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Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward
I see you point about O.P. books reverting. I still this the idea is usable, just with a different twist. This seems like a job for for various writer's associations (Science Fiction Writer's Association, Mystery Writer's Guild, ect.) One of their chartered purposes is to help improve the economic lot of writers, and getting them money for books that otherwise would earn no money for anybody would be a Good Thing. You could also include such writers who own their own e-book rights and want to minimize their internet overhead (voluntarily, of course!) It would also be good for the customers (readers) as well.
I just trying to be part of the answer, instead of part of the problem.
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I think the idea has considerable merit. It will just be a bit more complicated than we might hope to actually do it.
One sticking point is the question of proofreading. If I were a publisher, I might well be pleased if someone was willing to scan a hardcopy of something for which an electronic copy didn't exist, and provide me with OCR output of the scans. But I wouldn't assume their proofreading was sufficient: I'd have people who did it for a living proof the copy against a hardcopy of the original publication. That would add to my costs, but I'd consider it necessary. (I've done a fair bit of OCR. It never gets it exactly right, and proofreading and correction is a must.)
Consider the work HarryT has been putting in, proofreading his copies of Charles Dickens originally sourced from Project Gutenberg. Some of the etexts are riddled with errors. PG has gotten much better since Distributed Proofreaders has been providing the corrected source texts. They do, in general, a very good job. But there's a lot of stuff on PG from before DP took over that leaves a bit to be desired.
So it would be from something like this.
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Dennis