SCANNING A BOOK

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One reason why books aren't traded as often as music or video files is that the average American only reads one book a year, so there are fewer people willing to trade, let alone steal, a book (except this one, of course). A second reason involves the amount of work needed to convert a printed book into a digital file, unless you're able to steal the digital file. (See the "Cracking an E-Book's Copy Protection" section later in the chapter.)

Believe it or not, most books that appear as bookwarez are meticulously scanned in by hand, one or two pages at a time. It's a boring, time-consuming job: automatic high-speed scanners are too costly for most file sharers. For faster scans, some people purchase a sheet feeder for their scanner, cut the book apart at the binding, and slide the sheets through one at a time.

After saving the scanned pages as graphic files, the bookwarez maker can either convert them to text using optical character recognition (OCR) software (like OmniPage), or save the graphic files as a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. If they convert the files into text, they can run the file through a spellchecker to correct most of the scanning problems, and then post the resulting e-book to the Internet.

The alt.binaries.e-book FAQ (http://ebook.23ae.com) offers plenty of information about creating e-books, including tips for scanning a book (see Figure 11-1), naming files, and posting them to newsgroups and IRC channels.

Figure 11-1: Most books are scanned in by hand, page by page.

Each newsgroup has its own rules and customs that everyone needs to follow. For example, if you're going to upload an e-book, you need to include the author's name and book title in the e-book file name such as: Orwell_George__Animal_Farm(v1.0(htm).zip. To provide additional information, you may also want to include a brief description of your e-book posting that includes one of the following identifiers:

[NEW] A new e-book

[REPOST] An e-book that had been previously posted but has been posted again due to popular demand

[TECHNICAL] An e-book that contains technical information, such as computer manuals

[SCRIPT] A film or play displayed in script format

[FICTION] A novel or short story e-book

[NONFICTION] A nonfiction e-book

For example, you might name a file like this: [REPOST] Orwell_George__Animal_Farm(v1.0(htm).zip.

To provide e-books that people can view on practically any type of computer, e-book newsgroups prefer that people supply e-books in open formats, such as plain ASCII text, HTML, Rich Text Format (RTF), or Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Of course, nobody will complain too much if you supply an interesting e-book trapped in a proprietary format, such as Microsoft's Reader (LIT) format, but you should always strive to make any posted e-books accessible to everyone.

Newly posted books often show errors, such as hyphens in the middle of a word in the middle of a line. Some downloaders will actually proofread e-books, correct any errors, and repost the book as a new version. A book title ending in v1.0 usually means the book is newly scanned and fairly clean of formatting errors. The same book ending with v2.0 has been proofread and corrected, almost always by a third party. Once an e-book reaches v3.0, you can safely assume that it's free of most spelling and formatting errors.

Instead of scanning a book page by page, some people just take the much simpler route of copying books from book services, such as Safari Books Online (http://www.safaribooksonline.com) and Books24x7 (http://www.books24x7.com), which offer subscribers access to hundreds of technical books that they can browse, copy, and save. Because these services have taken the trouble of digitizing popular technical books already, subscribers can simply save the digitized books they want and "share" those book files through newsgroups or file sharing networks.

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