alex said:

People at the archive seem vaguely interested,

i think you probably mean to say they feigned interest.

but not as much as I'd have hoped.

which is exactly what i predicted the reaction would be.

Basically, it's "my project" to manage and "sell" to the upper folx.

well, that all by itself says that you're a volunteer... if you were a paid employee, they wouldn't let you "waste" time on such a "frivolous" venture as this...

I suppose we'll see where that goes.

which i take it is your code for "it ain't goin' nowhere"... and how could it? if the middle-management people won't even touch it, do you really think you could sell it to "the upper folx"? yeah, good luck with that... especially since this attitude _began_ at the very top... no, brewster isn't stupid, like those mid-level people. it's fairly rare to be stupid and yet get as rich as he is, unless you become a right-wing-radio-talk-show-host. but he's also a practical guy, which does sync with "rich". so i know exactly how and why (and even _when_) he came to his current position on the (lack of) value of digital text. in 2003, when michael hart celebrated p.g. e-text #10000, he did that in san francisco, at the internet archive offices... i went, to join in, and saw their newly-launched operations. one of the things they demonstrated was print-on-demand, the machine they were driving around in their "library van"... i took a look at some of the books they were printing, and soon spotted some errors. i remember one in particular... they had inadvertently dropped a blank page from a book -- because the o.c.r. had recognized no text there, d'uh -- but that meant that the recto/verso ordering got thrown off, and even-numbered pages were suddenly on the right side. that's never a good sign if you're trying to "clone" a p-book. when i brought this up, i could see that it was the straw that broke the camel's back. brewster related how difficult it was, in time and energy, to turn o.c.r. into a finished print pocket, and he bemoaned his ever-growing impression that it would make book-scanning a task that was impossibly expensive... so later on, when he talked about being favorably impressed with a "book-flipper" demonstration at the british museum -- a technology that utilized _pagescans_, not digital text -- i got the very strong feeling he'd choose that route instead... at the #10000 celebration, and several times since, people tried to impress on brewster the importance of digital text, in terms of its flexibility and its small resource foot-print. heck, sometimes _one_ pagescan requires more space than the _entire_ book uses if you store it as digital text instead. plus you can reflow it, and search it, and edit it, and so on. but he'd been scarred by those early experiences of people (who, to tell you the truth, were simply out of their league, and thus incompetent in terms of doing the job correctly) to work efficiently with digital text. plus, brewster lives in a cocoon where disk-space and bandwidth are _unlimited_, so a small resource foot-print is largely meaningless to him. what all of this means is that the basic archive.org approach -- utilizing pagescans in a "book-flipper" viewer-program -- was set rather early on, and has determined their world-view. thus, when the hard cold reality of mobile machines which are severely resource-constrained hit the internet archive, they were unprepared for the winter, and got snowed in... their focus on the pagescans does them no good right now. but they're incapable of shifting their focus to another place. all of this is to say, alex, that i don't think you're gonna have very much luck getting anyone at archive.org to place much value -- if any at all -- on the accuracy of their digital text. as long as it's "good enough for search purposes", it's fine... (i put that phrase in quotes because it seems stupid to me, probably because i expect computer-search to be accurate; but evidently some people think that 92% is "good enough".) now, alex, that's from a more-or-less "objective" standpoint. however, when i add in the fact that i have been _abused_by_ those mid-level people over at internet archive, i can tell you that i have absolutely zero interest in doing _any_ work that might benefit them, no matter how indirect that benefit is... those people aren't going to give me full credit for what i do. heck, they aren't even gonna share _any_ credit they receive! on the contrary, they'll do everything they can to make sure that i don't get _any_ credit, no matter how much work i do... i _love_ the internet archive in general. but those mid-level people there were assholes to me, they were total assholes... so, um, no, alex, i'm not interested in doing anything with you that would be housed at, or based within, the internet archive. i'm sorry 'bout that, but i trust you understand my explanation. i will be setting up a demonstration of an online proofing site, one geared toward taking a book from o.c.r. to e-book output, in the fashion that i just laid out in my recent series of lessons. my site will use content from the internet.archive, or course, and other sites as well, but it will be completely independent. if you'd like to work with me on my site, alex, that'd be fine... i'm not _asking_ for help from anyone, and i won't _need_ it, but i have no reason to turn anyone down who wants to help. even if they're from the internet archive... ;+) -bowerbird