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.)                :+)