Hi I want to say I am learning a tremendous amount from this interesting discussion - thanks for you two for having it! On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Aaron Cannon < cannona@fireantproductions.com> wrote:

LOL. So much for "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format."

I suspect that the quality of the public domain books will be roughly the same as the copyrighted texts. As to whether or not they will spend the time and money to improve the quality of their books, I doubt it. If they do, I suspect it would only be for a very few "important" works. The cost would otherwise be prohibitive, unless the improvement could be made via software.

The print-disabled already have services which work on converting books into accessible formats in high quality. One such organization is the National Library Service for the Blind, a division of the Library of Congress. They do so at a cost of about $5,000 per title (if I remember correctly). Archive.org seems to be focusing more on quantity and much less on quality. I think there is a need for both types of efforts. As I said before, one barely usable book is worth more to me than a thousand nicely proofread titles, if the one book is the one I happen to need.

If archive.org tried to cleanup their books more, I suspect that far fewer titles would get added to the collection, and in my view, that trade off would not be worth it.

Aaron

On 5/17/10, Bowerbird@aol.com <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:

...

aaron said:

...

You did not fully understand the announcement, nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing.

yes, i do fully understand it.

i didn't care to talk too much about the in-copyright stuff, because i believed that the less said about that, the better. i can talk about that if you want to delve into it deeper, but remember i do support the overall mission of archive.org...

so, do you want me to talk about that?

first, though, answer me this: do you believe archive.org's o.c.r. of in-copyright material will be significantly better?

i'm using the public-domain material to show the problem, simply because it's all i can see, and conveniently point to. but do you believe in-copyright o.c.r. will be problem-free?

there's a chance that newer books will o.c.r. more cleanly, but if not, do you think archive.org will make corrections? will they bring their e-books up to a standard of _quality?_

i don't think so.

so i, too, stand behind the point which i have been making.

-bowerbird

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