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Dear 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 enou
by Geimfari 12y ago
Dear 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.