Book People Archive

ok, let's make a budget

ok, let's get serious here and make a budget.

people who say they have looked closely inform us there are
10 million unique titles in the 5 libraries google is scanning...

(30 million volumes total, meaning 20 million are duplicates.)

since we need _some_ kind of figure, let's assume these books
average 200-300 pages, so let's call it 250.   i think that's high,
but let's go with it for the time being.   (we'll use _240_ when we
need to do computations involving time, since it divides by 60.)

according to kelly's article, chinese scanners have now achieved
a rate of $.10/page, while americans (who _projected_ a rate of
ten-cents-a-page) have actually obtained a $.30/page rate so far.

presumably because the chinese have scanned a million books,
they've streamlined their operations, and we could obtain rates
that are similar.   (or close, labor costs taken into consideration.)

and if all else fails, and we can't get our efficiency to their level,
we _could_ always subcontract our scanning to the chinese, right?

so let's assume the $.10/page rate.   that means a 250-page book
is gonna cost $25 to scan.   which means 10 million books will cost
a total of $250 million.   somebody please tell me if my math is off...

$250 million dollars.   to scan every unique title in 5 of the biggest
and best university libraries in the world.   sounds pretty cheap, not?

i mean, seriously.   we hear numbers like $100 _billion_ for the war
in iraq.   and who knows how much more is being spent on the war
on _terror_, with its global arena?   exxon made $10 _billion_ just
_last_fiscal_quarter_, if i remember my recent headlines correctly,
and their recently-retired chairman got a nestegg of $400 million.
(that's right.   this one guy could pay for our digitization by himself,
out of his retirement fund, and _still_ have $150 million "left over".)

i don't know how much is spent every single _day_ on the iraq war,
but it wouldn't surprise me if it was $250 million, or at least half that.

and i would be shocked if the _weekly_ cost was under $250 million.

but, for the sake of argument, let's pretend that the _monthly_ cost
of the war in iraq is $250 million.

now let's pretend that we "called off that war" for just one single month,
and took that $250 million and digitized those 10 million books instead.

ok, now let's stop pretending, and _actually_do_it_.

i'm serious, let's just call a "time-out", and explain to all fighting parties
in iraq that we are "going to do this scanning thing instead this month".

we can even tell them that we'll give 'em copies of all of these scans,
as a little "peace offering", to say "thanks for not fighting last month".

and maybe, if they agree, we can extend the peace treaty for _another_
month, and take _that_ $250 million, and scan all of their islamic books,
and give copies of _those_ scans to all the factions fighting that iraq war.

i mean, really, what are we getting out of a month of fighting that war?
what are we getting for our $250 million?   just a bunch of dead bodies.

yep, i think it would be a whole lot smarter to spend those $250 million
digitizing the global cyberlibrary instead.   that would be an _investment_,
an investment in the future of the world, one that we _know_ will pay off...

-bowerbird

p.s.   actually, when i did the fact-checking on what i'd written from memory,
i discovered that the actual figures are that americans can scan a book for $30
(which i presume works out to roughly $.10/page), while the chinese can do it
for $10, which is more like $.04/page.   so if we did subcontract to the
chinese, 10 million titles would cost $100 million.   less if they gave us
a quantity discount.  i won't go back and change all my figures, because
i think the point remains clear.  by any stretch of the imagination, this is
a tremendous bargain.