Replying to both lists. . .mh On Sat, 13 Nov 2004, Jon Noring wrote:
[I posted the following to The eBook Community. But clearly most of the real experts in digitizing texts are found right here on gutvol-d, so I'm reposting the message here.
I'm especially curious in the economics associated with commercially doing what Michael Hart and PG has done for years and years.]
My guess is that by the time there is a serious commercial eBook industry, say to the point where the next David Letterman and Jay Leno are joking about eBooks then, the way they were about the Web 5-10 years ago, that most of the public domain books will already have been scanned, OCRed, placed online, and will be going through translations into the various languages of the world. If not most, then certainly most of the ones that were easy to find and of general interest. But still, at the rate things have been going over the past 15 years, another 15 years should put us only a few years from this goal, well within sight, before the commercial eBook industry is developed enough to be part of cultural awareness. Michael S. Hart Project Gutenberg