Fred Bauder wrote:
I could do this as I am always searching for books. This can cost a lot or a little, luck has a lot to do with it. Make a list and I can start looking then email likely purchases to Jimbo.
One we could probably use and would be worth paying a bit for would be the Cambridge History of English and American Literature. It is up on Bartelsby at
A whole 14 vol. set of the 1931 reprint of the 1917 edition of the English Literature portion recently sold on eBay for $41.00!
A 15 vol. 1967 set is currently being offered with a $60.00 opening bid, but no takers. I would not hesitate to bid that on the older version.
Most of the really good public domain reference books are in the better old libraries such as Yale and Oxford and can be viewed there and an evaluation made.
Fred
Luck is only part of it. You also need a nose for bargains, and sometimes a willingness to take risks. When the best opportunities present themselves there is no time to thoroughly check things out at a major library. Two of my recent purchases John Howard Brown's 1897 "Cyclopædia of American Biographies" in 7 volumes for $25.00, and William Shaw's 2 volume1905 "Knights of England" (autographed) for $27.00. The 1976 and 2000 reprints normally sell for about $100.00 when you can find one.
From: Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] what to do with the money?
Imran Ghory wrote:
Something else we could do is use the money to obtain public domain books (e.g. biographical encyclopedias) that can be scanned/ocred and used for creating basic articles in areas which wikipedia currently lacks coverage.
What would something like that cost, anyway? My guess is that if someone wanted to do this, the cost would be close to zero anyway, am I wrong?
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. I would be surprised if Wikimedia had any intent to start a rare and old book library.
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.
Ec