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Books Technology

App Gives You Free Ebooks of Your Paperbacks When You Take a "Shelfie" 131

Posted by samzenpus from the show-us-the-pages dept.
Peter Hudson writes Alan Henry writes on LifeHacker: "Paper books are awesome, but sometimes there's no beating the portability of an ebook on your phone or tablet. If you have a physical book you'd love to read on the go, BitLit may be able to get you an ebook version for free—all you need to do is take a photo of your book case: a 'shelfie.'" CNET notes that it's not quite as useful as it sounds: "As you might expect from a startup in the e-book space, BitLit currently offers a very limited selection -- only about 75,000 books, so the likelihood of a match is pretty slim. Browsing the library, I recognized very few mainstream authors."
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App Gives You Free Ebooks of Your Paperbacks When You Take a "Shelfie" More

App Gives You Free Ebooks of Your Paperbacks When You Take a "Shelfie"

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  • I'm the app's developer. Happy to answer questions (Score:5, Informative)

    by Peter Hudson ( 3717535 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @09:37PM (#48670663)
    I'm the app's developer... If anybody has any questions, I'm happy to answer them. I should probably get these out of the way first because this is /. 1. Yes it's possible to cheat the computer vision algorithms with the following: A dry erase market and an acetate sheet; a high quality color printer; a dark pencil that you really grind into the copyright page. 2. No you can't get free ebooks by taking shelfies in libraries or bookstores. Not unless you're also willing to write your name into said paper books. 3. If you really want an ebook there are probably easier ways to download one without getting out of your chair. 4. There are 234 publishers on board (as of this morning). They offer about 80,000 titles. 5. About half of those 80K titles are public domain and we give them to you without requiring that you sign the copyright page. 6. Of the half of the 80K titles that aren't public domain about 30% are free and 70% are paid. 7. Of the 70% (of the 40K copyrighted titles) the average discount you'll get is 86% off the digital list price... so when we say "highly discounted" we think that's fair. 8. Of the 234 publishers on board, I can count on two mittens the number who require us to use DRM. 9. The LifeHacker and CNet stories totally blew our servers up and my co-founder and I have been scrambling to get more AWS instances up and the back end distributed across them so that OCR can run faster... but as it stands the shelfie queue is about 13,000 deep... so the 15 minute processing time that it says in the app is wrong by about 6 hours. Summary: Yes you can cheat, but it's probably easier to cheat in other ways. Lots of titles, the majority are free as in beer, and almost all are free as in speech.
    • Confused about how it works. 1. So first off, they are not all free, sometimes you just get a discount? 2. How does the actual registration of books work? You have to sign the books unless they are publicly freely available? 3. And it has to be done one at a time? There has to be way to do mass library registrations? 4. You have some algorithm to automatically detect the spine? the cover? of the books already in your collection, the rest will not be detected, and you will have to redo them if they become av

      • Re:I'm the app's developer. Happy to answer questi (Score:5, Informative)

        by Peter Hudson ( 3717535 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @10:19PM (#48670803)
        Great questions... sorry the actually method wasn't super clear in my first post. Here's how it works: you take the shelfie and the algorithms will identify every book on your shelf regardless of whether or not it's available... so even if you don't have any eligible books, you still get a tool that'll quickly and painlessly inventory your entire library. Once you've taken the shelfie and all the books have been ID'd we'll send you an email with download links to any books you own for which we have public domain ebooks. For any paper books you have which are not yet in the public domain, but which are from the 234 publishers that we've signed deals with, these books will show up in a list of "eligible" titles in the app. To claim an eligible title you have to take a picture of your name written onto the book's copyright page. As we sign up more publishers we will push a notification to the app if you have a title from a new publisher that's part of your shelfie.
        • There is no way you have access to every cover ever produced. What sort of success rate do you get, and how much does damage effect it?

