don said:
It's pretty hollow.
not surprising. even the article put it all in the future tense. and h.p. talked about "potential", while amazon merely confirmed.
This book has not yet been processed, but if you preorder we’ll process it faster and notify you when it’s ready.
Right.
it makes perfect sense to me. how else would you prioritize which books should be done first? as for skepticism on the time-frame, how much time do you think it'll take 'em to prep a book? i would guess that it's a matter of mere minutes. (seconds for the scripts to run, and then a minute or two for a human to execute the quality-control.) *** jim said:
bookprep
thanks for running that down, jim. good info. *** gardner said:
What's your point?
"what's my point?" well, it's pretty obvious, i would think, isn't it? if h.p. is correcting the o.c.r., that's a big deal. but if they're just printing the scansets, it's not. so there is an informational asymmetry at work.
If there are pages missing or illegible sections, then it might be better to skip that volume, versus go ahead selling it to folks who are likely to complain or return it.
ok, i see what you meant when you said "proofing"; i consider checks like that to be "quality control"... those problems were common in the first few years of the google scanning, but are fairly rare nowadays.
But if you're lazy, you'd skip that step and let the customer inform you if a given volume is unusable.
well, we differ on terminology again, because i wouldn't call that "lazy", as it's more like a business decision, but i'd think a quick screening for those types of problems would be cost-effective, as opposed to making good on any complaints that your customers would have later on. shipping is gonna be one of your biggest expenses, and shipping a book twice, to make-good, will be expensive... (not to mention a costly infrastructure to field complaints.)
If you get a lot of complaints about a specific volume, you can then go and figure out what exactly is wrong maybe find a fill-in source or what have you.
the "fill-in" source is likely right there in the umichigan stacks.
But why take on that work up front?
again, google and michigan have each separately worked on correcting these problems, so i'd think very few remain. and a quick check by h.p. can eliminate any glitches that do. i'd guess most of google scanning nowadays is clean-up work.
People will pay the same whether you invest up front or not.
but people will only pay once for a book. so if h.p. has to print and ship _two_ books to make that customer happy, they've lost money on that sale. that's why they'd "invest", up-front, to ensure they won't have to face that prospect. at least that's _my_ take on your particular point here... i guess real life will show us whether you're right or i am. -bowerbird