I recently bought a used copy of the book The BeOS Bible (1999, Scot Hacker, et al.) and spent last night unbinding it using a hairdryer and scanning it using my Fujitsu fi-4530C feed scanner - making light work of almost 1000 pages!
After the initial scanning I batch processed the TIFF files to crop and adjust contrast, and finally ran the whole lot through Adobe Acrobat to make all the text searchable.
I’ve uploaded the resulting 100MB Searchable PDF to Internet Archive/Open Library. So the book is now available to read, browse, download online:
One more thing…
These sorts of preservation projects an ongoing endeavour for me, funded by my Patreon supporters. If you wish to say thanks for this scan, or fund future projects, that would be very much appreciated. Any contributions are used only to purchase more material for preservation. Cheers! Matt Sephton | creating Digital Archeology | Patreon
Doesn’t Peachpit Press still hold the copyright? As page 2 of your scan says…
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without
prior written permission of the publisher. For more information on getting permission
for reprints and excerpts, contact Gary-Paul Prince at Peachpit Press.
Open Library is the same as any local library, it contains books that can be read by the public. If you have an issue with the way they operate, feel free to get in touch with them https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/about
Where I live, our libraries have online services, too. But you need a registration and they only have a certain number of copies of a book that can be borrowed at a time. Also, the time you can read such an ebook is limited to a few weeks. They don’t just have links to scanned books anyone can download and keep…
The Internet Archive also supports this kind of digital lending. You might need to contact them to see if they can get your book professionally scanned.
It was just an announcement. If anyone has moral objections to OpenLibrary and you want to read it then buy the book for essentially 1 penny + shipping costs or find something else to whine about. Taking the moral high ground over a worthless computer history book is ridiculous.
