Scan This Book!
In the article Scan This Book! The New York Times Magazine section takes a look at the book scannng, index and retrieval projects underway to create the universal digital library (needing a mere 50 petabyte hard disks). While it has been the tussle between Google and book publishers that has made headlines, there is more at stake:
The idea is to seed the bookless developing world with easily available texts. Superstar sells copies of books it scans back to the same university libraries it scans from. A university can expand a typical 60,000-volume library into a 1.3 million-volume one overnight. At about 50 cents per digital book acquired, it's a cheap way for a library to increase its collection.
The article continues, looking at the genesis of and issues around Google Print.
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Accuracy
Something I'd wonder about is how clean the scans would be for typos. How trustworthy would the text be in scanned books?
Not much trust there. OCR
Not much trust there.
OCR technologies have been trying for years to develop accurate tehniques. They suck in this very day.
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/6516
I heard those Olive Software people were pretty good...see their online samples yet?
ocr
I don't know about ocr sucking, I was doing scans on text over 13 years ago (as a 13 yo) for my fathers graphic design company with fair accuracy.
I am sure ocr is a lot more advanced now, it's been well over a decade ; )
Also re:typos, I am sure these could be corrected on the fly using today's tech.