        • All the best to you. However, I'm not going to deface the paper version of the book, especially a hard cover, just to get a free or cheaper e-book. I'm a reader who likes his books pristine, I don't highlight and I don't take notes in the margins. If I want to take notes that's what note cards or my phone is for. Scrawling in the book is anathema to me. Based on the reviews I saw in the Apple app store, I'm not alone in this. And like one of the other reviews I saw, I also have a largish paper book library.

          • Fair play. It's not for everyone. And I'm not the kind of developer who begs and pesters people for 5 star reviews, and as such only the trolls typically bother to review the app. Haters are gonna hate (not calling you a hater, just stating in general). If somebody feels the need to give a 1-star review in the app store for a free app that they didn't read the description of before they downloaded it, I'm not going to be able to change that here.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gl4ss ( 559668 )

          how do you deal with people just writing their name on a piece of paper and putting that on the copyright page? manual verification, including manually reading the copyright page and checking that's the copyright page? just by that it would be too tedious to cheat that way?

          (it's already pretty tedious to have to write the name on every book, that kind of takes away the getting the entire library in a snap as I find that it's pretty unlikely for many people to have _any_ public domain books)

          • There are a few tricks we use to stop people from using a print out of the copyright page. I won't mention all of them here... but one example is asymmetric page curvature... Copyright pages tend to be at the front or back of books as such the shot that captures the name on the copyright page shows the left / right pages with very different levels of curvature.
        • I already have an app that catalogues the books I own by reading the bar code (which contains the ISBN in most cases). It takes a couple of seconds on my cheap phone (Moto G) to scan each bar code - it takes longer to look them up in a DB. Why would I want to use an app that relies on being able to recognise a cover, which is both more computationally expensive and less reliable (several of the books I own have had a dozen or so different covers for different printings - try looking at all of the covers a

          • I already have an app that catalogues the books I own by reading the bar code (which contains the ISBN in most cases). It takes a couple of seconds on my cheap phone (Moto G) to scan each bar code - it takes longer to look them up in a DB.

            The example they show takes a snapshot of 25 books at once, looking at the spines on a shelf, and then claims to identify all of them by doing OCR on the spine text combined with a database lookup. If that works, it will be quite a bit faster than anything that requires scanning individual books.

            That's the theory, anyway. Looking at the reviews [google.com], it doesn't actually work well enough yet to bother.

            • We've been hit by a pretty hard by the LifeHacker and CNET stories over the last few days... the shelfie processing queue is normally about 15 minutes but has been over 6 hours for much of the last 2 days. It's now back to normal as we were able to spin up enough servers to handle the load. But your point about it being faster than scanning bar codes is exactly why we designed the shelfie feature.

        • It's a pity that seemingly devices without working flash aren't supported - some of us have adequate lighting.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by morcego ( 260031 )

      And of course it would have country limitations.
      In the information era, this is almost insulting, it is were not to be expected.

      So, why is that? Is it the publishers that are forcing this? If so, care to name names?

      • Re:I'm the app's developer. Happy to answer questi (Score:5, Informative)

        by Peter Hudson ( 3717535 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @10:24PM (#48670823)
        The app is currently live in Canada, US, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa... publishers often sell rights into different markets, so publisher A might own the digital rights to a book in the UK and publisher B in France. We get territory information from publishers in a format called ONIX which makes it easy for us to offer the books that the publishers we've signed with have the rights to offer in the territories that can offer them. So that's one of the reasons we've restricted the area of distribution. The other reason is the language model we use for the OCR in the shelfie. Since we're reading spines and since OCR is never 100% accurate we've got to apply an auto-correct model against a language database. We've used the English language "books in print" database from Bowker for this. There's no reason we can't expand in more time... but we're only a team of 8 of which only 4 are technical. So it's more of a bandwidth issue than anything.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by morcego ( 260031 )

          Ahh, thank you.
          I live in Brazil, and most of my books are in English.
          But I can understand your reasons for restricting the area. You, for once, have a good reason for it.
          Thank you. Hope we can eventually get it here.

