From: Eugene Leitl (eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Thu Sep 14 2000 - 04:15:24 MDT
Spike Jones writes:
> You and all of us. I have over a thousand titles, most of em
> hardback. Ideally I would like to ASCII all the text without
> destroying the books, if possible. Let me know if you find
I have the same problem. I even stopped buying dead tree because I
can't move with them in style (last time I had to pay several $100
just for shipping a few lousy printed matter boxes), and I figured out
a hard drive in hand luggage full of .ps.gz and .pdf is worth many 100
kg of pigmented cellulose, and at need can be printed on demand.
I would store scanned stuff at 300 dpi resolution (you can buy a
RAIDable 70 GByte drive now, with TByte drives to arrive in ~4 years),
along with the stuff you've OCRd. You can always reprocess it later,
remember, the segmenting process is still imperfect. And, of course,
the format will change three times over, and you won't be able to
migrate it losslessly. Scanning is the bottleneck, so I would scan the
best way you can afford, and store the stuff redundantly.
I'm waiting for
1) sustainable document standard and decent OCR quality plus good OCRing robots
2) a portable rugged display slate with quality approaching 300 dpi color
laser printer -- based on an open architecture.
By the time the stuff arrives you'll be able to napster the books I
want or buy them for micropayments virtually for free, so I'll have to
process only a minor fraction of my actual library by hand. Meanwhile,
the mice may have fun exploring it ;)
And, yeah, lugging less stuff around does really free the mind.
> anything workable. {8-] spike
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