michael said:
Obviously the press coverage about "Google library scanning" has done more "as the main impetus for resurg[ent] interest in a cyberlibrary" than the actualy scanning itself.
well, d'uh, of course. that's how it always is.
And the latest estimated I have received show that Google's total number of books has just recently passed 50,000
i do believe you misread that. 50,000 public-domain titles, with another 42,000 under copyright, for a total of 92,000. but even if it is just 50,000 total, they're still on my schedule: i predicted 10,000 after one year, 100,000 after two years, 1 million after three years, and 10 million after four years...
similar reports say that 88% are neither downloadable nor proofread to any particular level of accuracy.
except it's not google's job to make them downloadable, not in convenient form, nor to proofread the digitized text. it is _our_ job to grab the scans (as nicely and neatly as possible, courteous and respectful of the cost they entailed by scanning), and to make them available in a convenient format for reading, as well as to formulate automatic procedures to digitize the text and take it to a very high degree of accuracy. even if google did do these jobs for us, i would still replicate it, because i don't want to have to be dependent on google forever.
Somehow I don't think this was accidental. . . .
the point is, if your books were _already_ "reading each other", people would have been talking about it long before this article. -bowerbird p.s. i see you're one of those old-fashioned people who refuse to recognize "resurging" as an adjective. it's ok. hopefully, if i keep using it that way, i'll win. (i'm trying to change the usage of "hopefully" with the same strategy.) :+)