          Cheers,

          • Brazil is a very good target market for us... It's number 2 after German when we look at target markets with English language reading (but not speaking as a primary language) populations.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by morcego ( 260031 )

              There is a very good reason why we have such a huge English language reading market: if we want to read good books, we have to read in English. Unless you are talking Sidney Sheldon, Agatha Christie, or the latest Hollywood-is-making-a-blockbuster-movie-adaptation novel, you won't find it here. I mean, c'mon, even a good number of Stephen King books aren't available. How lame it that.
              Anyway, I rather read them in English anyway. Translations sometimes can destroy a book.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by ruir ( 2709173 )
            Same problem here in Portugal. I have an huge collection of english books. There are many ways to get around the country zone in the Internet age, personally it is not worth the bother. And for many, it is far easier to get a "pirate" copy. That is because of this bonehead policies of trying to transfer an outdated model to a new world that pirate contented is much more user friendly. It is fairly easy to guess who loses in the process because it does not adapt to new technologies, and then has the nerve to
      • I would guess because the publisher only purchased the rights for the book in certain countries.
        • That's correct. Often publishers (at the request of authors) will sell the print or digital rights to a book to another publisher in another country. The reason for this is that a local publisher will have better connections and resources for marketing that book in a local market. This is obviously way less true in digital, but it still happens a lot.

    • You own the books, so pirate the damn things and have them in the format you want without region restrictions. There is no legal nor ethical problem with this.

      • Re:I'm the app's developer. Happy to answer questi (Score:5, Informative)

        by Peter Hudson ( 3717535 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @10:31PM (#48670861)
        The legality of it depends on the copyright laws of the country you live in... I'll let the ethicist from NYTimes magazine answer the matter of whether or not you have the moral authority to pirate an ebook if you own the paperback. [nytimes.com]

        • This is an interesting app and I'm curious to try it out when I get home. Thanks for your work in this, Peter. I know it's hard to get development of something like this truly useful without a critical mass, but someone has to start the shift-space somewhere, and I'd rather see legal alternatives that encourage sales and legal consumption rather than blanket torrenting.

          This wasn't your point, I know, but the NYTimes answer misses an extremely critical distinction. When you buy a movie ticket, you are buy

    • About how many books can you identify reliably with one picture (taking the average phone camera for these example)? I have over 1500 books on shelfs myself. I don't suppose their is a csv import option?
      • It depends on the width of your books, but usually between 15 and 30. The best images are those shot in landscape mode where the book height is about 90% of the frame height. It's important that both the top and the bottoms of all the books are visible in the frame or else the segmentation algorithm doesn't work as well.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      As a book collector, I'd never ruin a book by writing in it, but I can see why this might appeal to publishers as it destroys the resale value of physical books on the second hand market. It is kind of like the way Easton Press provides each new book with a book plate to devalue those books on the second-hand market.

      Not a bad idea for people who don't really like physical books, though, and only have them kicking around through necessity.

      • Putting aside the $5000 dollar hardcore collectibles (first editions of moby dick) used books stores and patrons really do not care if someones name is written on the copyright page.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Putting aside the $5000 dollar hardcore collectibles (first editions of moby dick) used books stores and patrons really do not care if someones name is written on the copyright page.

          Completely untrue. Has a massive impact on the value of "collectible" books, even in the sub-$100 range. Not a biggie on a mass-market paperback (as these are worthless anyway), but kills the value of many other books.

      • I agree that this isn't for the true bibliophile and it's not for beautiful leather bound first editions. But for mass market paperbacks, it's not as bad. Also for people who don't want their messy penmanship in the book, you can use a bookplate sticker or stamp and the app will accept that as you having "marked" the book. Post-it-notes do not count.
        • I actually like the idea. Think of it - you've got your collection of books sitting in your bookcases, but you're getting old, your eyes aren't what they used to be ... being able to re-read a favorite book in an electronic format that you can enlarge the fonts is going to make a lot of people happy.
        • How does the ap determine that a bookplate has been affixed to the page and isn't just placed there to bypass the ap security? I can see taking one bookplate with no sticky on the back into a library or bookstore and simply shooting photos of it on the copyright page of any book one wants...

