Book People Archive

400 e-Books at Athelstane.co.uk

There are now 400 books posted on the e-Books website
http://www.athelstane.co.uk
Well over 100 books have been posted there during 2006. Recent scanning 
has been done using a Plustek book scanner, except where the book is 
split up into loose sheets, where a Kodak I40 has been used. OCR has 
been done with ABBYY FineReader 8, with the majority of the books 
scanned at 300 dpi into grey-scale PNGs.

The majority of these are nineteenth century or early twentieth century 
books for teenagers, and most of the books have a nautical flavour. Yes, 
they are all spelt in British-English. The format is html, with each 
chapter being posted separately, in order to save on bandwidth usage. 
Some of the authors have 100% coverage of their novels, such as Captain 
Marryat, R.M. Ballantyne, and Talbot Baines Reed. Many others have about 
50 to 80% coverage: these include George Manville Fenn, W.H.G. Kingston, 
Harry Collingwood, Mrs George de Horne Vaizey, Emily Sarah Holt, Thomas 
Mayne Reid, Rev T.P. Wilson, Margaret Murray Robertson, Amy Walton, John 
Conroy Hutcheson, Rev F.W. Farrar, Lewis Hough, James Bowman.

I have recently started a project to upload the scans in PDF form of 
many of the above books to the Internet Archive. The main purpose is to 
clear the path so that people from all over the world can upload their 
scans, and was suggested to me by Brewster Kahle. He calls it a 
Grassroots Book-Scanning enterprise. I am doing a pilot study, with 
twenty-one books in Stage One, and a further fifty in Stage Two. All the 
problems should be ironed out by the time this is complete in a few 
weeks from now. I am working on a manual to advise people wanting to get 
involved. After that a further hundred books will be prepared, put onto 
a DVD, and possibly posted for me directly at Internet Archive. There 
will be many more to follow after that. You can review progress on this 
project by using
http://www.athelstane.co.uk/iarchive.htm

In addition to the PDF I have posted an HTML file for each entire book, 
and a TEXT file that can be used to make an audiobook. The spelling in 
the latter has been converted to the American style (some of the posted 
books have not been done yet). There is also in each book's folder a 
small text file that explains how easy it is to make a good audiobook, 
with a recommendation that people should use TextAloud MP3 available
from www.NextUp.com whence you can also get the highly recommended
voices from Acapela. These are of course once-off purchases, and after
that you can make the audiobooks for free, except for the small cost of 
storing them on CDs. The technology also works for most novels on 
Project Gutenberg. There is a very easy process available within 
TextAloud for splitting the book into chapter files, correctly named, 
and from this creating a set of MP3 files for the book, one for each 
chapter.

Wishing everyone a happy Christmas and New Year,
Nick Hodson, London, England, United Kingdom