Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!husc6!think!ames!oliveb!pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge
From: sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Summary: Books and indexes also exist in electronic form
Message-ID: <557@metapsy.UUCP>
Date: 31 Oct 88 00:37:13 GMT
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <5772@hoptoad.uucp> <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <5790@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: sarge@metapsy.UUCP (Sarge Gerbode)
Organization: Metapsychology, Woodside, CA
Lines: 26

In article <5790@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:

>Let's see, if it takes about two minutes to scan and convert a page,
>and the average book has 250 pages, then that's 500 minutes or over 8
>hours per book -- let's say ten hours to be conservative.  So it would
>take 6710 hours or about three and a third work years to scan in 671
>books.  And I think my two minutes a page estimate may be optimistic,
>not to mention extra costs for indexing and mastering.  Not a basement
>project, I'm afraid.

Well, this must be somewhat ameliorated by the fact that many
publishers surely have most or all of their books in electronic form;
and there are fairly decent full-text retrieval and indexing programs
that would make a normal index obsolete.  One in particular is a
product called "Elexir", from ThirdEye Software in Palo Alto, that is
currently in alpha testing, which allows one to do context searches
and a variety of other actions that an index alone cannot accomplish.
--------------------
Sarge Gerbode -- UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.  Palo Alto, CA 94301
-- 
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Sarge Gerbode -- UUCP:  pyramid!thirdi!metapsy!sarge
Institute for Research in Metapsychology
950 Guinda St.  Palo Alto, CA 94301