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The two previous thoughtful posts have brought up the issue of the cost of digitizing. Often the "best is the enemy of the good" in that libraries often spend so much on a few items that they can not get much done, and therefore dont do much.
Lets look at it from the other point of view: Students use the net, almost exclusively, for research. the best the culture has to offer is not all on the net. therefore-- lets fix it.
but for how much? digitizing a book can cost as little as $10. really. the Library of Congress just got $100M in new cash (over its usual $450M/year), and must get $75M in match to deal with the problems outlined in a NAS report called LC21. Mike Lesk pointed out to them that that could digitize all the books in the library (26Million). I believe it. Think of it as the human genome type project: you start dumb and some genious figures out how to it faster and cheaper. (but current plans of LC are to do nothing of the sort, but that is another story)
So should we? Yes. This would unleash a tremendous amount of prior published knowledge that would have all sorts of consequences, much of which are unknown. Furthermore it could set the standards for commercial publishing to join in.
The public library system in the US is a $12billion dollar a year industry. Clearly we could spring $100million for a one time project to digitize the past's PD books.
Further problems are the terminally out-of-print. But we can get started with what we have in hand: granting public access to the public domain.
-brewster
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