Two weeks ago, I asked the Teleblog readers whether they would digitize their personal libraries, and under what conditions. A day later, I posed the same question to the Distributed Proofreaders, volunteer proofreaders who help prepare books for Project Gutenberg using a web interface.
Although the number of votes were hardly enough to draw any hard conclusions, the difference in voting patterns between the two groups is marked: almost all of the Teleblog readers want to digitize their personal library, but only half of the Distributed Proofreaders do. This is the more noticeable as the latter are used to digitizing books!
The question for both polls was: Would you digitize your collection of printed books?
And the possible answers were: 1) Only if it took less than a minute per book, 2) Only if it took less than ten minutes per book, 3) Only if it took less than an hour per book, 4) I (have already digitized/ am going to digitize) my most popular books anyway, 5) No, I would not; I don’t own p-books / I don’t re-read, 6) No, I would not because …, 7) I don’t know.
| Question | Teleread Blog | Distributed Proofreaders | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| votes | % | votes | % | |
| 1 | 12 | 14 | 2 | 5 |
| 2 | 23 | 27 | 7 | 20 |
| 3 | 31 | 36 | 9 | 25 |
| 4 | 15 | 17 | 2 | 5 |
| 5 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 8 |
| 6 | 4 | 5 | 9 | 25 |
| 7 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 8 |
| total | 86 | 100 | 35 | 96 |
Note: I used the percentages as calculated by the different polling tools. There may be rounding errors.
| Generalised reply | Teleread | Distributed Proofreaders |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | 94 % | 55 % |
| No | 5 % | 33 % |
| Don’t know | 1 % | 8 % |
To be honest, I wasn’t much surprised by the response of the Distributed Proofreaders. Earlier polls at their website’s forums had already pretty much determined that a lot of these Project Gutenberg volunteers do not read the digital versions of the books they produce.
A difference between communities was brought to light in earliers polls: the Teleread blog, Manybooks.net and the IDPF measured which formats and which devices e-book readers use, and came to vastly different results. (See here, here, here and here.) Friends of the e-book would do well to realise that different communities have different tastes.
Edit: as Manybooks.net’s proprietor Matthew McClintock points out, the IPDF’s and his results with regards to favourite e-book reading devices are rather similar, with ca. 80 % of the readers preferring a handheld device, and most of the rest a PC of some sort.
the Teleread blog, Manybooks.net and the IDPF measured which formats and which devices e-book readers use, and came to vastly different results.
The interesting part, to me, is the similarities in the poll results: both the manybooks.net and the IDPF polls showed a %70-%79 use of a PDA for reading ebooks. I guess the dis-similarities are in format use, and that should probably be left up to a neutral third-party…
When dedicated e-readers are better and cost less, we’ll see the percentage increase. That’s my take. As I see it, the TeleBlog readers are looking ahead.
Meanwhile, Branko, thanks for a fascinating post! Glad to hear from Matt on this, as well. – David
[…] Scanning books from your own library Branko of Teleread came up with some interesting statistics suggesting that – unlike distributed proofreaders – many of us would love to digitize their own personal libraries. If you’ve ever tried to scan a full-length book without having access to a high-end $150k+ scanner, you’ll understand why professional proofreaders who deal with books every day are not so fond of the idea of scanning their own content. Manual scanning and OCR’ing is a pain since both tasks are time-consuming and usually prone to errors. Now, as many of you know, Google is working with various major libraries to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them online. But don’t expect some poor first-year student to sit all day and night in front of a low-cost scanner flipping pages. These libraries have access to fully automated page-turning and scanning devices that produces high quality digital images of bound materials (nondestructive) at throughput rates as high as 2400 pages per hour. It’d be great if one day you could just visit a Kinko’s outlet and rent a Kirtas scanning device for a short period of time. Only then would I be willing to turn my dusty library into a bunch of e-book. […]
Matthew, you’re right, must have got my wires crossed somewhere.
actually I use a off-the-shelf $99 scanner with $500 OCR software and I get less then average one mistake for 4 pages. Various things can affect quality. Even a completely clean book can scan horribly if the software doesn’t like the font typeface for some reason.
I suspect part of the difference comes from a different relationship to copyright law. I want all our books digitized (preferably by others), but in digitizing thousands of books (personally, physically, thanks to Plustek), the desire to scan my own modern books is much less because nobody else could use them under the current laws. What point, in other words, in digitizing them for myself? Duplication of effort.
I bet that has something to do with the differences: I’d love to have the electronic versions, but would hate to think they were mine alone.