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I'm not exactly sure but this looks like this is made by a company called Advameg, Inc. They've quite a few other sites that might be of interest to HN readers:
by xbryanx 12y ago
I'm not exactly sure but this looks like this is made by a company called Advameg, Inc. They've quite a few other sites that might be of interest to HN readers:
http://www.advameg.com/ http://www.advameg.com/
- Geimfari 12y agoDear lord, that is a lot of wonderful reference material. I'm not certain I get how they can afford so much (seemingly?) original material, yet be low-key enough that I haven't come across them before.
- wxm 12y agoSome companies buy up the rights to old/out of print books that created this original material. Then they cut it up and automatically digitise it. There was a post on HN quite some time back about somebody describing his process to do exactly this for a repair-your-car book - and how he used it to make money via ads through SEO hits.
- jnbiche 12y agoDo you remember about when this was? I've been searching for the post on HN and can't find anything.
- wxm 12y agoI'm afraid not. I've been searching as well and couldn't find it. I recall his process to be 1. secure the rights to the book (he knew the author personally/through family) 2. cut the book open and run it through a high resolution scanner 3. use imagemagick to preprocess images 4. run OCR on the pages and convert them to markdown 5. have a compiler convert his markdown and images to HTML EDIT: FOUND THE LINK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4974055
- jnbiche 12y agoThanks for tracking that down! Very interesting.
- muhfuhkuh 12y agoHoly moly. Quite possibly the greatest content company I'd never heard of. A lot of those sites I have pleasantly visited at one time or another. Brilliant mix of reference and entertainment and clearly presented with no fluff, scrolling images, multi-click pages or other tricks and BS. I mean, yeah, they've got ads, but how else would they make money?
- zeeshanm 12y agoI wonder what is their source for public schools [0] and neighborhoods [1] data. I once tried to get access to same kind of data from ACRIS but the annual bill was around $50k. May be I was doing something wrong or asking for too much. Would be interested in knowing if someone has any insights. 0 - http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Battery-Park-City-New-York-NY.html http://www.city-data.com/neighborhood/Battery-Park-City-New-... 1 - http://www.city-data.com/school/edward-r-murrow-high-school-ny.html http://www.city-data.com/school/edward-r-murrow-high-school-...
- mb_72 12y agoWow, no more work will be getting done here today. Thanks, looks like a great collection of collections of information.