Xref: utzoo comp.sys.next:423 rec.arts.books:4326 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!pacbell!hoptoad!peora!rtmvax!bilver!bill From: bill@bilver.UUCP (Bill Vermillion) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next,rec.arts.books Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk (long!) Message-ID: <282@bilver.UUCP> Date: 31 Oct 88 07:04:34 GMT References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <5772@hoptoad.uucp> <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <5790@hoptoad.uucp> Reply-To: bill@bilver.UUCP (Bill Vermillion) Organization: W. J. Vermillion, Winter Park, FL Lines: 83 In article <5790@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: >In article <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> ns@cat.cmu.edu (Nicholas Spies) writes: >>In article <5772@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes: >>>... >>>And according to this estimate, a Next disk will hold 671 books at 256M. >> >>At $40/book that's $26,840.00 + $50.00 for the disc itself. Just the >>author's royalties, figured at 15%, would make the disc cost $4,026 (after >>all, why should the authors take a loss?). Therein lies the problem of very >>dense media. > .... stuff deleted .... >entirely. Even with public domain books, the costs of scanning and >character-recognizing are pretty large. ....... ........ >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. >-- Let's take a step back and look at this again. If a book is on disk we don't neccesarily need to be able to read it on a character basis. The idea is to be able to READ Shakespeare, not to re-edit, re-create, re-print, etc. I would suspect that it would be a bit difficult to get publishers to agree to that form of distribution. However - if we go to image storage we can still see the book on the screen, we could have images from the book, we would be able to search through the book (providing it was indexed - more in a later paragraph), we would be able to do almost anything except re-edit, re-(etc.).... So from 8 hours per pook at 2 minutes per page, we can go to 12.5 minutes per book at 3 seconds per page. Now before you say that can't be done - let me tell you I saw it. I forgot the company that makes it, but the system was a document storage and retreival system using high speed scanners, fast photo-copy type printers, and 12" laser disk media. One of the options was a 12 video juke box. I don't recall the exact capacity, but it was large. Let's just map this onto existing video technology. In a CAV mode a 12 disk can store approximate 55,000 frames per side. When these disks are used for data they are about 1.2 gigs. That is about 4.5 times more than the 256meg disk. That means we should be able to get about 11,750 (rounded) pages per 256Meg disk. Or 47 books per disk. Media cost then is approximately $1.00 per book which puts it just above paper-back printing costs, but below hard-bound. And I would estimate it would cost you under $2.00 to ship the disk first class, as opposed to $$$$ to ship 47 books that way. The document storage/retrieval system also had software so that you would index the document as you stored it. Then anytime you needed the document you would go to the index and get it. On a large juke-box that could take 20 to 30 seconds to find the disk, place it, search and then display. But on a large juke-box that was finding 1 document out of FIVE MILLION. THen at a touch of a button you had a full hard copy of the original, and the company had information on the legal acceptability of such documents. Quite impressive. So instead of 6700 books taking 3 years, we get 50 books taking 10 hours. This seems a more reasonable route. An aside - that relates to the above. Before Sony and Phillip cross-licensed their CD technology, Sony had developed a "digital audio disk". They could see no market for the disk. Why. Well they had this disk, 12" in diameter, and they could not conceive of being able to market a record that played for 20 HOURS per side. Phillips had a 4" (approx) disk. Playing time was under 1 hour. One of the favorite works of a Sony exec. was 73 minutes long, so the disk was designed for that. That is where the 12 cm disk came from. It is probably better to waste space and have a marketable item, than to achieve maximum capability and have no market at all. Who - execept a library would want 6700 disks on a volume. And what about accesibility to the 6699 other books when someone has the disk to read 1 volume. -- Bill Vermillion - UUCP: {uiucuxc,hoptoad,petsd}!peora!rtmvax!bilver!bill : bill@bilver.UUCP