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> As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are no
by w1ntermute 15y ago
> As for why OCR is used, just look at the range of books that are now available electronically. There are a lot of books from the 1980s and earlier that are now available as EPUBs. Do you really think that it would have been easier to use the source files off floppies?
How are reprints of such books achieved?
- wtallis 15y agoMost likely, by using PostScript (edit: sometimes, even high-resolution raster) files that have no semantic markup and cannot be automatically reformatted in any way other than simple zooming/scaling. Such files are not much easier to transform into ebooks than scans are, but are probably harder to get access to.
- w1ntermute 15y agoThis state of things is quite apalling. Given how small the source files are, I would've thought that publishers would keep an up-to-date copy of all of their books in a centralized repository.
- wtallis 15y agoSome publishers might do this. But it would be very surprising if any major publisher has been completely standardized on using the exact same toolchain and file formats for more than 20 years. Most publishers also have no incentive to modernize the markup for a book that's not getting any content updates.