November 13, 2007
Digital Text Community
Jon Noring of Digital Pulp Publishing has announced the start of "The Digital Text Community" (DTC), a public mailing list (on YahooGroups) devoted to serious discussion of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications.
The full group charter is found at the group's home page.
DTC will be lightly moderated primarily to ensure civil discourse, and a separate archive of the discussion will be started and maintained (Jon notes that YahooGroup's default archive is poor, to say the least.)
Jon explained his rationale for starting the group:
The primary reason why I am starting DTC is that there is, surprisingly, no independent and dedicated forum to discuss the various, interrelated technical and non-technical issues of digitizing "ink-on-paper" publications, such as books, periodicals, etc.
Current discussion on digitizing paper publications is disjointly spread around in various nooks and crannies. For example, there are forums for particular digitization projects such as Project Gutenberg (e.g. "gutvol-d") and Distributed Proofreaders (which maintains a set of online-only forums.)
And then there are more generalized forums which touch upon various topics of relevance to text digitization, but which is not their main focus. Examples are Book People (which John Mark Ockerbloom is sadly closing the end of the month) and The eBook Community (another YahooGroup which I administer.)
The summary purpose of DTC is given in the last paragraph of the DTC group charter:
"This group is not affiliated with any particular project or organization, but rather is independent. It is hoped this group will be a bridge between the various text digitization projects, enabling information exchange for everyone’s benefit."
This sounds like a great new resource, and I have already subscribed. You can too, here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:27 PM
October 26, 2007
The Discoverability Wars
Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press has some thoughts about how discoverability and other publishing-oriented technologies have put book publishers in the catbird seat.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 4:52 PM
March 24, 2007
OUP on Google
OUP's blog today, in a response to the Financial Times article (subscription required) of a couple days ago, talks about what Google's digitization effort is doing for publishing - and how they are responding to it in-house.What we publishers have come to realize is that Google and friends have opened up the world to our content by showing us that discoverability and access leads to interest and opportunity. Every major media company is now thinking they need to figure out their share of the digital space.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:00 AM
March 21, 2007
More Thoughts on Google Books
Michael Cairns from the blog PersonaNonData wrote to highlight two recent articles on Google, one he wrote and one written by his colleague Peter Grabois. Both are skeptical of Google Books, for different reasons, and both articles are well written and very thoughtful. Michael also pointed me to a related article by Peter Brantley, who is one of the truly smart guys in the digital library world.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 7:00 PM
December 11, 2006
More on Microsoft Book Search
Again, as I mentioned in another entry, I have not looked too closely at it yet, but Microsoft Book Search has nice behaviour in the basic interface, and the image in this page was clearly digitized with some care.
