Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Okay, given. But it's not like it's rocket science. Scanning and OCR-checking can be given to interns, farmed out to foreign services (who only have to distinguish an incorrect letter from the original text, whether or not they know what it means), or done by summer help.
Such a job needs 3 people: One to scan; One to do the OCR and checking; and one to check behind them. I think most publishers can handle the cost of 3 interns producing from the backlist as many as they can manage.
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And indeed, they do farm it out. It turns out, however, that getting clean copy is more difficult than it might seem. Arnold Bailey (the web-guy who takes care of these things for Baen) has been through a bunch of different contractors/services/etc. for scanning/OCR/checking. I think he has some reliable choices now, but I seem to recall that it took a bunch of tries to results good enough for publication.
It certainly isn't impossible, but neither is it so cheap and easy as you make it sound. Unless, of course, you don't mind having one or more OCR errors per page.
If you want to learn more than you knew there was to learn about OCR and OCR errors, go hang out on the Distributed Proofreaders fora.
Xenophon