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
--
http://bits.bris.ac.uk/imran