[KHS]

I'm not looking forward to months of manual scanning of 100s of fake books, no matter how good the equipment I might purchase. Why can't music publishers employ a simple and profit-making way of authenticating whether a customer already legimitately owns the printed fakebook (such as requiring him to mail in the copyright page) and then, for a very small fee, allow that user to download a picture-perfect PDF and associated .CSV of its contents? Has anyone ever broached this subject with the publishers? Of course, they'd have no practical way of preventing their customer from illegally sharing the .PDF with others, but if they already bought and owned the thing, maybe they have better things to do (like playing the music) and should be trusted. After all, their customer has always had the physical ability to defeat their copyright by lending their book for someone else to scan or photo various pages.

I realize there are "sharing" sites that offer scans, but I'm not smart enough to know what malware or other horrors might be lurking therein. I confess I've peeked at a few of their offerings and the scans are often of low quality (pages off the edge, etc.) and horribly identified (with titles like "Jazz Book"), making it impossible to find exact matches for the books one already owns.

Anyone out there have connections to the publishing industry? I'd be willing to pay a fair fee to avoid months of scanning, but I'm not going to re-buy at today's prices a digital version of something I paid dearly for originally.