On Tue, 30 May 2006 Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
yahoo has enough money to generate press any time they want.
but you have to take that money out of your pocket to do it...
so the answer is that they haven't wanted it enough.
indeed, the only contribution to o.c.a. that i've seen acknowledged is a $5-million one from microsoft. which is pretty much peanuts, coming from a company as rich as microsoft, and we all know it...
i get the impression everyone at o.c.a. -- except maybe brewster -- is trying to go the cheap route. might work that way, or might not, but o.c.a. certainly ain't gonna get much publicity without buyin' it.
-bowerbird
Actually, from what Brewster told us, and I think you were there, he really does want to take the cheap route, and would prefer to do mostly only raw scans if he could get away with it, much as it appears the Gallica collection does. I had some of my Parisienes take a look at it, and they told the that Gallica got complaints, many of them, for being so hard to use, and not providing much of an actual full text eLibrary, even one such as Google's separated out for searching, then different files for viewing. No one seems to thinks Gallica is really an eBook collection, raw scans seems to be most of what is available, and even those are a set of low-res versions that is not really suitable for OCRing. I must admit that I am relying on my friends here, as my Francias is not really good enough to know if I didn't miss something that would have provided better results on their site. Michael