On Fri, 13 Jul 2012 13:44:51 -0400, John W Kennedy wrote   
   (in article <9484D038-4D2C-4761-9284-3ABE501E0E65@attglobal.net>):   
      
   > On 2012-07-13 11:14:12 +0000, Wayne Dernoncourt said:   
   >> I have all of the B5 books so far (not the trilogies, but the script/What    
   >> the    
   >> hell happened/etc. books, at least I think I have), what I would love to    
   >> have    
   >> but doubt I ever will are electronic versions of these books.  I have all    
   >> of    
   >> the books, but I've stopped reading them.  Why?  I've damaged some of the    
   >> books (and they've been replaced by the scripts team), but if I go back and    
   >> re-read them, replacements won't be available.  Also those things end up    
   >> being heavy.  I'd love to be able to carry three or four of those books    
   >> around when I go on vacation.  A Kindle or an iPad version would be lots    
   >> more    
   >> portable than the printed copy.   
   >>    
   >> I'm sure that my dream will remain unfulfilled, but I can still have it.   
   >>    
   > Apart from the other problems, most of the material is in the form of    
   > original scans; you're talking a megabyte or two per page (assuming they've    
   > been converted in to optimized PNGs -- otherwise you could be looking at   
   over    
      
   > 100MB each). In principle, they could be OCRed, but I've just been doing   
   that    
      
   > with a single 80-page typescript, which reduced it from about 500MB to about    
   > 125kB, but destroyed all the formatting while introducing several OCR errors    
   > per page, both of which I had to fix by hand (and I'd still be working on it    
   > if I hadn't decided that I could ignore the original line breaks and page    
   > breaks, and that's not acceptable for the scripts).   
   >    
   > Unless you can find a few dozen volunteers to work for several weeks without    
   > pay, I don't think it's feasible.   
      
   I'm willing to bet the text didn't start out as pen on paper, maybe it did.     
   But someone somewhere put it into a computer for production on a printer.     
   I'm looking to capture that to an electronic version.  As someone else    
   pointed out the "Limited time only" is a sticky issue.  I'm sure there are    
   other issues.   
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