It's so simple that even Mr. Bowerbird's rhetoric cannot confuse the issue: A picture of the pages of a book, even if complete and OCRable, is simply not a a full text eBook. 1. It takes many times the drive space. 2. It takes much more download wire time. 3. You can't do ANY of the things you can do with full text, EXCEPT THE MOST IMPORTANT. . .YOU CAN READ IT. But the expense in time and money is much larger, and it's much harder to write research papers. By Mr. Bowerbird's logic, a pre-Gutenerg book would be as useful as a post-Gutenberg book. On Wed, 24 May 2006 Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
michael said:
Then again, some people think pictures of pages are as good as full text
those are probably the people who want to "just" _read_ the words of the book, and don't want to copy out its text.
but that would entail a different definition.
yes, what a pity that their "definition" is so constrained.
when black ink is splashed onto a white page of paper, the result is nothing more than a "picture" of the book. but somehow, for over 500 years, that has been enough.
-bowerbird