Scanning Books
2002-11-19 16:40:51+00 by
Dan Lyke
2 comments
Debra collects old books. Some of these old books I'd love to read, but collecting them and maintaining them costs money and time spent looking. The money would probably be better donated to Debra![[Wiki]](/adbanners/lookingglass.png)
to do her own looking, if I could find a way to share her books. So I'm interested in anyone who's done scanning of books. I'm thinking a decent digital camera and a copy stand and maybe there's room to start building an antiquarian library for the ones out of copyright, and maybe for the ones that might be in copyright I can see how hard it really is to track down copyright holders.
[ related topics:
Books Photography Copyright/Trademark
]
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#Comment made: 2002-11-19 17:47:01+00 by:
td
[edit history]
Think about supporting one of the people that are already chasing this problem. The most obvious is Brewster Kahle, who runs the Internet Archive http://www.archive.org and its Bookmobile http://archive.org/texts/bookmobile.php
Brewster's Bookmobile is a traveling demand publishing setup. They have a used minivan with a nice duplex HP printer, a second color printer for doing covers, a few laptops, a satellite internet connection on the roof and a low-volume Perfect binding rig. They put the whole thing together for $15K. They make OK copies of public domain books for about a dollar a copy. (And they mostly concentrate on giving books away to needy students. Brewster is full of great stories about overcoming the skepicism of underprivileged kids who never thought a book could make a difference to them because they can't afford to buy them and their school & public libraries are NFG.)
Another Internet Archive project is Distributed Proofreaders http://texts01.archive.org/dp Proofreading OCR output is one of the hard parts of making public domain texts available and useful. Distributed Proofreaders organizes this work and parcels it out to volunteers. Sign up to do a page a day!
Also, John Warnock (CG pioneer and Adobe founder) is an old-book collector and has a non-profitish company called Octavo that is devoted to making ultra-high quality scans of rare books. They've recently finished doing Yale University's Gutenberg Bible, and it's gorgeous. Their web site is http://www.octavo.com
#Comment made: 2002-11-19 19:12:06+00 by:
alecmarlow
dan u need to take me out and shoot me, i am gettin very bored here...