Digital copycats: Personal digitization of books catching on across Japan
A store worker explains a scanner to a customer at Yodobashi Camera's Shinjuku Nishiguchi store. (Mainichi)
(Mainichi Japan) August 20, 2010
Personal digitization of books is catching on in Japan as people look to move their book collections to portable devices.
Referred to in Japan's Internet community as "jisui," (literally "cooking one's own meals"), the process involves feeding pages of a book through a scanner one by one to turn a work into digital form. Boosting the popularity of personal digitization is the emergence of portable devices such as Apple's iPad.
"I used to get rid of the books I had read periodically, but I bought four copies of one book because I needed it later on. The accuracy of scanners is good, and reading books on the iPad is sufficient," said a 31-year-old Tokyo woman who has recently been digitizing her books.
In June, Internet research company Macromill Inc. surveyed 300 iPad owners and found that 20 percent of them had digitized their own books, while roughly 30 percent were interested in doing so. Reasons people gave for digitizing their books themselves included that digital versions of the books were not available and that it was easier to read the digital versions of books that paper books whose pages had faded.
The trend has resulted in a boon in sales of related products. Former scanner models could handle only one side of a page at a time, but now models that can scan both sides in one pass have started to appear at affordable prices. Ishikawa Prefecture company PFU, part of the Fujitsu Group, said its June sales of duplex scanners were roughly double the figure recorded the previous month. Major online retailer Amazon also saw orders for popular models of scanners and paper cutters double from April to June. Meanwhile, major electronics retailer Yodobashi Camera has set up a corner at its Shinjuku Nishiguchi store showing store visitors how to go about home digitization.
Tomoyuki Koshihara, a director of Nagano Prefecture company Jissen, which offers a service to cut books into loose pages for 110 yen per copy, says that recently its customer base has been changing.
"We cut between 1,000 and 1,500 books a day. In the past there were a lot of men who would bring how-to books and specialized publications, but the number of women has been increasing, and the number of ordinary literary works has also increased," he says.
Some companies also offer a full-scale service from the cutting of books through to the creation of data, which has raised concerns of copyright violations. Digitization of books by the purchaser as a form of "personal use" is permitted under Japanese copyright law under the presumption that individuals do the reproduction themselves. The Japan Book Publishers Association is considering warning companies that copying conducted by businesses exceeds the boundaries of personal use and is an illegal activity.
Tetsuya Imamura, an associate professor in intellectual property law at Meiji University, says that the law is lagging behind the latest developments.
"Legally speaking, it is a violation of reproduction rights, but with respect to the handling of digital data, the copyright law is out of step with current times," Imamura says.
Susumu Nishimagi, president of a business in the Fukushima Prefecture town of Koriyama that recently started a digitization service, says his company is proceeding with care.
"We have received a lot of requests from authors themselves, which was unexpected. Some books, however, include works like old collections of research papers, and the content varies. In legal terms we perceive it as a gray area and we want to proceed cautiously," he says.
Commenting on the "jisui" boom, Yashio Uemura, director of Tokyo Denki University Press, commented that new businesses were appearing because publishers weren't meeting people's needs.
"Now is a period of transition to new forms of media. The publishers themselves should sell digital data together with printed books as a set," he said.
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