Sharing and copying texts is as old as books themselves—actually, one could argue that this is almost a definition of the book—but computers and the Internet have only accelerated this activity. From transcription to tracing to photocopying to scanning, the labour and material costs involved in producing a copy has fallen to nothing in our present digital file situation. Once the scan has generated a digitized version of some kind, say a PDF, it easily replicates and circulates. This is not aberrant behaviour, either, but normative computer use: copy and paste are two of the first choices in any contextual menu. Personal file storage has slowly been migrating onto computer networks, particularly with the growth of mobile devices, so one’s files are not always located on one’s equipment. The act of storing and retrieving shuffles data across machines and state lines.
Dockray, Sean. “The Scan and the Export.” Fillip 12 (2010): 98–112.
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