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ruir ( 2709173 )
        If you say so. I do not mind buying signed books at a much more discounted margins.

    • I don't own an IOS or Android device.

      I have a Palm OS PDA (Clie) with a camera.
      I have a digital camera.
      I have a few Macs and Linux and Windows machines.
      I have lots and lots of books.

      What do I need most, and how do I do this?

      • Hmmm... if you can run an Android simulator on your Linux box and have a good webcam and a powerful headlamp, I could send you the app APK and you could submit shelfie photos that way.
    • Why did you create that horrible farce of a word? "Shelfie?" Seriously?

    • Hi Peter,

      We exchanged e-mails a couple of days, but my problem is still unresolved and my Kyocera Event is still showing in the Android Market as incompatible in spite of your saying that it matches all of the requirements. Are there a lot of people having such problems or is my problem relatively rare?

      Also the summary and the linked article lists the size of the current library, but I have not been able to find that actual list. Is there a list of available books so that those of us who cannot yet run

      • Sorry for the delay in looking into the compatibility of your device. When smoke started coming out of servers yesterday Marius and I ran for the (metaphorical) for extinguishers... but I haven't forgotten about checking up on your device. You are the only person who's have a device that "on paper" should work... but that isn't working. Did I already suggest that we send you the APK and you install it directly? That's certainly something we could do. And yes, there is a way for you to check which books are

    • Why can't I make it "try again" on a book that it thinks I have that is in the 80k books you have some rights / discounts on?

      • Hmmm... I think this is a bug. I'll look into it. Sorry. It's early days, we'll get better. Thanks for letting me know about the bug!

  • So... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xlsior ( 524145 ) on Wednesday December 24, 2014 @09:44PM (#48670677) Homepage
    ...What are the odds people will simply start snapping pictures of the shelves in their local bookstore in order to get free copies?
    • See #2 in above.
    • They only give you the free copy for the photo of the cover for public domain books. If you want to read these, install FBReader (which has a nice search interface for various online collections) and don't waste time with this app. To get copies of in-copyright books, you need to deface the copyright page. If you can do that in a book shop without having to buy the book, then you live somewhere with very tolerant shopkeepers...

      • To get copies of in-copyright books, you need to deface the copyright page. If you can do that in a book shop without having to buy the book, then you live somewhere with very tolerant shopkeepers

        Or, if you write your name in books in the bookstore without the shopkeeper seeing, you're also essentially confessing to the crime. The police will know each and every book you "claimed."

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by allo ( 1728082 )

          Who says, it needs to be your name? It just needs to be the name you're using in your account.

          • In which case, the police can get a warrant to request the real name/address from BitLit. Either way, I don't see too many people writing their names in bookstore books in order to get a free eBook. Not when other piracy methods likely offer a more anonymous method of getting them.

    • I take it you didn't read the message from the app developer that was posted 8 minutes before you posted your pointless post.

  • I clicked on the user name in the article (Peter Hudson [slashdot.org]), here's what I got:

    The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case.

    Maybe a new, less obvious Nerval's Lobster [slashdot.org]?

  • Indeed the library is thin. Even public domain book are scarce: I could find Rousseau's Emile or Confessions, but not its Social contract, for instance.
    • Just checked and we have two editions of the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau... one is a public domain (Gutenberg edition) ad the other is an updated version with commentary published by Wordsworth Editions for $0.99.
      • Yes it is there. I now realize I missed the "more books" link at the bottom of search results. I do not know how you could make it more obvious, but I still missed it.
        • Ahh yeah, sorry this was a design decision that I was against. There's a good search function in the app itself under the discover section.
          • You can now go back to the one that made the decision and tell him it hurts the sales :-)
            • If I remember right, the designers argument was that having pagination and counts and next buttons made the design "far too utilitarian"... I guess that's a synonym for "useful". It is funny to look at a sorted list of the things visitor search for on the books page. Number 1-5 are: Harry Potter, Stephen King, Asimov, Tolkien, Neal Stephenson... We have Neal Stephenson... but I guess I know where to focus my efforts going forward.

