Fundamentally, this project has really become about all the niche book scanning stuff that everyone else ignored.

BI: Is it fair to say that ultimately the scanner is about preserving knowledge?

DR: Yes, and about people helping themselves. The most important thing to note here is, despite the ENORMOUS focus on digital books, their marketing, scanning, distribution, reading, and sale, there has been nearly ZERO focus on all the books people already own. Whole classes of books and book-related desires have been wholly ignored. That's where I – and my designs and league of interesting people – come in. We help people get their books into a format they can use, using mostly stuff they already have. They might not always be archival-quality scans, but they are a whole lot better than being ignored.

BI: What's most frustrating about current intellectual property law?

DR: The fundamental problem with intellectual property law is that it was formed in a totally different technological era. It wasn't designed for our current age of computation and copying. When these legal concepts came into being, it was hard to make a copy. You needed, for example, a printing press. Today we copy thousands of times a second with our electronic devices. The law can't handle the present. And that's where the trouble begins.

We're going to need to find a law that can handle the present.