Quote:
Originally Posted by kurochka
I could scale the effort/quality to the need and price expectations. Right now without any additional investment, I can make a near perfect scan + nonproofread OCR layer of a 1,000 pages book in about two-three days if I have sufficient motivation. And the original book is kept unharmed in any way. Typically, my Fine Reader 8 gives pretty good OCR results from my scans even without human proofreading.
The time issue comes in in the manual proofreading, which is so important in dictionaries. Plus the dictionaries can have multiple languages and sometimes Ancient Greek! And finally, I read the dictionaries when I proofread them. That's where the fun is for me.
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I can take that 1,000 page book and create a good-to-high quality facsimile reprint of it (with a single copy printed) for less than $350 dollars in about 2 weeks. Subsequent copies would cost less than $20 even if printed one at a time. (All through a third-party company--none of the work being done by myself.)
With competition like that (even if they do not provide the extra mile services) I think you might be hard pressed to charge enough for your work to really make it worth your while.
You have nothing to lose by trying though. Maybe make a website, put some ads on Google Adwords, market yourself on these forums a bit, and see if any fish bite.
