On Fri, 26 Dec 2003, Ray Saintonge wrote:
From a Wikisource perspective this is a useful idea, but buying these books should not be a central organization function. It should be the contributors that do this since they are the one who will keep the books after they've been scanned.
As I said in one my previous messages, if you're willing to destroy the book in the process you can scan it with the minimum of work and time by using a high-speed destructive scanner.
Scanning by hand means you don't need to destroy the book, but it involves a lot of work and you can only scan at a maximum speed of about 350 pages/hour.
Cost may not be the problem with this proposal. Scanning and proofreading the OCR results is a long and tedious job that may not suit everybody's temperament.
Have you seen www.pgdp.net, it's a PG project that makes proofreading easier by distributing the process across many people.
Imran