is this the beginning of the end?

is this the beginning of the end?
http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/10/hp_amazon_team_on_rare_book_reprint... hewlett-packard is teaming with amazon.com to turn the scansets of the public-domain books from the university of michigan into paperbacks. hp will clean up the scansets, and print them, and amazon will sell those puppies, and split the cash with hp and u.m. it's ironic, because most of the u.m. scansets were done by google... and now amazon will sell them... i am assuming that hp won't just print the scans, but will actually clean up the o.c.r. and print that. if i'm right about that... then, relevant to the point here on this listserve, is this observation: if hp cleans up all the scansets, and prints them nicely to an inexpensive paperback, why should anyone here bother doing a digitization? instead, just buy the paperback, and scan that thing. with clean pages and clear digital printing, the o.c.r. will likely be near-perfect, so clean-up would be easy. now, of course, if hp is merely going to print the scans, then we'd be back in the same boat. but -- otherwise -- is this the beginning of the end? -bowerbird

Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
now, of course, if hp is merely going to print the scans,
There is no doubt in my mind that this is exactly what they will do. Printing the scans is easy, preserves artwork, halftones, colour, oddball typography, initials and other stuff. The final result will be no worse than a good quality photocopy. My bet is that they won't even proof the stuff, but just rely on the end user complaining if there is something wrong. Expect them, of course, to insert a spurious new copyright notice. They will have de-speckled the images, tweaked the aspect ratio and de-skewed them a bit, so they will no doubt believe they deserve a new copyright, and claiming copyright where one's not entitled never causes any harm anyhow. ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan <gbuchana@teksavvy.com> Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today.

is this the beginning of the end?
LOL - Well maybe - but certainly NOT for the reason posited! The HP side of the effort is called "Bookprep" and can be found here: http://www.bookprep.com You can read the books free online, and you can zoom in by clicking CTRL-+ where you can find out if you had doubted it earlier that indeed they apparently ARE "only" doing page images no OCR and apparently pretty bad page images to boot. Don't pick one of their recommended example books (which are unrepresentatively good) but instead do a "search function" instead so that you see what their effort is really like. For example I did a search on "Mark Twain" which ought be a turkey shoot, but see what you find if you try it!
participants (3)
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Bowerbird@aol.com
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Gardner Buchanan
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James Adcock