>is this the beginning of the end?

LOL – Well maybe – but certainly NOT for the reason posited!

The HP side of the effort is called “Bookprep” and can be found here:

http://www.bookprep.com

You can read the books free online, and you can zoom in by clicking CTRL-+ where you can find out if you had doubted it earlier that indeed they apparently ARE “only” doing page images no OCR and apparently pretty bad page images to boot.

Don’t pick one of their recommended example books (which are unrepresentatively good) but instead do a “search function” instead so that you see what their effort is really like.  For example I did a search on “Mark Twain” which ought be a turkey shoot, but see what you find if you try it!