jim adcock said:
Not exactly sure what would be pulled by who where.
well, no, jim, you're "not exactly sure", because you do not have the type of vision or clout michael has, unfortunately. which is not a slam, since few people do. certainly none of the "business as usual" people who are running the show now. they're all just a bunch of sheep. their redeeming quality is that most have good intentions. they're not "bad" people; they just like their familiar ways. it's not even clear that michael still has his old chops, but i'm _certainly_ not going to count him out just quite yet... especially as i dearly hope he'll shake their complacency.
But Google is making progress towards "reasonable" 100% human-free OCR translation of the body text of books, not including "the hard parts" such as TOC, Index, etc. and then only on relatively recent pubs such as circa 1900s.
google will eventually have error-free text throughout. which is what i've said all along. it is fairly easy to see. and the 50,000-item p.g. library will merely be "quaint," a testament to an outdated workflow that wouldn't scale.
One could imagine a system that accepted such "good enough" OCRs and put them online immediately, and which allowed real-world readers to propose fixes as they read the book. You could still require PG volunteers to review the proposed fixes before accepting them.
why would you "imagine" such a system, when you could find it described perfectly, with proof-of-concept demos, in the posts on this very listserve going back many years? i mean, seriously. a lack of imagination is _one_ thing... but a willful ignorance of the past is quite another thing. yet even this scenario is mired in the dated viewpoint that correction of o.c.r. is the main problem that needs solving. d.p. has tons of almost-fully-corrected books languishing... -bowerbird