“We’ve achieved mass digitization at 10¢ a page, on average about $30 a book. That includes high-resolution color imaging, optical character recognition, and compression and packaging into PDFs. And all of it open, meaning you can download and use these books in bulk. Take a million-book library, which is larger than most libraries in the world. What would it cost to make a million-book library online? At 10¢ a page, 300 pages in a book, it would price out at about $30 million, costs that could be spread out over many institutions. If the library market in the United States is about $12 billion a year, $3 billion to $4 billion of which goes to publishers’ products, $30 million is about one percent of one year’s budget. We can do this.” – Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, in a Library Journal interview spanning many topics.
The TeleRead take: Lots of luck to Brewster in realizing his goals. Along the way, I hope he’ll budget sufficient money for conversion efforts to allow material to appear in popular formats beyond PDFs, especially the IDPF‘s new epubs standard. I just downloaded a PDF of Men of Wealth: The Story of Twelve Significant Fortunes from the Renaissance to the Present Day and it came in at 30 megabytes. I didn’t see a .txt option. If need be, some versions of books should be available without images. Yet another issue is how well the books will display on handhelds, the least expensive way to be able to kick back on the sofa and enjoy a book as opposed to parking yourself in front of a desktop.
Related: A First Monday paper by Paul Duguid, which, as summed up by if:book’s Ben Vershbow, “shows in detail how Google’s ambition to organizing the world’s books and making them universally accessible and useful (to slightly adapt Google’s mission statement) is being carried out in a hasty, slipshod manner, leading to a serious deficit in quality in what could eventually become, for better or worse, the world’s library.”
And speaking of amenities—or necessities: Check out Dan Viesel’s thoughts on indexing. Interesting issues arise. Do you think that word-searching in e-books makes indexes obsolete? Well, not necessarily. To use a hasty, hypothetical example, a book might mention apples and oranges and pineapples but lack an all-inclusive term, like “fruit.”
"@Kitty Axelson-Berry:
I am not quite sure how amazon is destroying my quality of life. When it comes to entertainment and enjoying life, if I can ..."
"I just sent emails to the following publishers asking why there is a dearth of Canadian works available in electronic format:
Harper Collins: feedback2@harpercollins.com
Random House: webquestions@randomhouse.com
Penguin: ..."
“We’ve achieved mass digitization at 10¢ a page, on average about $30 a book. That includes high-resolution color imaging, optical character recognition, and compression and packaging into PDFs. And all of it open, meaning you can download and use these books in bulk. Take a million-book library, which is larger than most libraries in the world. What would it cost to make a million-book library online? At 10¢ a page, 300 pages in a book, it would price out at about $30 million, costs that could be spread out over many institutions. If the library market in the United States is about $12 billion a year, $3 billion to $4 billion of which goes to publishers’ products, $30 million is about one percent of one year’s budget. We can do this.” – Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, in a Library Journal interview spanning many topics.
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