Sam Vaknin, Project Gutenberg's anabasis, United Press International, January 7, 2004. Vaknin interviews Michael Hart, founder and director of Project Gutenberg, and Greg Newby, CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.
Vaknin: Why don't simple scans or raw OCR (optical character recognition) output qualify as eBooks?
Hart: [P]eople are not interested in scans. Some Project Gutenberg sites each hand out 10 million eBooks per year -- impossible with scanned images or full text eBooks due to their bandwidth-consuming oversize. The "scanners" want to be the only source for "their" books, even when those books are in the public domain -- and are willing to claim copyright on the public domain works of Project Gutenberg in the process. They deny themselves true access to the public. Our Unlimited Distribution Model calls for everyone to have a library of 10,000 eBooks, stored on a single DVD that costs only $1. [The same books are online at the PG web site free of charge.] People find this appealing....Additionally, the huge scan files hold just a single book, are not searchable, cannot be copied, indexed, or cited by off the shelf applications, typos can't be corrected, and are not truly portable due to their size.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/08/2004 01:34:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
