The Future of Digital Books

Tabercil writes "The New York Times has an article about the mass scanning of books, which argues that actions such as Google's Book Search project are an inevitable outgrowth of the internet." From the article: "Scanning technology has been around for decades, but digitized books didn't make much sense until recently, when search engines like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN came along. When millions of books have been scanned and their texts are made available in a single database, search technology will enable us to grab and read any book ever written. Ideally, in such a complete library we should also be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, magazine or journal. And why stop there?"

Comments

Some such texts already exist

[golodh]

See e.g.:

-MIT's Open Courseware at: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

-Textbook revolution at http://textbookrevolution.org/

-Physiscs texts at: http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html#langua ges

-The assayer at http://www.theassayer.org/

-Open content at http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/Technolo gy/OpenContent/opencontent.htm

I also know a number of econometric and statistics texts that are also available as free Ebooks, but they are of interest only to specialists.

Re:Scanned Books? No one is interested!

[mirkob]

Not all the publisher are scared by free distribution of theyr titles

a good article is at http://www.baen.com/library/

you could read the rationale of the publisher and many of his autors who offer free e-book to boost the selling of other e-book/books of the same author.

trying to summarize: to them downloading a book when you are young and have few money could be the same that havig one from the local library, if you like the autor then, in the future when the money for some book will be a no-problem you will buy a lot.