IPad Makes Space in Japan's Tiny Homes by Removing Bookshelves | Hacker News Reader

IPad Makes Space in Japan's Tiny Homes by Removing Bookshelves

bloomberg.com

49 pointswmeredith33 comments

They charge 100 yen for doing a book conversion. That's only about $1.25 US. I would kill for a service like this. I'm preparing to move in about a month, and I've got some 500 books that I need to move. I would love to just digitize the majority of these and get rid of the physical volumes.

This actually sounds like a fantastic service that the publishers could offer if they were progressive enough. They would prepare a digital copy of the books they offer (if they don't have them already). Then customers could ship them their physical volumes for destruction along with a nominal fee ($1-$2) in return for the digital version.

This actually sounds like a fantastic service that the publishers could offer if they were progressive enough.

How about a startup? Of all people in a position to implement the physical side of this: Half Price Books. They could scan the UPC barcodes and see what books are in a catalog, then offer to give the customer an eBook for a nominal fee. So they would be receiving money instead of paying it out. This would be a way of publishers to be able to make money off of IP with sales that have already dropped off. The publishers would still have to cooperate.

A startup would have to battle the legal system the publishers have helped create / abuse. Anyone know what, if anything, might stand in the way of such a setup?

Lots of things I'd assume. Without doing any research, here's a twist (still likely not legally wise):

The startup scans your books.You pay a monthly fee for storage of your books at their facility, which is a free-to-use library. You remain the owner of the book and take the scans with you.

There are probably some (many) issues here, such as first sale rights, but it's not crazy.Adding additional businesses could help (coffee-library-book scanning) offset the expense but it's probably easier to try and change the law - someone would be angry enough to make your life miserable.

Why doesn't Google offer this as a service? They have all the infrastructure already.

> They charge 100 yen for doing a book conversion. That's only about $1.25 US. I would kill for a service like this.

Are they physically scanning every book presented, or is each scanning service building a library (by scanning each title only once) ? If they are doing the latter, I can see how they can pull it off at that price.

Agreed, except for the destruction part. Maybe the publishers could pass the books on to nonprofits to donate to developing countries, libraries, schools, etc.

> “The home-made e-book market will continue to exist as long as the copyright situation isn’t dealt with and people cannot find books they want in electronic format"

Sorry this is a bit unrelated, but out of curiosity, are there any legal ways to buy Japanese books in an electronic format? I have been trying to start reading books in Japanese but I don't know enough kanji to make it enjoyable.

I actually came up with my own way around this.. I bought a physical copy of the book, opened it to a random page, did a quoted search ("たとえば") on google for a full, unique sentence and found some plain text copies. I wrote a script to quickly format this in html and used rikaikun/chan to make reading easier (just put the mouse over words I don't know and it looks them up). The problem is that this limits me to reading in a browser on a computer (with chrome or firefox installed).

I've actually been interested in doing some sort of app like this (probably for free). Then adding the functionality to add words I don't know to a word bank that I can practice on my own later. If anyone is interested, please let me know. The biggest thing stopping me is that I don't see any way to get legal content for this (and the fact I do not have a lot of spare time). Does anyone know if some Japanese books/stories are in the public domain?

You might look in to the 青空文庫 http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

Wow, this looks really great. Sounds like there is currently a 50 year limit on copyright. I found a bunch of works I haven't read by Akutagawa Ryunosuke that are public domain.

Thank you so much!

This was essentially my justification for buying a Kindle: it's about the price of a new bookcase.

I have 3 full bookcases in my house right now, all of which I bought, new, for under $25 each. And one I got for $5 at a rummage sale. When the Kindle goes to $25 (and opens up the SDK), I'll be ready with my money in-hand. Until then, I'm waiting until they lose some of the insane vendor lock-in.

How much have you spent storing and moving them and their associated loads?

For younger people just starting to build a library I think the value proposition is definitely in favor of eReaders. They don't have to buy or move book cases, they can carry their entire library in one hand, you can re-download all your books in the event of a catastrophe (imagine trying to find and repurchase all of your books if they were destroyed in a fire) -- I could go on.

I'm under 30 and already have 3-4 bookshelves full. And that's after throwing away half of them. At this rate my Kindle will save me a bundle of money and pain.

The vendor lock-in is an annoying issue to some, but it's not an game-stopper for many people.

So, yeah, more expensive than the nominal value of some bookcases but there's much more to consider than that.

Insane vendor lock-in that can be readily and legally circumvented with Calibre, a free and open-source piece of conversion software that runs on the three major consumer OSs?

