Of particular concern to PG voluteers will be the clarity of the page scans of Google Print's public domain works, which will mainly come from the academic libraries' rare books archives. As far as I am concerned this is the best potential of Google Print--to make works available that 99.999% of the population never had access to. (How important, really, is it to look at just a few pages of a book that is in most public libraries and many book stores?) I doubt those libraries will allow Google to cut up the books--and rightly so--therefore the quality of the images may not be as good. Although Google makes it difficult to download these pages images, we all know that where there is a will, there is a way. And perhaps some PG volunteers will use these page scans for a real e-book. Better scans would make for easier transcriptions.
From the Google Print side, worse scan would probably cause more errors in their behind-the-scenes OCR database linked to each page scan--making searches of these pages less accurate. Hopefully for researches, this increase in error rate will be a fraction of a percent, but who knows?
-----Original Message----- From: juliet.sutherland@verizon.net Sent: Dec 31, 2004 11:09 PM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org> Subject: Re: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
3. Google cut the pages ('cos the scans are just _beautiful_!) and scan the pages of the books into images.
As I've previously noted, destructive scanning of modern reprints is easy and usually results in good images and good OCR. --------------------------- Dennis McCarthy nihil_obstat@mindspring.com