Storing book PDFs in Evernote...

[Frank.dg 1,385]

Here's a typical part of a copyright notice for most books:

 

"All Rights Reserved. This book may not be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in whole or in part by any means, including graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the express written consent of the publisher..."

 

Does this include Evernote? It doesn't seem like a big deal... but I was just wondering, technically. Am I technically not supposed to store any of my e-books in Evernote?

[gazumped 11,656]

In practical terms I'd say you have a pretty good argument that having bought an e-book,  you have to load it into one or more applications in order to read it,  and Evernote counts as one of those.  Any online document comes with its own copyright freight,  and in most cases you can probably make the same argument.  The publishers thereof will have no way to know if you store the containing note in your own account,  and are pretty unlikely to know even if you share the note with a few colleagues or friends.

 

Share too widely though and sooner or later some corporate lawyer will be asking serious questions of both you and Evernote,  and I'd imagine EN would take down any challenged content even if you don't.  In practical terms,  with copyright violations around the world,  most companies need to pick their targets carefully - and in affordable venues.  Avoid any mass distribution for profit,  and you should be OK.

 

PS - not legally qualified,  or an intellectual property expert;  and this advice is worth exactly what you paid for it....  

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Does this include Evernote? It doesn't seem like a big deal... but I was just wondering, technically. Am I technically not supposed to store any of my e-books in Evernote?

 

I guess the question you can ask yourself (and/or legal counsel) is how is storing your e-book in Evernote legally different from storing it in your computer hard drive?  Personally, I don't see a difference.

[CalS 5,280]

Below is a cut/paste from an Amazon e-book.  Depending on how meticulous you want to be, a case could be built for EN not being the place to put the book, assuming you think of EN as a database or retrieval system.  As Gaz says though, if you are using it for personal use or as a backup, not likely to get in any trouble.  Then again, not sure how one would get an Amazon ebook into EN.  Most of the PDF books I have seem to reference reproducing and transmitting with no mention of storage.  FWIW.

 

 

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

[jbenson2 2,147]

Another perspective - keep in mind there have been several power users who have run into the Evernote scalability problem once they reached a large database size. It might be better to store large PDF's, including e-books, elsewhere. You could keep a small note in Evernote which lets you know where it is stored.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I agree with JBenson2, Evernote is NOT the place I would store my electronic book library -- just for technical reasons.

As JB suggests, create a Note in Evernote with a link to the PDF, along with keywords, abstract, summary, comments, etc.

With proper use of Tags, you should be able to locate the PDF of interest quickly, and then open it for reading.

[Frank.dg 1,385]

I have read several books right in Evernote, for the purpose of annotation, mostly with productivity books where Evernote gives me an annotation summary. Personally I've had zero problems with the almost 2 dozen books I've read and annotated right in Evernote. However, I do not store all of my PDFs in Evernote. Those go into Dropbox. I prefer the super quick air print feature together with Dropbox on iOS. I decided early on that Evernote was not the most practical for my PDFs in general... but I am absolutely hooked on reading and annotating with my bamboo pen right in Evernote.

 

The reason I started this thread is more than one of curiosity. Of course I would not be the target of a litigation. I'm small fry. I was more thinking along the lines of what I encourage others to do... so... say I write a blog post or even a thread on the Evernote forum in the future... about annotating one's e-books in Evernote, which has worked so well for me. On more than one occasion I have referenced my annotations via the summary Evernote provides. If I were to wholesale promote this kind of dynamic - not so much running into legal roadbocks, but mainly from an ethical standpoint - if I were to promote this in one way or another, I just want to make sure that I'm not contravening copyright law. At this point it's more of a curiosity, but it does make one think. As was mentioned above, one does need to load an e-book into some sort of app or device, whether it be iBooks, Kindle or whatever. I thought the part about not being able to place your book in a storage and retrieval system seemed quite nonsensical. Especially considering that Dropbox and Evernote are right there, front and center.  

[jefito 5,589]

Scalability of the Evernote database is a side issue. I don't know that I've ever seen any specific causes (note sizes, content, numbers of notes, attachment types, etc.) for the problems that some of the outliers are experiencing (which, lest any nitpickers fret, is a problem and ought to be addressed). I wouldn't want to set out to store the Library of Congress, but I'll bet my Kindle collection (in whatever format) -- several hundred books -- would be fine.

 

My take on the topic: what you put onto your hard drive is your responsibility. What you share with others is your responsibility. A file system is a database by any reasonable definition, and it's a file storage and retrieval system as well. I don't see the Evernote case as any different. If it makes you uncomfortable, then you probably shouldn't do it. I doubt that anyone would go after me if I had such a system for my own use, so I wouldn't worry about it myself.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Legally, I think there is still a lot of disagreement out there about whether you have the right or not to scan your books in the first place, much less stick them onto a cloud service. My sense is that the law is quite out of step with technology, and it might be some time before the courts in the US, at least, clarify this for us. If you Google "fair use," "format shifting," or "time shifting" you can read up on the debates.

