One objective of DMB Publishing is to digitise books heading to landfill, digitise them into a PDF and share them for free with those interested in the subject. In the case of a few books where the digitisation process becomes a lot more complicated the books are sold on Amazon. Always mindful of the copyright of the original authors or publishers their approval is always sought if they can be located. If this approval cannot be obtained the legal loss of the original authors copyright 70 years after their death is invoked or if this criteria has not been met it is shared based on a digitisers Creative Commons Licence . For the publishers copyright over the graphical arrangement of the printed works only lasts for 25 years from its original publication date. DMB Publishing further qualifies what it digitises and publishes based on it never intending to digitise any book that still has a commercial value potential to the original author or publishers. This is difficult to apply since there are exceptions like you could freely publish a Charles Dickens book where it can sell at a commercial value today. Essentially DMB Publishing is adopting the same approach as the major digitisers like Google Books, Harvard University, Project Gutenberg, Carnie Mellon University and so forth. We are all trying to keep books for the use of future generations otherwise this vital book technology with its content will be lost for ever. With keeping these books available being a not for profit activity requiring investment by the digitiser and no charge to the user.
To date DMB Publishing has
focussed on Books and Booklets produced by the “home based publishers” but we
are starting to move into the more established areas of commercial publishing.
Inevitably the books are getting thicker so the need for a new more effective guillotine
to slice off the book bindings has arisen. This is obviously the most brutal
approach to digitising, producing loose sheets that can be run through my
automated document reader capturing both sides simultaneously. For books I
don’t want to destroy in the digitisation process the plan is to purchase a
proper book digital reader with laser page flattening capabilities that remove
the curvature in the book pages when they are being digitised. But this is a
big investment.
So take a look at my current guillotine and the new one that arrived today (210224) that I have already used to destroy two books by slicing off neatly their bindings in readiness for the scanning process to begin. The new guillotine includes the important wheel operated paper clamp to hold the book in place as the sharp blade is used to cut off the binding under the leverage of the extra long handle. One of these books is a Midland Red Bus Company Gazetteer of the Midlands with a supplement of Inland & Seaside Pleasure Resorts (Circa 1961). The other book is damp damaged with collapsed binding but 108 years old (Published March 1916) called the Warwickshire Water-Colours by Fred Whitehead (1853-1938) with perfect watercolour plates.
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