    • I tried this service a few months ago - I took pictures of about 200 books (out of 1,000 or so) and not a single match was found. It's a great idea, but the library is so thin that the service is probably near useless for most people. Still, it's worth a few minutes of your time to check it out just in case.

      I do wish that the major publishers would get behind this service. I wouldn't mind paying a dollar or two for an electronic version of the paperback books I already own - but honestly not much more than

      • Thanks for being there early and supporting us. Getting more content is very much a chicken and egg problem that we've got to bootstrap... publisher don't want to waste their time signing up for platforms that don't have many readers, and readers aren't interested in platforms that don't have any content. Honestly, the more users we have who've taken shelfies, the easier it is for us (me) to walk into a big five publisher and show social proof that readers want bundling.
  • The pitch was that the company gets to know your taste in books, since you've taken a picture of your bookcase. How much do you think a bookseller (Amazon, for example) would pay to get that data? Another "People who bought this also bought ..."

    • Did they get a patent first? Amazon already has barcode scanning in its app, and I guess a bunch of recognizable spines could be next....

    • I cannot imagine that much, if they shop through any booksellers these booksellers will already know what they like. And there are cheaper alternatives, like all the book fan sites or just ask like FB does.
      • People still buy their dead-tree books from various sources. Also, there are books that are out of print, books that never had a major distribution and got remaindered and ground up for pig feed (doesn't mean they're not good - it could be bad marketing, poor distribution agreements, etc).

  • This is wrong. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I'm an author and I find this horribly violating for some reason.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by gnupun ( 752725 )

      Why? Should readers purchase multiple copies, one for paper and another for the ebook version?

    • I wish I could go into my job. Do something once and get paid for it forever.

      You've still sold a user a book. They still have your book. They just skipped by the scanning every page part.

  • Back then "Online Advertisements" were all the rage. Those were animated GIF images designed to influence the behaviour of the users. There were some companies having "pay for surf" business models where you installed a piece of malware onto your computer which would display you banners. You would then get paid money for that. Of course all of those companies went bankrupt as most people simply cheated the software. The disappearance of "Online Advertisements" essentially meant that nobody tried again. Toda

  • They didn't have the book I wanted:

    http://athenae25.files.wordpre... [wordpress.com]

  • "...but sometimes there's no beating the portability of an ebook on your phone or tablet."
    When did normal books become non-portable? I mean, if you're looking at something like Moby Dick, yes a tablet might have a slight edge. But most books I have are not much thicker than a tablet, and actually smaller in the width and height dimensions.

    Also, I do most of my reading in the bath. That brings up the issue of dropping things in the water. I have dropped books in the water before, and if you pull them out

    • A single book is portable. A pair of books is doable if you have large pockets or a bag. A selection of books for a long trip is not. Especially if going by bus, plane, or train where you pay by the weight/size of your bags. And it's much easier to pick up new ebooks to read while you are out and about than trying to find a bookstore or suffering through the "selection" of books in gas stations.

      There's also several waterproof ereaders and tablets out there, some that are even usable underwater (like the

      • When I'm traveling I don't want to read, I want to experience the culture and the history and the landscape of the place I'm visiting. On the plane/bus, I listen to music; reading makes me carsick. If I have a few minutes to kill while at the destination and I feel I must read, I'll buy a print magazine or something. On my trip to Europe, I read through a couple of UK magazines and got a good grip on their slang.

        If for some reason I decided to travel to a totally boring place where I felt I needed to read

  • In the end, this is what will get people to switch to e-books, like MP3 locker services were needed for people with big personal collections to switch to cloud streaming. Publishers should jump on this, because e-books offer drastically lower distribution costs and many more opportunities for impulse purchases.

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