10-05-2006, 11:36 PM
Quote:Jasper Oorthuys:3nv7klja Wrote:That'd be three or four scans per 2 pages. I'm not masochistic!
Ave Jasper,
keep cool. You don't have to scan. Remember: You already own that book
Aside from issues of legality (and it is of course illegal to scan an entire book, regardless of 'fair dealing'/'fair use' which is only ever for a portion of a book), what the heck do you do with a scan of Robbo's masterpiece? Print it out (at A4 or US letter size that's not exactly easy to read)? Browse it in Irfanview (or, even worse, Internet Exploder)? The book (technically, a codex) is just such a superb invention that there can be no doubt that, even at hugely inflated prices, if you care about the subject, you should own a Robinson in book form. Sell the TV, cancel your newspaper, and use the money you save to buy a Robbo. After all, when you've finished reading it for the 33rd time (nothing else to do as you now have no TV or newspaper to read), you can always screw legs on each corner and use it as a coffee table.
Incidentally, somebody once scanned the whole of B&C1 and put it on the internet (I think it was an FTP site), presumably on the assumption that since it was out of print it was okay to do so (didn't bother asking the authors, of course). Rather than send me into spasms of wrath it made me chuckle for a whole day as they had scanned each page as a full-colour uncompressed BMP file, weighing in it around 1Mb each page; in the days of dial-up and slow modems, this was comedy therapy, rather than piracy.
Mike Bishop
