Michael Hart wrote:
Project Gutenberg has already produced and distributed nearly 15,000 eBooks, with a budget that has yet to reach a significant total for all 33+ years, and is projected to reach a million eBooks without undue expense or effort.
PG produces books at a lower cost only if you neglect the cost of volunteer work. I'm sure a big organized corporation like Google can create eBooks way cheaper than a loosely organized group of volunteers like PG.
We'll just have to wait and see if either Google Print, or any of the various "Million eBook Projects" will ever come up with even 1% of a million eBooks that you can carry with you on a one inch stack of plain homemade DVDs.
Whereas PG already has reached 1.5% of a million books with 98.5% still to go.
If it hasn't been proofread, and if you can't take it with you, it is only of limited value. . .sort of like reading over someone's shoulder.
Depends on what you want to do with the book. If you only want to cite some work a page scan (that you cannot take with you but is error-free) is much better than a proofread eBook (which may contain OCR errors).
With Project Gutenberg eBooks, you OWN them. . .forever. . .and can save them in your own favorite formats, fonts, margination, pagination, or whatever, and you can search, quote, print, and do all the normal eBook fuctions.
Yours forever ... until new copyright laws separate you.
I would say that an eBook has to be at least 99.9% accurate, and that it should then be a process as people read the eBooks, to send in corrections.
That is ~ 2 errors per page if you assume a line length of 55 and page length of 40 (~ 2000) chars.
Most of the Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofeaders would say it has to be over 99.99% and perhaps even over 99.999%.
That is approx. one error every 5 pages or every 50 pages. Still not very good.
Not only that, but, viewing the entire eBook effort as a 50 year process, of which I have walked 33+ years, I must state for the record that I think OCR, spellcheckers, grammarcheckers., etc. will be so much better a decade from now that doing the proofreading on the more obscure works will require so much less effort than it does today, that it will be a great trade-off.
Which poses the question: isn't Google's approach to just scan the books today and wait, better suited to achieve the 1 million target? Every progress in OCR technology automatically "proof-reads" all books Google has scanned. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org