Okay, so we’re definitely going to need a better name. Anyhow, my recent research into history books has taught me how inaccessible even some fairly basic public domain history books published in the 19th century already are, in that they’re not on Gutenberg, they’re not on Unz, they’re not actually on Google Books, and they’re not available to anyone who isn’t capable of compiling and utilizing a custom Hathi Trust scraper that won’t always work anyhow.
We have a relationship with a professional scanning service that will scan and OCR books for a reasonable price, and I was thinking about making use of them for three old books I recently acquired which are not readily available in ebook. Initially, we’ll make these high-quality ebooks available to History, Library, UATV, and Arkhaven subscribers, with the idea that if there is sufficient interest and popularity, we can set the project up in its own right with full access for the public down the road.
What do you think? Is this of any interest to you? Do you think it is a worthwhile endeavor? The idea is not to replace Gutenberg or the other digital book repositories, but rather to fill in the blanks that they are missing for one reason or another even in the event they don’t become too converged to be useful.