scanning

Scanning stuff is a bit of an odd activity.

Well, it's not odd as such, but when you do it a lot, and you do it for a particular area like anime as I do, you end up with some slightly peculiar attitudes.

I mean, the fundamental truth is that the things you scan are not your own, as such. You scan artwork that was made by someone else and probably took them quite a lot of time, effort and a whole heap of talent.

But it's you that buys the book and, in the case of anime, has to pay quite a lot, since it all comes out of Japan. And at some level as the end consumer you're going to be the one paying the shipping costs, even if you buy it from a company local to your country.

So you're investing quite a bit of money.

Then, in my case, and I know I'm more at the extreme end, you take this book apart (you pull out the staples or use an iron to melt the glue and then slowly pull the pages apart). This is actually quite a time consuming process.

But what's even more time consuming is that you have to actually scan it. I have an A3 scanner so there's not much I have to do in more than one pass, but still, you need to scan at quite a high resolution - at least 400dpi - and that means it takes a good minute or so per page. Multiply that by, on average, around 100 pages, and you can see scanning a book can take around another 1.5 hours.

Having scanned them, you generally have to process them before you can save them. Often times this means rotating them slightly so that they're properly vertical, cropping off unwanted parts outside of the page, and maybe adjusting the levels slightly to compensate for colour problems. More time and effort.

If you're a real nutter you'll even go through the process of cleaning and tidying up the scan - if it's a 2 -page spread sticking it together, for example. If you do that it can take hours.

Then you save as a high quality file. Now if you're doing this as a dedicated activity, you're going to amass a lot of scans pretty damn quickly. That means a lot of big files, so you need some way to store them. For me that meant buying an entire external hard drive to put them on. But not only that, you need to back them up as well. That means burning them all to CD/DVD.

In other words, you have to pay money again to store the scans, as well as the time and effort spent archiving them in this way.

So my point, in summary, is that scanning artbooks (and magazines) in any serious capacity is not a quick and easy thing to do. It takes time, money and effort. And as such, what tends to happen is that you kinda become attached to the scans.

As I say, they're not "yours" as such, but you start to feel that at some level they are yours. It's your effort that's gone into making them.

And this is sort of where the problems start.

Because having done the actual scanning, most scanners then want to display their work on websites. This can take several forms - they may upload it to a public site (minitokyo, AnimePaper, for example) or they may have their own site (APA, ferricorp, for example). If you upload to public sites then normally it means you'll have to do some additional processing on the scan. The actual scan you made will probably too big for the public site and may also need additional tidying up. More time and effort. If you have your own site then you may not do quite so much tidying up, but you have to pay for the site. It costs money to have internet hosting.

But anyway, the fundamental issue here is that the scans become available for other people to download.

Other people who have absolutely no appreciation of the time, effort and expense that went into making those scans.

Other people who will re-upload your scans onto other websites, claiming to have made them themselves (or at least, not saying who did make them).

Other people who will give no thanks or acknowledgement whatsoever for what you've done to get the image available for them to re-upload.

These things are extremely annoying if you are the person who did make the scan. You see, it's not that you mind them having your scans, it's not that you mind them re-uploading them, it's that they do not acknowledge your efforts.

It becomes worse at sites like AP where they operate a system of exchange - for uploads you are enabled to make downloads. This means these unscrupulous people can "profit" off of your efforts and also affect the running of the site by effectively leaching their bandwidth.

It's why I've never really uploaded stuff to 4chan's /hr. In many ways sites like 4chan could be an answer to some of the issues above - you don't really need to tidy it up to the same degree (other people can if they want), the files can be really big and you're not paying for the hosting and bandwidth.

But /hr is also absolutely dripping with all those fuckwits that will re-upload your scans onto other websites and not acknowledge the source. Indeed, most of the uploads onto 4chan are such images - stuff taken without then being credited.

It's ungrateful is the problem - as I say, you have no problem with them having the scans, or even uploading them to some extent (though doing so en-mass is a piss take) but not saying who actually did the scan is just plain ungrateful.

There are a couple of ways around this (well, outside of not uploading your scans, but that sorta defeats the point). Firstly you can add a sig to your scans, saying who may it.

The problem with this is to some extent it disfigures the image, and that's not why you're a scanner. But also, you come in for a lot of flak. Which is so ironic it almost hurts - people who did not make the scans, and have no appreciation for what it takes to make them complaining that you've put a sig on and these same people are the ones who then steal your scan if it's sigless.

The other way is to try to police the internet. By which I mean you go to sites like mt on a regular basis and trawl through the scans to find the one that are yours. To say this is tedious is understating the issue on a biblical scale, but also, many public sites don't actually care where the stuff was stolen from.

Sometimes I do think "fuck it - I'll just upload my shit on 4chan. Let them steal it - it'll save me all the hassle." But every time its the lack of gratitude that stops me clicking the submit button.

... got a bit carried away there :).