On Sat, 1 Jan 2005, Dennis McCarthy wrote:
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.
Yes, one concern we all have is how good Googleberg's scans will be. Will they give us access to the best hi-res scans? Or only to something that is easy on their storage and bandwidth, and consquently not so good for OCR? [I'm guessing they will NOT make the best materials available to all. Either in the case of raw scans, or the OCRed full text files.]
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.
Of course, this raises the question if 99.999% of the population WANTS access to these books. . .a question I raised earlier. . .will the Googleberg collection be so stilted that it is mostly for scholars?
(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?)
Well. . .this brings us to the entire point of why have Project Gutenberg? Why give people an entire home library of eBooks that are "in most public libraries and many book stores?" * I say the answer is simply individual access rather than public access. Of course, Ray Bradbury VIOLENTLY disagrees with me here, and I understand why he does. . .he believes in the social experience of libraries.
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.
I'm betting Googleberg will store the hi-res scans offline, hidden behind some VERY powerful security. As for cutting up the books, some are, some aren't. Michael