i said:

go try reading my post again, and see if you get it that time.

i've been informed the point was missed a second time, so i'm happy to explain it, for anyone else who missed it. if -- and as i've made clear, i don't know if it's the case, and i actually _doubt_ it, but _if_ -- h.p. will "clean up" the o.c.r. and then print the books from that clean-up, then that would likely mean "the beginning of the end" of the way we typically now do digitizations of these books. currently, people o.c.r. the scanset; the o.c.r. results are typically fairly bad, and time is spent on cleaning them... however, if h.p. cleaned the o.c.r. first, and then printed out the paperbacks -- on clean pages, with digital type -- the o.c.r. from such paperbacks would be extremely clean. so, if you bought such a paperback, and did a scan of it, the o.c.r. that you got from it would be extremely clean... you would find that "cleaning" that already-very-clean o.c.r. would go very quickly, especially compared to the old way... so it would be "the beginning of the end" of that old way. now, as most people (including me) have said, it's probably unlikely that h.p. will take on the work of correcting the o.c.r.; it'd be much easier for them to just clean and print the scans. (and, since the end-target is paper anyway, that would be ok.) so we are probably _not_ seeing "the beginning of the end" of the "old" way of doing digitizations -- from the scansets. what i was saying had absolutely nothing to do with e-books versus printed books, or the speed of delivery of p-books, or the number of books available from amazon versus p.g., or anything else other than exactly what i have explained here. (although i'm glad whenever anyone brings up the vital issue of the digital divide, even if it is completely off-topic, since we spend too little time thinking about that important topic.) if anyone has any more questions about what i'm saying here, i would be happy to answer them. -bowerbird