Second, Levy is talking about “ripping” books in the way we rip CDs. Before you could pop a CD into a PC and have the songs ripped to mp3 files, there were other, more cumbersome ways to do the same thing, but music piracy didn’t take off until it was really easy to do so. And this is what Levy is talking about… widescale “ripping” and illegal sharing of books. He isn’t talking about legitimate ebooks provided by an author or publisher or public domain books. He’s talking about me taking my collection of Stackpole books, casually ‘ripping’ them to an ebook format, and sharing them with any and everyone who wants them via Kazaa or some other peer-to-peer file sharing system. (And don’t worry, I would never really do that.)

The truth is, not a lot of people are going to go through the hassle of ‘ripping’ a novel via flat scanner and OCR software. But at some time in the future where there’s a device that you’ll ‘feed’ a book into and it’ll automatically scan, convert and correct the copy into ebook format (and honestly I’m dubious that we’ll *ever* get such a machine), then publishers will have to worry. When the new “Harry Potter of the Next Gen” book comes out and instead of lining up at Barnes & Noble, people are downloading the illegal copy that someone ripped and released the day of release, then publishers will have a problem on their hands.

What about suggesting reviewers write out what they want to say first, then read it aloud?