does every conversation here _have_ to be tedious?

***

ok, let me 'splain you...

first, if you're gonna wait for users to report errors,
instead of proactively seeking them and fixing them,
you might as well _give_ your lunch to someone else
and then trot off to your mat so you can take a nap.

if the tech world has taught us anything at all lately,
it's that you'd better improve your product offerings
_yourself_, before any of your competitors do it first.

project gutenberg e-texts have one powerful benefit
-- they are cleaner than many other texts out there.
(but don't look back, because google's coming fast.)

the e-texts also have 2 significant related liabilities --
they have no provenance, so the accuracy isn't verifiable.

this means a competitor can knock you out quite easily,
and even use your own text to do it.  they simply take it,
hook it up to a scan-set, and do a proof via comparison.

voila.  they have _cleaner_ text.  which _has_ provenance.

then they point to your absence of any provenance, and
draw attention to your errors -- which they've fixed! --
and boom, they've done a number on your reputation...

do that a couple dozen times, with high-profile classics,
in a way that goes viral, and the blow would be crushing.

crushing.

that's if they beat you to the punch.  they eat your lunch.

there's your top-down seminar...

and now for the bottom-up part.

if you're going to build a system capable of pulling up
an arbitrary page from an arbitrary book in response to
an error-report regarding some of the text on that page,
then you might as well blossom it into a system that will
serve to correct all the text on every page of every book.

you dig?

-bowerbird