GoogleBlog: A picture of a thousand words?

This blog post from Google discusses that they can now search 
through scanned images inside PDFs.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/picture-of-thousand-words.html

I think this technology has the potential to make ebooks 
significantly more widespread. Up to now, getting from an old 
out-of-print paper book to an ebook involved a considerable 
amount of effort, especially in the proof-reading phase.

The upside to that effort was that the book became not only 
readable, but also searchable. But now you don't need to go 
through that effort.

With technology like this being widespread, it now becomes 
practical to simply scan older works, and publish as a series of 
scans. If anyone wants to search them, they can - but there is no 
requirement to invest a lot of up-front effort in getting to a 
perfect ebook before you know what the interest - and value - is 
in that effort.

I can see a further benefit to scholarly research, because when 
you never discard the scan - it becomes the ebook, in a sense, 
you no longer have to be concerned as much about potential errors 
in the OCR and proof-read stages. If there is any doubt, you can 
immediately check the underlying page.

We aren't quite at the point where a home scanner can accept a 
peperback and simply scan it into a readable ebook, but we're 
getting closer with steps like this.

It would be nice if at some point, the effort in coverting my old 
paper books to ebooks was comparable in time, effort and cost to 
converting my old 78s to MP3s.

: chris smith ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
: nihil tam munitum quod non expugnari pecunia possit - cicero :

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