don said:
PG could be keeping itself busy forever digitizing some order of magnitude more ebooks than it does today and still not be catching up.
true.
The list is to describe the scope of what all would need to scale up if PG were to take the true magnitude of the job seriously.
ok. but...
Take a ridiculously low number - say a rate of 10 times more books than are being added now.
so when you say "ridiculously low", you mean that, even at that rate, p.g. would still fall behind badly. but even that kind of jump would be very hard to attain -- in my judgment -- if you were to try to leverage the current pg/dp infrastructure, because it is deeply resistant to _any_ change... so you'd need to start anew. and even that would be difficult to accomplish, if you were to ask me... we see that even wikipedia, an unqualified success, is having trouble maintaining its own participation, since people are more interested in updating their facebook page these days than collaborating online. *** but let's say that you _could_ create "p.g. times ten". that means you'd put up about 25,000 books a year. in 4 years, you'd have 100,000. in 8 years, 200,000. people already have reasonable access to 2 million public-domain books. just the scan-sets, true, but that seems to be all that the average person needs... i argued every step of the way that digital text was superior in just about almost every way to scans... but now that we have these millions of scan-sets, we have to ask if the cost of cleaning the text for a relatively small percentage is worth the benefit. given the current output of d.p., which seems to be polarized, with "campfire girls go horse riding" at one end and "dante's divine comedy" the other, i'd say nobody will be happy with your percentage. if a person _does_ want digitized text nowadays, they want it for a _particular_ book, not a library that's so small and idiosyncratic that the odds are fairly slim that it even contains that specific book. back in 1992, and even in 2002, p.g. made sense. in 2012, a world where we are awash in page-scans, i think you would need to re-think the justification... not just a workflow, but the "why are we doing this?" if you would whip up volunteers, i think it'd be great, because i think there is huge value in digitized text... but that's my personal opinion, and it also recognizes that synergy only kicks in if _all_ our text is digitized. and if your project isn't ever gonna make that happen... *** so i'd say you'd need to be upfront and honest with potential volunteers, about the true value of the deal, to weigh the cost-benefit ratio of their contributions. -bowerbird