Why Project Gutenberg Isn't There Yet

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)."

Comments

other issues...

[Stanley Feinbaum]

There are more serious technical issues for an online library. A real library has only a limited amount of books, and they can only be lent to limited amounts of people at once. An electronic library would have to follow the same principals, having time limits and user limits for each document. Otherwise they would be giving out works for free, and most are not intended to be distributed that way.