Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
Thousands, if not more will do this. They already do it all the time with Guttenberg texts. They do it here and they format those works with loving care. You see, as many of the industry pundits have pointed out, the future isn't in the product, it's in the context. It's in the niche and the community developed around that niche. So, will we see crowdsourced editing? Of course we will. Will we see digital dust jackets produced for other writers for no fee - yep, of course we will. I'm already doing it.
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But we won't see as much of it as we would if editing public domain texts paid.
I have, on my hard drive, scans (bitonal for text, jpg for images) of:
- 10 volume Berle's Self Culture (a set of books like the "junior classics")
- 7 volume History of Freemasonry
- 8 volume History of the Christian Church
- TW Rolleston's "Myths & Legends of the Celtic Race"
- HG Wells' "The Outline of History"
- English Lyrical Poetry from its Origins to the Present Time (when "present time" was 1912)
- Warner Library vol 27: Book of Songs & Lyrics
None of which Gutenberg has. I'd love them to be widely available. I'd love to convert them to usable ebooks, instead of their current state of image-based PDFs.
I love--L.O.V.E.
love--doc conversion work. I spend hours throwing docs into Finereader, correcting the OCR errors, and outputting them into useful formats. Over the last couple of weeks, I converted three ancient Star Trek zines to readable formats. (30-year-old 3rd generation photocopies of mimeographed pages. It probably would've been faster to just retype them, but then I'd lose the ability to make searchable PDFs w/the original images.)
Those, I can't share with anyone because of copyright concerns. But this collection of public domain works, I could share. I can't even email them to anyone; my dialup connection means they're pretty much stuck on my computer. While I have high-speed at work, they block all the major filesharing pages.
I don't have time to convert them. I convert the content that interests me directly, or that someone has specifically asked for; I can't afford to spend 6 hours a day converting PD texts for random strangers at Gutenberg.
So instead of correcting OCR errors in documents, and reformatting the paragraphs so they work as ebooks, I spend my 9-5 hours scanning closing binders (to PDF), and renaming them to "Tab 01 Terms and Conditions of Sale; Tab 02 Amendment to Terms and Conditions," and calling clients on the phone and explaining that they cannot have "searchable tiffs" no matter what the last guy they talked to said.
I'd much prefer to be reformatting scanned texts. But without being paid for it, it remains a side hobby, and the documents that are directly useful or interesting to me & my friends come way ahead of documents useful to the public at large.
I format ebooks into PDFs that work on my Sony Reader; I can't do Mobi at all, and am lost with LRF formatting. Learning the new programs takes time, and that's a limited resource. (How did I learn to make PDFs? I got paid for it; I worked for 4 years in a scan-OCR-PDF production company.)
Your idea that "people will volunteer their work" is correct... to a degree. I volunteer bits of doc editing/conversion work here & there; sometimes to friends, sometimes to total strangers. (I've taken to downloading free PDFs, adding tags & bookmarks, and sending them back to the authors.) But if I were paid to correct OCR errors and convert scanned pages to ebooks, I'd happily do it 40 hours a week.
There's a lot of writers in that spot, too. Writers who will indeed write a novel & release it for free online... but who could be writing the next Lord of the Rings, the next Stranger in a Strange Land, the next Watership Down... if they could afford to stop teaching high school and write full-time.