Quote:
Originally Posted by Zetmolm
The fact that you don't know them does not mean it does not happen.
If you know where to go, you can already now download more books than you can read in the rest of your life in just a couple of hours (and that's not just the Gutenberg stuff, but current titles). Scanning a book and correcting the OCR version takes a lot more time than ripping music, but distribution of the result is a lot quicker because of the smaller file sizes. People will re-upload what they found. So I expect it won't take long before all these books are as easy to find as your favorite music.
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Yep. I know at one time, there were tons of ebooks available on various news groups. I understand they have moved to other areas, but if you are interested and are willing to take the risk, they are easy enough to find. For that matter, instructions on how to build your own book scanner using cameras are out on the web.
My understanding is that a group of people will get together and crowd source the OCR and proofing of the books. If you take five different OCR versions of one page and compare them, you get a pretty clean text, so it's actually easier for the various ebook scanning groups to produce a clean copy of a book than it is for a publisher. Really, all you have to do is look at the Guttenburg project to understand how easy it is to scan a book and produce good copy when you have a team of people working on it.