Originally posted by FlightCommanderSolitude:
That's possible, although I suspect it would take some work. Ultimately it would be easier to just rescan the pages, but do it properly.
You want to know what the tragedy is here?
The tragedy is, of course, that these problems didn't have to happen at all.
There is no reason whatsoever that MWM couldn't have leveraged the community to aid in this project.
At a minimum he could have sent preview copies to a select group of folks to do some simple auditing.
But, what he perhaps could have better done was simply leverage the community itself.
There's, what, 12 books on this CD? And they're reasonably short books (less than 100pgs?). There's nothing secret contained here (perhaps some surprise bonuses, but, really, nothing secret). It's 20 year old material that EVERYONE has already SEEN.
So, through a combination of this forum and TML, he could have easily found volunteers who would have been more than willing to do 90% of the labor for him.
Just about any one of us would have been tickled pink to find a manilla envelope in the mail with a cut copy of Hard Times (or whatever) and a note "Please scan this for me. Have it back to me by June. Appreciate the help! Thanx, MWM".
Multiply that by extra people. All volunteers, all willing to sign away any claims etc beyond a mention in the "Special Thanks" column of, well, something.
And what you would have had was the work of folks PASSIONATE for the product. Anyone here would have scanned Hard Times a dozen times if that's what it took to make it look just right.
Heck, some of us would have been hardcore enough to audit and correct the OCR as well.
Why? Because we want the product, and we want it to work. It's hard for us to do ourselves the entire suite (just a plain lot of scanning and checking), and nobody would reap the benefits of all that labor because we can't distribute it ourselves. Both of those facets deter us from doing the project on our own.
But do it for the community? Get help from others? The books would have been scanned and OCR'd in a month, and they'd all be high quality.
Send everyone a different book, send the masters back to Mark, send the scan results of a different book to the others for some editing and quality control by a new set of eyes, get the finished works, drag and drop onto the "Burn CD" Folder and voila!
So, beyond answering a few emails, and lining up the people, labor is minimal. It's all management. The labor is for us, the passionate nutjobs, who would do it willingly.
I don't know if the idea was even floated, but a community like this is available to be leveraged. If we start being abused, we'd just push back, but until then I think a lot of us are more than willing to help.
And it's a shame that we weren't given the chance.
