Bowerbird said: "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format." I stand by my initial assessment. You did not fully understand the announcement, nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing. From the release: "We'll offer current novels, educational books, anything. If somebody then donates a book to the archive, we can digitize it and add it to the collection," he [brewster kahle] said. So, if all those e-books are available as text, tell me where I might find (to pick a random book) At the carnival by Leslie Valdes, published in 2005? As far as I can tell, it's only available in the DAISY format from archive.org. Aaron On 5/16/10, Bowerbird@aol.com <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:

aaron said:

...

I just love it when people criticize something without fully understanding it first.

um, aaron, just exactly what is it that you think i fail to "fully understand"?

because i do fully understand that a book with poor o.c.r. is better than no book with no o.c.r. there's no question about that.

but that's not what archive.org's press release was all about.

they were trumpeting the release of e-books in the daisy format, for the blind and dyslexic.

_all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format.

the reason this press release is cynical is that the o.c.r. can be awful, as i've been showing, meaning the text is bad and the daisy is bad.

a sighted reader can refer to the page-scan if a passage is unclear, and resolve the issue.

but a blind reader has no such recourse...

so, if anyone here doesn't "fully understand" the issue, i'm afraid it is you, aaron, not me.

-bowerbird