On 2012-07-13 11:14:12 +0000, Wayne Dernoncourt said:
> I have all of the B5 books so far (not the trilogies, but the script/What
the 
> hell happened/etc. books, at least I think I have), what I would love to
have 
> but doubt I ever will are electronic versions of these books.  I have all of 
> the books, but I've stopped reading them.  Why?  I've damaged some of the 
> books (and they've been replaced by the scripts team), but if I go back and 
> re-read them, replacements won't be available.  Also those things end up 
> being heavy.  I'd love to be able to carry three or four of those books 
> around when I go on vacation.  A Kindle or an iPad version would be lots
more 
> portable than the printed copy.
> 
> I'm sure that my dream will remain unfulfilled, but I can still have it.
> 
Apart from the other problems, most of the material is in the form of original
scans; you're talking a megabyte or two per page (assuming they've been
converted in to optimized PNGs -- otherwise you could be looking at over 100MB
each). In principle, they could be OCRed, but I've just been doing that with a
single 80-page typescript, which reduced it from about 500MB to about 125kB,
but destroyed all the formatting while introducing several OCR errors per
page, both of which I had to fix by hand (and I'd still be working on it if I
hadn't decided that I could ignore the original line breaks and page breaks,
and that's not acceptable for the scripts).

Unless you can find a few dozen volunteers to work for several weeks without
pay, I don't think it's feasible.

-- 
John W Kennedy
"There are those who argue that everything breaks even in this old dump of a
world of ours. I suppose these ginks who argue that way hold that because the
rich man gets ice in the summer and the poor man gets it in the winter things
are breaking even for both. Maybe so, but I'll swear I can't see it that way."
  -- The last words of Bat Masterson
--- SBBSecho 2.13-Win32
 * Origin: Time Warp of the Future BBS - Home of League 10 (1:340/400)