New Scientist: “Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work. This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images.”
So how will the publishing industry respond to this? Digital watermarks? A new paper with some harsh reflective surface? Each book issued with a digital code? As the OCR-enabled camera phones make their way into the hands of the public, I foresee a small spike in book piracy four years from now.
Not a new thought – but it just seems to me that dead-tree publishers will have to adapt somehow. The Examiner is not as good of a paper as The Chronicle, but by God it’s free – and sometimes I don’t have quarters handy. Why don’t publishers work with the demand and make content available? Downloaded right into your phone or whatever. Of course someone will have to figure out micropayments and/or some sort of ad model and other options – but trying to stop technology will always be a losing game.
I saw the NYT is going to start charging for their Columists. How well do you really think that will work?