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Why Project Gutenberg Isn't There Yet

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the because-there-is-a-long-way-from-here dept.

option8 writes "This wired article ('Any Text. Anytime. Anywhere. (Any Volunteers?)'), goes into good detail on why Project Gutenberg, and similar efforts, are far from creating a complete, free electronic library. A quote: "The mechanics of a universal library are simple. The tricky part: harnessing the free labor." Though it doesn't go into technology much, I expect there's a lot of potential in mass OCR tech and good speech recognition (faster to read a book aloud than to transcribe it correctly)."

4 of 334 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Tex? by Angry+White+Guy · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    If it were a toss up between MS and Unix, Plato would have used Unix.

    I'm all about the ancient Greek Philosophers. Fo' Sho!

    --
    You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
  2. speech recog works by SHEENmaster · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    for short command sets. Mac OS X has excellent speech recognition for example. What we are lacking is a way to differentiate a larger vocabulary.

    I can see PG's next release now:
    Welcome to the audiotape version of.......

    --
    You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
  3. Lousy Frivolous Patents by ediron2 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Sorry to hear the project's in trouble. Man, it sucks that big companies keep enforcing these frivolous patents.

    If it helps in proving prior art, some guy invented something similar about 500 years ago, but I can't remember his name...

  4. Re:Tex? by cel4145 · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    nah. plato would have been a mac man.

    it's the sophists who would have been the open source users!