On 10/11/2011 9:16 AM, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
On 10/11/2011 02:36 PM, Jana Srna wrote:
I think I understand where all the other points are coming from, but why 4.? Why would you want to stop people from scanning books that aren't already available online?
Because it saves time, and you won't end up doing all those long forgotten (for good reason) books you can buy for 1 cent.
One thing I learned in all my time at DP is that there is always *someone* who finds even the most obscure books important. I've always felt that the "classics" will certainly be made available, if not by PG* then by various academic or profit-making organizations. What will be overlooked are the more obscure works. The things that only a few people will value but who will be extremely glad to have them available. Yet another school book on American History? The student doing comparison of how views of American history changed over time will be delighted to have a decent sized corpus to work with. Yet another silly children's series book? Well, the website called something like Not Quite Nancy Drew seems to value them highly and has folks who are definitely interested them. Obscure and detailed articles from the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineers about the train tunnels into and out of Manhattan? Those got a thank you letter from someone who had been searching for that material for years. Changing the subject, I believe that one of the reasons the DP-EU and DP-Canada sites have not (yet) had the success of the original DP has to do with the difficulty in building a community of volunteers. Getting a critical mass takes time (last I looked, DP-Canada was making nice progress) and some other ingredient that I don't understand. Volume comes with number of volunteers. DP has many faults, it is true, not least of which is slowness to change, but starting up a new site and expecting it to quickly achieve the volumes that DP currently does is unrealistic. On the other hand, there are so many books out there waiting to be turned into proper ebooks that having a dozen sites like DP would only benefit our (PG's) purpose of making lots of ebooks freely available. JulietS *It does get frustrating to make new, better proofed, better illustrated versions of classics only to have the PG website continue to list the older, more problematic versions more prominently.