Work

Title

DIY Kindle Scanner

Author

Peter Purgathofer

Date

2012-2013

Description

DIY Kindle Scanner is a Lego Mindstorms project. It combats the removal of old-established rights by ‘digital rights management’ systems. DIY Kindle Scanner runs in a loop, repeatedly pressing the ‘next page‘ button on the Kindle and taking a picture of that page. DIY Kindle Scanner then sends the pictures to a cloud text recognition service so that you end up with a plain text file of the scanned book.

diy-kindle-scanner-05 diy-kindle-scanner-01 diy-kindle-scanner-02 diy-kindle-scanner-06 diy-kindle-scanner-03

CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 by Peter Purgathofer

Statement

This is an art project reflecting the relation of book scanning, copyright, and digital rights management. This is not intended to be understood as an instruction or invitation, but rather as a provocative thought experiment. In 2002, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote in an open letter to the authors guild: «When someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.» A few years later, his company built a device that effectively violates the very ideas he expressed in this statement. The DIY kindle scanner is an art installation reflecting this loss of rights Jeff Bezos first defended for us, but then chose to remove. It also is a statement about the futility of DRM.

URL

vimeo.com/73675285

Medium

Installation

Technology

Lego Mindstorms, OCR

Platform

Amazon, Kindle

Related

How a Man in Austria Used Legos to Hack Amazon’s Kindle E-Book Security” by Arik Hesseldahl, All Things D, September 6, 2013.

Keywords

access, control, DRM, ownership, process, reading, writing

Added

ID

227