You can remove Kindle DRM with Calibre? News to me.

(Also, it still doesn't address the principle of the matter: digital music has gone DRM-free, it's time for eBooks to do the same.)

Calibre does not remove DRM as a built in feature but there are plugins available that do it.

DRM is bound to lose on books. One reason is the analog hole, same as with music. A dedicated hobbyist with a scanner and OCR could easily produce unencumbered e-books even if DRM were perfect. Also, the bits in an e-book are always going to be easy to pirate just because there are so few of them. A book weighs in around a half a megabyte of uncompressed text.

Are you aware that there are a great many places to purchase DRM-free ebooks at places other than Amazon? And that programs like Calibre can format-shift these to kindle-readable formats?

You're not vendor-locked with the Kindle with these tools. Your /brain/ might be vendor-locked though, if you think that a Kindle will only ever read stuff bought from Amazon. I bought a Kindle for a friend, and torrented hundreds of ebooks for her. She hasn't paid a cent to DRM formats. When she wants a new book, she can purchase an ebook from somewhere other than Amazon if she wants to avoid DRM, and use Calibre to convert to .mobi format, which the Kindle happily reads.

But that's my point exactly: I don't want to torrent books, I want to purchase them legally.

Also, do any DRM-free stores have nearly the selection of Amazon/B&N/iBooks? From what I understand, the DRM-free stores only have independent/self-published books.

I bought a kindle for the exact same reason. I already lent half of my books a couple of weeks after the kindle arrived, and here, to lend a book its to lose it.

"It's a gift. Never lend a book." —William Adama

The comments about the reality of urban housing in Japan has made a lot of things in Japanese media make a lot more sense. In particular, the soundscapes make more sense. I understand why the sound of trains passing seems to much more prevalent in Japanese media: so many people live in small flimsily built urban apartments with little acoustic insulation. In the states, there's more of a mix due to older buildings. (Even more so for Europe.)

And there are more trains. Loads of Japanese media take place in the areas around rail lines, because people actually have experience with them. In the USA? Hah! Only a few cities have any, and only a few of those are any good.

For myself, I've lived near a train track my whole life, in well-built, older buildings. Well, 1/2 block away. The train goes by and everyone just pauses conversation until it passes, because it drowns out everything. Because trains do that. It's hard to move hundreds or thousands of tons quietly.

Makes me wonder: would mag-lev make this situation any better? I've never been near a mag-lev train or heard it pass in real life. Anyone with any experience with them care to comment on how loud they are?

Probably pretty loud, for high speeds:

>In January and February 2008 hundreds of residents demonstrated in downtown Shanghai against the line being built too close to their homes, citing concerns about sickness due to exposure to the strong magnetic field, noise, pollution and devaluation of property near to the lines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29#China

Though for slower ones:

>The only low-speed maglev (100 km/h) currently operational, the Japanese Linimo HSST, cost approximately US$100 million/km to build.[40] Besides offering improved operation and maintenance costs over other transit systems, these low-speed maglevs provide ultra-high levels of operational reliability and introduce little noise and zero air pollution into dense urban settings. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maglev_%28transport%29#Economic...

[citation needed], but good news.

The first bit indicates: Chinese are not smarter than anyone else.

Oh absolutely. But that does imply the same will occur everywhere, with special focus on the "noise" and "devaluation of property". And whether you believe in the "strong magnetic field" fear or not is irrelevant if you're trying to sell your house near the tracks to someone who does.

I've long wondered whether it would be possible to build a sufficiently-isolated room within a room within a room (ad nauseam) to have a recording studio located near a train track.

Yoshi's in Oakland CA is a jazz nightclub that is right next to the train tracks. IIRC, they spent over a million dollars to isolate the performance space.

I saw this article yesterday and searched out this site: http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/ with the idea of making one to digitize a few of my bookcases.

Too much going on right now to take that on, so I'm curious, does anyone know of a service around the bay area that will do this without charging fees near the original price of the book?

I wonder, it's not because of no rooms but simply because Japanese people have more books?

http://www.worldmapper.org/display.php?selected=343

Also handy if you end up moving to another continent. I moved from England to San Francisco. I had a lot of books before the move, I sold some, left some with my parents and shipped the rest.

It makes practical sense given the dearth of living space in japan.

It could also make a difference on the margin anytime someone moved from one place to another. It's generally cheaper to live in a smaller place, so if you can live in less space, you can trade up to a more desirable location.

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