michael said:
>   It's so simple that even Mr. Bowerbird's rhetoric
>   cannot confuse the issue:

it's even so simple that mr. hart's rhetoric cannot confuse it.      :+)


>   A picture of the pages of a book, even if complete and OCRable,
>   is simply not a a full text eBook.

a picture, by definition, is not text.

whether or not a _scan-set_ qualifies as an _e-book_,
however, is more of a semantic issue than anything else.


>   1.  It takes many times the drive space.

there's no question about that.  and no need to reiterate it.


>   2.  It takes much more download wire time.

there's no question about that.  and no need to reiterate it.


>   3.  You can't do ANY of the things you can do with full text,

except...


>   EXCEPT THE MOST IMPORTANT. . .YOU CAN READ IT.

and here we have the most important concession, finally --
that a person can indeed _read_ an e-book that is a scan-set.

so, for the person who _only_ wants to _read_ a book,
a scan-set of that book is all that that person needs...

nobody, least of all me, is going to argue with the position that
digital text is _better_ than a scan-set in a multitude of ways...
so if that's what you think this is about, michael, you're wrong.

nobody, least of all me, is saying that people should _settle_ for
a scan-set instead of digital text, especially for our cyberlibrary.
so if that's what you think this is about, michael, you're wrong.


>   But the expense in time and money is much larger,

i can figure out some interpretations of this that make sense,
thinking along the lines of file-storage and bandwidth costs.
but both of those things are cheap now, and getting cheaper.

and a look at the whole picture shows that _scanning_ incurs
the biggest cost, in terms of human labor and machine-costs.
so it's a good thing a rich company like google is doing _that_.

as for the next step -- the o.c.r. followed by the proofing --
that incurs more cost, mostly in the form of human labor costs.

so -- actually -- it would _cost_ less to just "settle" for the scans.

that would be a false economy, though, because the extra time
that it takes to convert a scan-set into digital-text is _worth_it_
(i.e., the benefits of having digital text _and_ the scan-set are
significantly greater than those of having _only_ the scan-set,
and the increase in benefits is greater than the digitization costs,
and this will become increasingly so as we automate the proofing.)

so there's no question that we should keep doing the digitization.
so if that's what you think this is about, michael, you're wrong.

it is important to keep in mind, though, that we have no funds
for doing this digitization, so we are relying on _volunteers_,
and the number of volunteers we have now, and can reasonably
anticipate having in the near future, is not even _close_ to being
enough to keep up with the rate at which google is now scanning.

and when google kicks up their rate, and the new scanning projects
get going as well, and the ones currently operating cumulate their
results, the number of undigitized scan-sets will become _huge_...

so it's counterproductive -- to say the least -- to continue to foster
some kind of unrealistic attitude about these scan-sets as being
totally without value.  we need to see they are of _immense_ value.

to continue to throw rocks at them because "they can't be searched"
or "you can't copy-and-paste their text" is silly to the point of stupid.
people lived with paper-books -- which cannot be searched and
from which you cannot copy-and-paste text -- for 500 years, man!

and maybe it's good training for me as an anarchist to have my hero
say something silly to the point of stupid.  but it sure is disillusioning.

the task before us now is to find a way to make use of the millions of
scan-sets that are out there, standing in line, waiting to be digitized.


>   and it's much harder to write research papers.

i'll let the researchers worry about writing their papers.
after all, that's why they get paid the big bucks, right?


>   By Mr. Bowerbird's logic, a pre-Gutenerg book
>   would be as useful as a post-Gutenberg book.

only if you try and twist my logic to say things that i don't.

-bowerbird