GITEX Case Study

In GITEX, I saw a book scanner, which can basically scan a 500 page book in less than an hour.

At first this technology seemed like a great innovation, however, after some thought. it seems that it may have many social and ethical issues. 

Stakeholders: users of the scanning software, the company who made that software.

Strand 1:

This type of technology has several social and ethical issues. The main one is the reliability of the actual scanner. The scanner may not accurately scan all the pages, which can then lead to falsely documented books. This can cause problems in the future, if documents or manifesto's are falsely scanned and recorded. This is especially the case if a library wants to scan a very old rare book (like a history book). The book may have creased pages or worn out pages, which means that the scanner may not be able to actually accurately read the content, thus leading to incorrectly documented information. Another social and ethical concern is that these scanners can be purchased by anyone. The reason this is a social and ethical concern is because the person may purchase a book, scan it, and illegally distribute it. This is then a breach of copyright laws, since the intellectual property of an author distributed freely. Aside from free distribution, the person may simply sell electronic versions of the book to other people, for a cheaper price, which means that he makes profit (illegally) off of someone else's work. In addition to that, this scanner converts the book to PDF format too, which means that it has character recognition software which allows it to read text, copy and paste them into a PDF. This is another place where the reliability of the scanner is at stake, because depending on the quality of the scan, the quality of the book, and the font of the words, the reliability of the OCR software is altered.

Strand 2:

This type of technology can be implemented in several places. The first one that comes in mind is 'education and training'. If the company or school buys a book for training/teaching purposes, it can pay more to request a license from the book publishers. A license which allows the scanning of the book as long as it is only used in by the employees of that company. This makes it much cheaper overall for the company, than actually buying a separate book for each employee. Of course, this has a counter argument as well: there must be policies in place which ensure that the employees who have access to the scanned books don't distribute them. In addition, it links to 'environment' as well, since such a technology decreases the wastage of paper.

It can also link to 'government and politics', because the government may use this scanner to achieve files on specific people or events (like 9/11 files or CIA reports, etc.). However again, this has other implications, which are the security of the actual computers this data will be stored on, etc...

Strand 3:

Essentially, the IT system uses simple scanning to scan the pages. The first step is flattening the page being scanned on glass. This ensures that the surface is uniform, which means that the quality of the scanned work will be better. It uses a light source to illuminate the whole image, then a series of capacitors move across the glass, and capture all the detail. The reason such an IT system may be unreliable is because: if a book is really old and work out, then the first step (which is flattening the page) becomes really difficult. So when light shines upon the page, it may not fully illuminate the page, which leads to some of the page parts being 'shadowed'. Therefore, when the capacitors move across the page, they cannot detract all the writing and convert it. Aside from the printer perspective, there is also the OCR. Essentially, the way these work in such technology is like this: a page is scanned and turned into a picture file format, then the character recognition software scans the image, looking for text and characters. It compares the scanned text and characters to those in its database. If there is a match, then it pastes those characters in another document, creating an 'ebook' type file. If there is no match, then it moves on to the other characters. This is where mistakes in the scanning of the book can occur. The fonts are limited to those found in the OCR database. In addition to that, it becomes really hard to preserve books of other languages.