On Wed, Mar 3, 2010 at 1:24 PM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
I suspect when Google digitizes the book the original is then trashed by the college library
That would be silly. When you have endowments the size of the Harvard University, you have no need to do that; since they're already built book-storage buildings where books can stored in more space-efficient forms than browseable stacks and are retrievable only with a couple days' notice, you're simply more free to exile them there.
-- the whole point being they do not want to have to pay to maintain physical library books in various states of decay.
The whole point of this thing is that Google thought that digitalizing this material would be valuable, and the universities all thought that it would be valuable to have digital copies of their collection, and that it would further their mission to spread knowledge.
Google then becomes the sole repository for this information
No. The universities all have copies of all the scans made from their books.
But to my mind one measure is obvious: Books that real people do not in practice want to read we should not bother to restore!
Then we aren't doing enough porn. If your sole measure of worthiness is the number of hits, then forget about doing the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, let's start digging up all that erotica published in the 20s and 30s under the table and watch the Google hits come flying it.
As a simple measure at least the total amount of time people spend reading the book has to exceed the amount of time volunteers spend preparing the book, or it's a loss to society.
It's not a loss to society to take time that would be used for watching TV and use it to restore books. It's not a loss to society if we make a work accessible to the right scholar, or if we inspire the right person.
But it is trivial to find a book to work on that will be 50X more popular than the average book DP finishes.
First, looking at the puerile crap (no offense intended) that comes up as done by you, I'm not sure you can find it. The first Slashdotting of DP, someone complained that among the little material we had available was my scan of "From October to Brest-Litovsk", but to this day, I think that book--history written with lightning--was one of the more important works I did, and probably more read too (someone did it for Librivox). In some sense, the single most popular work PG has has to be the 1913 Webster's, which has been borrowed as the basis of just about every online free dictionary, and referred to by people who don't even know that PG exists. And another major point is, what do DPers actually want to work on? Hard material tends to go through slowly, where as junk fiction tends to go through pretty quickly. That has nothing to do with the popularity or worthiness of the text. We could toss out a bunch of the "less worthy" books in exchange for the OED or porn, but I doubt that will increase DP production overall. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.