I just love it when people criticize something without fully understanding it first. As a blind person myself, I think this new project is great! Folks can complain about the quality of the books, but the fact is that most of the books are still usable, in spite of the foibles of OCR. Given the choice between a nicely proofread book from PG or another source, or the raw version from archive.org, I'll of course choose the proofread version. Unfortunately, that's usually not an option. Most of the books made available from archive.org in this program are not available from other sources in an electronic format. So, given the choice between getting the book from archive.org or scanning it myself, I'll choose archive.org. I'd much rather let them do the scanning for me. If it is unusable, fine, I'll rescan it or get someone else to proofread it. However, in my experience, that is almost never necessary. One barely usable book is worth more to me than a thousand nicely proofread titles, if the one book is the one I happen to need. Aaron On 5/7/10, Bowerbird@aol.com <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
when are people going to start calling "bullshit" on the press releases from the internet archive?
that's what i want to know.
look at their text. it's raw o.c.r., and it's _awful_. and unlike google, they're doing nothing to fix it.
but they're putting it out for the "blind and dyslexic"? is this some kind of mean trick they're trying to play? do they think blind people won't notice the bad o.c.r.?
i don't know who's calling the shots over there, since they all _seem_ like nice people... but my goodness, the cynicism of these press releases is overwhelming.
and all this "good publicity" that they are getting will soon exercise its karmic force, and bite 'em in the butt.
it's past the point of embarrassment; it's _dangerous_. even if the press will print your lies, it's wrong to lie...
-bowerbird