Quote:
Originally Posted by SleepyBob
Twenty years from now, not being able to locate a copy of an ebook will be a thing of the past, aside from an ever-shrinking pool of "old" books.
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We are talking about many millions of old books not available as eBooks. And unless scanning gets far better, it is still going to require a lot of human proofreading before a book can become a decent eBook. And consider that cutting scan errors in half -- quite a difficult artificial intelligence feat -- would by no means reduce the cost of proofreading by half. If anything, you have to concentrate harder when there is less to find.
So it is still going to be the case that Project Gutenberg gets its proofreading for free (see
www.pgdp.net), giving neglected public domain books a big cost advantage, when it comes to digitization, over neglected still-under-copyright books.
Now, it may be that in twenty years, you won't be interested in much of anything more than thirty years old. I don't know. But if I live that long, I expect to still be pretty much of a twentieth century guy.
Given this, if somebody in Washington wants to champion shorter copyright, unless he or she is utterly irresponsible in other areas, they have my vote.