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From: geb@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU (Gordon E. Banks)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next,rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Hundreds of books on an optical disk
Message-ID: <1676@cadre.dsl.PITTSBURGH.EDU>
Date: 2 Nov 88 14:31:37 GMT
References: <0XMtqn087E-0A14EYk@andrew.cmu.edu> <344@uceng.UC.EDU> <5772@hoptoad.uucp> <3447@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <5790@hoptoad.uucp>
Reply-To: geb@cadre.dsl.pittsburgh.edu (Gordon E. Banks)
Organization: Decision Systems Lab., Univ. of Pittsburgh, PA.
Lines: 19

In article <5790@hoptoad.uucp> tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney) writes:
>
>Yep.  All I was talking about was how many would fit.  Whether it could
>ever be economically feasible to publish such a disk is another matter
>entirely.  Even with public domain books, the costs of scanning and
>character-recognizing are pretty large.

Not really.  You can estimate it by the cost of getting books from
University Microfilms.  They have to photocopy each page.  A normal
sized book is around $50.  This covers retrieving the book from
whatever library has it, and the labor of copying it.  Of course,
they expect to sell more copies of the microfilm later, but this
would apply in spades to optical disk versions.  OCR programs will
soon be sophisticated enough that it won't add much to the cost
of simply photocoping the book.  Compared to conventional publication
(typesetting) this cost is trivial.  If all books worth reading in
the public domain were done, it would be a wonderful thing.  I suspect
people will start doing this as soon as the market is large enough.
The real hang up is going to be with current books where royalties
will have to be paid.