On Wed, 31 May 2006 Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
sebastien said:
Most of the time the original typesetting does not matter much.
different people can disagree on that.
And how!
I believe you are missing the point. Michael doesn't care as much about collections of pictures as he does about digitalized text.
different people disagree with michael.
Please stop quoting from what I said about illustrations when bandwidth was a serious issue. . .not that everyone has broadband these days. . .or wants pictures; however, the point was made long ago when making an eBook larger, often many times larger, would stop people from reading. Don't forget just how much effort we put in to making an illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland with the best of several resolution tests for each illustration, just for the purpose of making it small enough for more readers. However, this is all pretty much in the past now for the people on this list, but we should never forget that the world at large still may have bandwidth issues, and this new attention to reading eBooks on cell phone may play a major role in accentuating this issue.
As long as scans and/or OCR technologies are so disappointing, we'll have to rely on higher-level human brains with initiatives such as PGDP or ebooksgratuits.com
or methodologies which are better.
Of course having easy access to pictures is useful and much better than nothing and serves you well, but that's not what PG and ebooks are about.
different people can disagree on that too.
ebooks are much more than photographs of regular analog books.
yes, but photographs of regular analog books _might_ qualify as e-books, for _some_ people.
different people can disagree on that too.
3. is the top we are heading for. 2. is just a step on the way.
but #2 might serve the needs of person x just fine.
I did that and got 20845628 bytes for 604 pages.
scans are resource hogs. nobody disagrees about that.
one argument is that since these resources are now plentiful, it doesn't matter that scans are resource hogs.
different people can disagree on that too.
as long as we can easily move scan-sets to digitized text, i don't see much purpose in continuing to debate these two as if they were competitors. they're not. they're complimentary.
-bowerbird