Long story short, I’ve gotten into bookbinding lately and I’ve seen a common practice all over the community of scanning books to reprint them on better paper/with a better binding. Though I doubt any small individuals making them for personal use will be involved in litigation over this, I’m curious about what US copyright law technically says about this situation as I get more involved in the community. I am in Virginia.

It seems like the typical scanner bookbinder:

• Buys a paperback copy of some Great Book
• Pays a book scanning service to destructively scan the book (e.g. take the spine off, pass it through a scanner, produce a PDF, and throw out the pages from the original)
• Prints the PDF out and proceeds to bind exactly one copy intended for personal use

It seems like there’s no clear consensus on this online, and lots of case law gets thrown around on Quora by people that seem pretty unqualified to be discussing it. Specifically, I’m seeing a lot of mentions of precedent that supposedly allows this copying without redistribution, and some people claiming that since you purchased the original work and destroyed it, you’re in the clear.

I’m also wondering what this means when the bookbinder is clearing out their shelves before a move. Normally, selling/donating books you purchased is no big deal, but if you want to ditch your specially bound copy of Great Book doesn’t that constitute a violation of copyright due to distribution of what’s technically a copy of a protected work?

To stray a bit into the hypothetical here (happy to delete this section if it infringes on sub rules): it seems widely accepted that simply performing repair work on your copy is allowed. Let’s say your dog eats a couple pages out of Theseus’ Ship and you acquire copes of those pages from a second book you own, replacing the eaten pages in book number one. Let’s further say this happens slowly over time to all pages of the book. Do you now effectively have a copy in violation of copyright law, or was it a violation the second you started replacing pages?