Book People Archive

an open letter to the google book scanning people

google book scanning people-

i am a long-time advocate of electronic-books.
i've researched, prototyped, and programmed 'em.

you've probably read me on the e-book listserves,
so you know i've been a staunch defender of you...

i know you're busy, so i'll get right to the point.

i'd like to have all of your pre-1923 image-scans.

those books are public-domain, and i would like to
make them available to the public, in readable form.

the project gutenberg people have offered to host
all of the scans, and i've written code to display 'em.

in addition, i intend to o.c.r. the scans and clean up
the digital text to a _very_high_ standard of accuracy,
using a wide variety of tricks i have been researching.
i will be happy to share back this clean text with you.
(not that i doubt the wizardry of your labs to clean it.)

i've also done a lot of work on a "plain-text" formatting
system, which i call "z.m.l.", for zen markup language --
("it's two generations more advanced than x.m.l.")      :+)
-- which allows this clean text to be represented with
the high-quality typography traditional in paper-books.

i could scrape these scans one at a time from your site,
and will do that if i have to, but it would be much easier
if you'd just hand them over nicely to me in bulk.        :+)

i imagine that you can copy them from your machines
to project gutenberg's machines.   i also imagine that
such a generous act will net you _tons_ of supporters
in your legal wranglings over your important project...

yes, i realize that this is a _massive_ request.
but i believe you're smart enough to say "yes".

if you have any questions, you can ask me directly or 
post to the "bookpeople" listserve, where i have sent
a copy of this open-letter.   thank you for your time...

-bowerbird intelligentleman