Re: Bringing out-of-print math books into print



On Apr 17, 10:17 am, irvanellis <ianel...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Apr 15, 12:24 pm, tc...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

An alternative, or perhaps supplementary, route to creation of a
"want" list web site would be for those willing and able to
participate to put together something like the Gutenberg e-book
project. This would require a core of volunteers who would be willing
to check on the copyright status of proposed titles, to scan books
into an electronic data base, serve as proofreaders and editors to
ensure that the electronic texts produced were accurate in respect to
typography, etc., to organize the volunteers who would work on these
projects, to establish, organize, and maintain a host site for storage
and retrieval of the titles so produced.

In case it's of interest, Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
("DP", at http://www.pgdp.net/c/ ) already has this infrastructure set
up. Because of US copyright law, DP normally only processes books
published prior to 1923. There are sister sites in Europe and Canada,
subject to corresponding copyright laws.

Several LaTeX projects are slowly wending their way through DP. Most
are late-19th/early-20th Century school books on arithmetic and
algebra, but occasionally one sees titles possibly of some interest to
this group, "Le calcul des r?sidus et ses applications ? la th?orie
des fonctions" by Lindel?f and "Theorie der Abel'schen Functionen" by
Weierstrass, for example. The selection is governed entirely by the
content providers, who most likely are not mathematicians, but
bibliophiles. Many of DP's "interesting" mathematical projects come
from page scans of university libraries. There's an unfilled content-
provision niche for mathematics, with a lot of low-hanging fruit.

The OCR problem Irving mentions is completely correct in my
experience, by the way; math turns to ASCII hash, and usually must be
typed in from scratch. Unfortunately, LaTeX-knowledgeable volunteers
are in short supply at DP.

A bit more information about volunteering: Setting up a DP account
takes only a few minutes, costs nothing, and has no commercial
entanglements. There's a small learning curve, since the work is
separated into proofreading and formatting stages, with consistency
conventions governing the tasks done at each stage. The work itself is
done in a web browser one page at a time, so the time commitment can
be as little as a few minutes a day.
--
Andy http://mathcs.holycross.edu/~ahwang
.