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Originally Posted by gazza
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If Google cannot get it right -- and it hasn't -- what chance for mere mortals?
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Pretty good, thanks. I have family who works at Google, and I know a little bit about their operations (although nothing more that what's publicly available). They don't proof the work. It gets scanned and spot-checked. They save the images and the text. You can do a much better job yourself.
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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.
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Absolutely. Many publishers 'discourage' that concept, but it's certainly true. I've proofed books I've scanned, found typos in the original work, and reported it back to the author. The author in question is aware of what I'm doing (and why) and he has voiced no objections. He has thanked me for letting him know about the typos, and has taken time to explain to me a bit about the publishing process.
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Originally Posted by wayrad
As far as farming the work out to China, I see some problems:
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I don't think farming it out is realistic, but here's my take on the scanning process in general:
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1) ...I love my Opticbook, but it's not particularly heavy duty, and the availability of support and parts is notoriously bad. ...
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I'm using two Kodak 8.1mp cameras. I scan 2 pages in about 7 seconds, counting page turns.
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2) ...then spend the rest of your life proofreading? Remember, scanning is the easiest part.
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Absolutely correct. A lot of this depends on what you're after. I find that the more I love a book, the more time I spend proofing it. With Finereader, 95% of the "errors" are words not in it's dictionary. That leaves 5% error, which can be quite a bit. Many times, I'll give a book a quick proof, make the ebook and mark errors as I read the book.
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3) How do you plan to proofread? ...
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For me, what works best is comparing against the scanned image and having the book next to me in case of a bad scan.
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4) What happens down the road when you find out he missed a page? (yes, it happens. Quite often). Or cut off an edge by mistake?
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Yeah, that does happen, and it's a pain. I usually deal with this when I first process the images, and before I bring it into Finereader. I've had to re-shoot a page or two and it can be cumbersome getting those pages in the right order but it's very doable.
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Originally Posted by wayrad
Ah, I tried that once. Drove me out of my skull. Perhaps I should've tried background music.  |
I'd go out of my mind without the background music!
- Ed