Publishers offer free/discounted ebooks of the print books you own with Bitlit

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Oh, hell, yeah! I need to get a new SD card for my phone first, but once that’s done, the entire library I’ve spent 40 years in collecting is going to end up getting sent in to these people!

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I’ve scanned four books now from a participant publisher. BitLit recognizes them and assigns them to me but Google Play claims then that they are not available for purchase and errors out. The books are explicitly listed on the BitLit site as available so it seems that there are some bugs to be worked out.

The next time I get a book signed, I’ll get the author to sign the copyright page…muhaha!

Sadly, the app is unavalaible for the canadian market. We always seem to be lagging behind, don’t we…

Just working out an issue with the recognition issues syncing with Google Play. Should be fixed shortly… sorry for the delay. (but books do have a great shelf life).

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App is available in Canada… BitLit is based in Canada (Vancouver)… almost a third of our publishers are Canadian.

That’s nice, I suppose, but do you really need permission? Is it unethical to download a pirated copy of an ebook when you own a physical copy?

Perhaps for older works which had to be converted by scanning and proofreading them. For example, they got the Perry Rhodan series to ebook by scanning some two thousand issues and checking them. That’s some genuine effort, though I still think that charging as much as the current issues is a bit much.

Newer works, hell no. When the text’s already in an electronic format, creating a decent usable epub is a trivial matter. (For novels and the like - it’s a different matter when there are tables figures or graphics, then you’d actually have to do some tweaking so it works on the most common devices.

BitLit fixed the issue I was seeing on Google Play (even going back and forth with me on twitter today). So it all works for me now.

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oh geez… this is not going to be abused at all… :stuck_out_tongue:
can imagine people bringing their pens into barnes and noble for some digital ‘shopping’…

not sure what would make it less foolproof though… i was initially thinking a receipt in the shot as well but that doesn’t address books that you’ve had for years… although maybe that would be a good, natural cut-off - new purchases only.

Remember of course that a smartphone has a GPS… so taking a photo while inside B&N might not be such a good idea :wink:

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