The Great Library of Amazonia (120,000 fully searchable texts and counting at Amazon.com)

wired ^ | nov 2003? | By Gary Wolf

[dennisw]

120,000 fully searchable texts and counting

[Physicist]

Ping.

[Jeff Head]

Interesting. I use Lightning Source, the print on demand company that was mentioned in the article, to print my novels and distribute them and the eBook versions of them. They are a very credible and very efficient company for distribution into Ingram.

As far as the online search of printed books is concerned, once it becomes available I'll have to try it with my Dragon's Fury Series, which sells, among other places, on Amazon.

[Physicist]

3 Ways to Scan a Library by Dustin Goot

There's a fourth way to digitize texts: type them in by hand. The first few volumes of Notes and Queries that were produced by Distributed Proofreaders for Project Gutenberg were too badly deteriorated for OCR, so they had to be typed in. They were tough, but it went surprisingly quickly. Many hands make light work.

[Quilla]

I've read many books online from the source below, many of which appeared to have been typed by hand. Text from Project Gutenberg is linked numerous times.

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/

[Jeff Head]

Check my last. It is available and they are looking for publishers to sign up their titles.

I just applied my Alpha Connections publishing name to get in the program with all of my Dragon's Fury Series. it's a great tool and will got the books much more exposure on any relevant term that buyers put in for search.

Matt and others, check this out.

[Physicist]

And even then, the project concentrates on digitizing those that are out of copyright. Libraries and nonprofits don't have much leverage with publishers, and since the goal is fully readable online text, there is no system to protect the interests of copyright holders. As a result, many of the titles being digitized by the Million Book Project are government documents, old texts, and books from India and China, where copyright laws are less stringent.

The author misses the point, here. Efforts like Project Gutenberg and the Million Book Project don't "settle for" books that are out of print and free of copyright. For one thing, it is not vitally important to provide access to things people can already buy. For another thing, the goal of those projects is not simply access, but preservation. The books that are in print are not in immediate danger of being lost forever, but most books that are out of print are in such danger. It is estimated that for every pre-1923 (i.e., public domain) book that remains in print, 10,000 are out of print. Almost none of these will ever be reprinted, and old copies of these works are getting ever more scarce. Every day, the last remaining copies of some number of books are lost forever. Books under copyright can wait.

[steve-b]

It is estimated that for every pre-1923 (i.e., public domain) book that remains in print, 10,000 are out of print. Almost none of these will ever be reprinted, and old copies of these works are getting ever more scarce. Every day, the last remaining copies of some number of books are lost forever. Books under copyright can wait.

The last sentence is no longer true under the current regime of extending copyrights by twenty years every other decade.

[Physicist]

Point taken. I should have said, "books in print can wait", followed by "books not in print but still under copyright must wait". It is true that many of those texts will die by law.

I advocate changing the law so that in order to preserve copyright, a book must be offered for sale to the public (conspicuously, and at a reasonable price). If any book should be out of print for more than 20 years, it becomes public domain.

[Colorado Doug]

Through centuries of aggressive acquisition, the librarians of Alexandria, Egypt, collected hundreds of thousands of texts. None survives.

This destruction, brought to you by the religion of peace. I guess all of that history muddied the waters when reading the koran.

[steve-b]

Certainly, some sort of reform is needed to cover the "orphan" publication problem. At a minimum, format conversion must be clearly recognized as fair use (so that anyone in possession of a copy of a work under copyright can preserve it in digital form and continue to update it as required by the extant forms of digital media technology) and copyright holders should be required to post current contact information at reasonable intervals (so that only a specific veto by the copyright holder, not mere inability to find him half a century later, takes a work out of circulation).

[Doctor Stochastic]

Are you referring to Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria's buring of the library?

[freedomcrusader]

The Burning of the Library of Alexandria

by Preston Chesser

The loss of the ancient world's single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages. But how and why it was lost is still a mystery. The mystery exists not for lack of suspects but from an excess of them.

More...

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Doctor Stochastic]

More likely the library just attrited away due to patrons failing to return overdue papyri.

[Colorado Doug]

Are you referring to Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria's buring of the library?

I am thinking more like Caliph Omar's burning of the library. Theophilus should perhaps get a little credit for about ten percent of the destruction at another time.

[Colorado Doug]

Caliph Omar = Caliph Omar ibn Al-Khattab

[Colorado Doug]

More likely the library just attrited away due to patrons failing to return overdue papyri.

LOL!!

[Travis McGee]

Amazon has mine! There's a link to the Amazon page on the website.

[zeugma]

I'd concur that books should be available for sale to remain under copyright. After a given period of being out of print, works should automatically lapse into the Public Domain as an abandoned work. It would help greatly if, in order to maintain copyright, that some scheme similar to Lessig's proposal of requiring some token payment at defined intervals be required to maintain copyright for the statutory maximum be made. Neither of these proposals are going to fly. The only change we'll ever see in copyright law is that the length of time a work remains out of the Public Domain will increase by 20 years every 20 years.