I’ve been waiting for the perfect eReader to sweep me off my feet with its native PDF capability and huge file capacity. I thought it would be the Nook, but it looks like the annotation function is missing some desirable features. There’s also salient possibility that PDFs of journal articles will be too small to read the 6″ screen.
However, I’m not giving up hope on the Nook, and I’m starting to be optimistic about the Que. Soon, we’ll have an eReader that will give philosophers the ability to carry around ALL of the last several years of the best philosophy journals.
But now there’s a different issue. As I noted, my main reason for wanting an eReader is that I would like to have an incredibly awesome Philosophy eLibrary with me at all times. Imagine having the last five years of the top ten general philosophy journals on an eReader that was as easy on the eyes as reading paper. That would be amazing.
Problem:
This awesome library would take a while to build.
Solution:
10+ philosophers get together and divide up the labor. Each philosopher would be in charge of 1 of the 10+ most popular journals. They would download all of the articles from that journal for the last five years and trade. We would send each other an electronic folder of the journal we were in charge of. Most likely we’d have some shared server space to do this (or perhaps a Google Wave).
After the initial trade, each philosopher would be in charge of tracking their journal. When a new issue came out, they would download the articles and upload them in the standardized format that the group selected.
I imagine that if every philosopher in this group actually has access to all of the journals being shared and could have downloaded all of the articles for their own use, then fair use guidelines would not be violated. If this wouldn’t violate fair use guidelines, then this seems like a no-brainer for philosophers interested in using eReaders the way I’m interested in using them.
This seems too good to be true. Am I missing something?
I don’t believe you’re missing anything, actually. Such a knowledge base would be pretty darn awesome. I just didn’t know how it’d work. We’d also all have to have a standardized way of naming the files. Say “Author-Year-Title” or something.
I’m e-mailing our university’s copyright lawyer to ask about the hypothetical. I suspect we’ll be fine if we don’t charge and treat it as peer-to-peer rather than uploading them to a central hub.
Sweet. Let me know what you find out.