Original Sources

[Chinsukolo]

To the Arcanists,

I mentioned it once buried in a thread before you guys went live - but thought I'd ask again.

Can we link digital copies of Brandon's published books to Arcanum, for those of us reading the paper version it would make searching and citing much much easier.

I feel like this would be well within fair use, I wouldn't be surprised if Brandon gave a digital copy just for this, but I'd totally be willing to buy it myself to facilitate this addition. 

What I don't know is is it even feasible/realistic (you folks are the smart ones on implementation)..

Thanks for the time

[Chaos]

I... don't think it would be legal for us to have searchable versions of the texts publicly available. I think we could get in serious trouble for something like this. 

[Joe ST]

I don't quite get why this would be under Arcanum's purview anyway? We might be able to make a thing that tells you what chapters your search term appears in, but yeah giving you full text search isn't even close to fair use.

But other than that I don't quite understand what you're meaning by 'linking digital copies'?

[Chinsukolo]

Hmm I'll try again in my explanation - not sure if it will help.   

When I said digital copies i meant kindle books that are searchable, as opposed to paper books, audio books - sorry for poor verbiage)

I wasn't thinking to link whole copies of the books for people to read - I understand that isn't fair use.  

My thought was place a copy in Arcanum as a source, hidden from view in it's entirety (so people can't just take/steal a copy), but when you search for key words, the sentence in a book with that key word would come back alone with any other WoBs.

Something like I search "Zahel"  - in addition to returning all relevant WoBs, it also returns each individual sentence in SL1, SL2, SL3 that contain it as well. 

That way people who only have the paperback/hardcovers can still search the books for relevant material without literally read reading entire sections.  

If showing the sentence was even to much, perhaps give a page and paragraph (but to me that seems like it'd be more complicated.

I hope that explained my thought better :/

 

[Mestiv]

@Chinsukolo I understand what you mean, unfortunately things are complicated.

First, we'd need to make sure it's not possible to get the whole book by searching for words like "the" that appear in practically every paragraph.

Second, none of us is a copyright lawyer, and the last thing we'd like is copyright trouble.

Third, that's not really a problem that Arcanum is meant to solve. We focus on interviews, signings etc. Searching through book content is not part of our goal. There are many things we still need to do in Arcanum, so even if the previous two points weren't there, book search would have extra low priority.

 

If you really want to do something like that, you can try contacting Dragonsteel and ask for their opinion/permission. Then I bet you'll find some willing coder to make it happen. But honesty, my gut tells me that they wouldn't be too enthusiastic about it. Too much risk of leaking the books and publishers might also have their objections.

[Chinsukolo]

6 hours ago, Ookla the Codebringer said:

@Chinsukolo I understand what you mean, unfortunately things are complicated.

First, we'd need to make sure it's not possible to get the whole book by searching for words like "the" that appear in practically every paragraph.

Second, none of us is a copyright lawyer, and the last thing we'd like is copyright trouble.

Third, that's not really a problem that Arcanum is meant to solve. We focus on interviews, signings etc. Searching through book content is not part of our goal. There are many things we still need to do in Arcanum, so even if the previous two points weren't there, book search would have extra low priority.

 

If you really want to do something like that, you can try contacting Dragonsteel and ask for their opinion/permission. Then I bet you'll find some willing coder to make it happen. But honesty, my gut tells me that they wouldn't be too enthusiastic about it. Too much risk of leaking the books and publishers might also have their objections.

Makes sense =)  

Oh well was an idea anyways, not all ideas pan out.  You guys are the experts on how this thing works so i default to your expertise.  Thanks to taking the time all of you to respond and answer.