In the post about Digitizing old books to make them accessible again I mentioned the service eod books. I now tried it out and wanted to report how it went. In summary it was a smooth experience but the details depend on the library you order from, especially in terms of how much money you need to invest and which rights are granted to you.
Context
Any research depends on peers and predecessors. But access to those publications (whether digital or in print) is often not free and/or rather difficult. For those not affiliated with a research institution it is harder to get access to research papers because often the libraries of said research institutions pay the subscription fees and make the digital periodicals available to their affiliates. Also research institutions often house large scientific libraries but of course not all print publications can be in stock.
If you have access to such a library and want to have a digital copy of a book you can help yourself by using one of the book scanners that are often available or get the book for loan and scan it yourself. Of course you have to respect the author’s and publisher’s rights so for the rest of this post I’m talking about works where the copyright has expired. If the specific publication is not available at the library you have access to there is also the mechanism of an inter-library loan where you can order books from other libraries and get them through your local library for an increased fee. Then you could again use the book scanners or scan it yourself.
The reason why I’d like to have a digital copy of such a book is that I had to pay an extended fee for e.g. an inter-library loan and if I need something out of this book again I don’t want to go through the whole process again. Of course scanning a book yourself takes time and you should also take care that you do not damage the spine. If you do not have the time or don’t want to invest it what do you do?
The Digitization service
Fortunately, there is eod (ebooks on demand) where you can order eligible books (usually with expired copyright) from participating institutions (e.g. university libraries). When searching in the catalog of a participating institution you see a “Digitize” link when viewing a book eligible for digitization. Clicking on it directly takes you to the order form of eod. The service itself looks a bit dated. It isn’t mobile friendly, uses very small font sizes and has wide margins on the right and the left. The design is not bad but the technology basis needs a refresh. However, I have not discovered any bugs – it works. The site is available in several languages. You need an account with an e-mail address and also need to submit your name and postal address. Payment is possible with credit cards, PayPal and per invoice (pre-paid). Once ordered you can manage your orders in your user account.
The process
For my chosen book the available options were PDF and high resolution images with a way higher price. For PDF optical character recognition would be performed automatically if possible. The offered services and the price depends on the library. In my case the University Library Graz charged € 10 as base price and € 0.12 for each page on the PDF option. I ordered two books, one with 303 pages and the other one with 120 pages, so I payed € 70.76. Not exactly on a budget but essentially you are trading your time with money unless of course the library would not give out the book for lending – then there is no other option.
I was informed that scanning the book could take up to 14 days but after a few days I received the notification that the book would be ready for download after my payment. The payment went smoothly – I chose PayPal. Also the download completed without issues.
The result
I received two PDF documents each with cover (2 pages) and a closing page in eod design including the book details, terms & conditions and so on. The size of the documents was 107 MB and 52 MB respectively. The book cover and rear were included, the pages were split, there were no warped lines and the pages were in full-color. One book had interesting shadows on the pages and small amount of warpings (see example image). I’m not sure why this was. Maybe it was due to the paper characteristics and the bends came from book use or the book acquired moisture once and that was why the pages were a bit wobbly. In any case it was just a small effect and unlikely due to unprofessional scanning. The resolution was reasonably high around 300 dpi. All in all it looked professionally made as I expected. Both documents came with an invisible text layer from OCR. The OCR quality was very good but not flawless. The small amount of warped lines did not have a noticeable result on OCR.
One book was written in Fraktur and also for this script the OCR was very good. Interestingly, when there was Latin script interspersed in the text the OCR could not handle this very well. Maybe because it had been set to operate on Fraktur beforehand. Also the special s of the Fraktur script was mostly recognized correctly (naive OCR would detect an f there), but not always. Sometimes the s still was recognized as f and also vice versa. But the results showed that some high quality OCR had been used on the scans.
Terms & Conditions
I already mentioned that the offered services and prices depend on the participating library. This is also the case with granted rights. For the University Library Graz I found this a bit irritating, because in their terms & conditions they mention that rights are granted only for the customer and you are not allowed to pass on the book to others whether free of charge or not. Other libraries like e.g. the University Library of Innsbruck handle it differently and in my opinion more appropriately in that they do not claim additional rights on the digitized work.
This approach of the Graz library is interesting insofar as the book’s copyright had expired. (Note: when talking about copyright here I mean the author’s rights variant in the European Union which is different from e.g. US copyright law.) Normally, pure digitization does not add additional author’s rights to works because the threshold of originality is not reached. That means digitizing a public domain book normally does not give you copyright on the created digital document. You could argue that you had to put in substantial amount of work, the pages have been split up and OCR has been performed and so on which makes it a derivative work. Now you are free to agree on anything in your contract’s terms & conditions but if it is legally enforceable is another story. Also I can understand that you would not want somebody to resell the digital copy.
Summary
The ebooks on demand service is an interesting service to obtain digital copies of books that are otherwise not easily available to you. For me it worked out quite smoothly but you also have to invest some amount of money and you might not be happy with the rights granted to you depending on the library. Buying and running the equipment and paying staff costs money so I’m not questioning the fees but I would suggest to use the opportunity to make works where the copyright has expired available to everybody after somebody payed the fee for scanning. I saw that the Vienna University Library does this. Maybe this is again depending on the institution and I do not know how the University Library Graz handles this. In my case I think I would rather scan the book myself if possible because this is cheaper for me and I’m more flexible.