Putting your Kindle collection into Evernote would almost certainly be illegal, as you would have to strip the DRM to access the content. The likelihood of you getting caught is probably low, but as I always say, anything you put unencrypted onto the cloud ought to be considered "public" (accessible to state or private hackers as well as company employees), so you are doing so at your own risk. Book publishers seem less aggressive / vindictive / absurd than the recording industry (suing individuals for obscenely large damages), but you are still exposing yourself to potential legal issues. Remember, data can be stored and accessed forever, so twenty or thirty years down the road, who knows how society / laws will change, and as part of a case against you or others, anything you have released onto the cloud can be used against you. Our UK users have a wonderful show called Black Mirror that recently explored some of the dystopian possibilities of this infinite access to data in Season 1, Episode 3 (I think). And, of course, classics like 1984, Fahrenheit 451, or Kafka's Trial have been around for years as disturbing warnings about how institutions (such as the state) can threaten individual freedoms (you might be tempted to dismiss these as irrelevant science fiction, but elements of all three stories can easily be found in the present day).

Anyhow, in terms of performance, Evernote used to limit the amount of text in a note, so the text extracted from a scanned book like a dictionary would not fit and throw an error. I think they have raised the limit, but I haven't tested to check. Scalability was a big problem for me in the past, especially with the incremental search, but this has probably been improved in recent versions. Again, I haven't tested to check.

As jefito said, it really isn't one thing that seems to throw off a database, but a combination of things. However, Evernote does index text, and dense amounts of it will understandably affect its performance. If the local library decides to digitize and store its contents in Evernote, or you decide to download all of Project Gutenberg into your account, there will likely be some serious performance issues.

In my experience, the best tool for handling massive amounts of text is Spotlight on Mac (I use the HoudahSpot app to easily work with the index). It is amazingly fast and able to gobble through terabytes of data, even on external drives. It is not a personal information manager. And, it is not a note-taking app. But, it (Spotlight) is a great tool to use in combination with Evernote (it will also index your Evernote database). I'd recommend considering putting your notes (stuff made by you) into Evernote and keeping massive amounts of text elsewhere to be accessed by Spotlight. Unfortunately, this will mean that all of your text is only available on one computer.

Alternatively, if you do expect to have a lot of text (we are talking many millions of words), create one Evernote account for the dense text, another for regular use, and access the text one on the web whenever you want to search the contents (don't forget that iOS and Evernote on the Web only play well together on the mobile version of the Evernote site, if that is available today -- it comes and goes). That will put the search load on Evernote's powerful servers. There are other ways to handle two accounts as well (one account on the iPad, on logged in on the iPhone), so you can experiment with what works best for you.

[jefito 5,589]

As jefito said, it really isn't one thing that seems to throw off a database, but a combination of things. However, Evernote does index text, and dense amounts of it will understandably affect its performance. If the local library decides to digitize and store its contents in Evernote, or you decide to download all of Project Gutenberg into your account, there will likely be some serious performance issues.

Just one note... since we seem here to be talking about an Evernote-opaque format (non-text, non-PDF), the indexing part of this may not be an issue.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

 

As jefito said, it really isn't one thing that seems to throw off a database, but a combination of things. However, Evernote does index text, and dense amounts of it will understandably affect its performance. If the local library decides to digitize and store its contents in Evernote, or you decide to download all of Project Gutenberg into your account, there will likely be some serious performance issues.

Just one note... since we seem here to be talking about an Evernote-opaque format (non-text, non-PDF), the indexing part of this may not be an issue.

 

 

Scanning a book would turn it into a PDF, which Evernote would automatically OCR to produce text content (assuming the user didn't do that already and you broke up each book into chunks), and Project Gutenberg (among other things) provides text files. Presumably, one reason to digitize a library is to make the context searchable.

 

However, you are correct that, assuming you dumped in a bunch of PDFs of a certain size that Evernote wouldn't OCR, its impact on Evernote's performance would probably be almost imperceptible (perhaps only when scrolling through the PDFs would you notice any issues). 

[jefito 5,589]

Actually, what I'm saying is that there are other e-book formats (EPUB and MobiPocket, for two), that I'm pretty sure that Evernote wouldn't index, though I don't know that for sure.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Actually, what I'm saying is that there are other e-book formats (EPUB and MobiPocket, for two), that I'm pretty sure that Evernote wouldn't index, though I don't know that for sure.

 

Oh, right. But, putting those in Evernote would be kind of silly if you didn't convert them to text first using Calibre or some other application. At any rate, if you did put them into Evernote in some format Evernote couldn't read, your point is a good one -- they won't affect the indexing. In fact, audio and video files are quite large and not uncommon, but they probably don't have much impact on Evernote's performance.

[Wordsgood 526]

Frank, I advise you to pay special heed to whatever Grumpy Monkey has to say on the topic. Sadly, he's a known book murderer and has NO compunction about lopping the spines off books and digitizing them...