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All of which is utterly fascinating. Some more information. Agreed that scanning in a book is a waste of time. But I work mainly in Australia, the UK and China. In China we have a situation where a young chap has had to return to his aged parents out in the boondocks. (The wrong word as, in fact, it is Tagalog meaning 'wooded place' but it will do.) It is possible for me to ship him a thousand or so books at a time and for him to scan them in for me. My wife insists on getting the books back -- I see no logic in this -- but even then the cost is minimal.
The cost comes in the proofreading. If we use the right scanner and the right software -- and I learn something every time I access this forum -- we should get pretty clean copy because you can mask the pages so the headers and footers and page numbers are not scanned in. Say we get four books a day, 20 a week. That should keep us happy.
I though the only option for OCR was (dammit, the name has skipped my brain for the moment) but now I shall seriously look at ABBYy.
The idea of building an automatic flash page reader appeals tremendously if I can get someone to do it for me. I cannot hold a screwdriver straight. The problem then will be proofreading. If Google cannot get it right -- and it hasn't -- what chance for mere mortals?
Finally (how the man does do on) the law of copyright is perfectly clear that if you buy a book you can copy it for your own use. Publishers lie in their teeth to make you believe otherwise but that is in the Berne and Geneva Convention. That does not mean you can copy it and then put it on one of these Bit torrent thingies. But you can do it for your own use. For certain sure.
Gareth Powell in Sydney were it cannot make up its mind about the weather
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