Quote:
Originally Posted by Giggleton
I must say that your admission of not being able to read digitized versions of the books that you admire is an exemplary example of the inadequacy of the current library system.
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I was thinking of the many prize-winning books that are not available anywhere except in paper. Examples of personal interest would be Conrad Richter's Pulitizer and National Book Award winning novels. Google almost surely has scanned copies in their server farms, but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has done the tedious job of fixing the OCR errors and preparing for digital publication.
On January 1, 2019, Richter's works pass into the Canadian public domain. Baring changes in law, I expect that they will be available, within a year or two after that, to Canadians, in the Patricia Clark Memorial Library, and to you and I when visiting the great Dominion to our north.
Are you seriously saying that public libraries should have digitizing such out-of-fashion literature as part of their mission?
P.S. As maxiart implies, English is ahead of most (all?) other languages when it come to digitizing. So we are going to need traditional paper-book libraries for a long, long, time.