My own experience leads me to second Patrick Nugent's
remarks re scanning as a temporal black hole.
Even though the OCR (Optical Character Reader) software--which
transforms the scanned image into ASCII characters--has improved
remarkably in the last few years, trying to get the cartularlies
from the diocese of Chartres on line has proven to be a project
for my golden years.
So, when I saw a few years ago, that Brepols had put the
PL on disk, I hustled to ask them at Kalamazoo what breakthroughs
in scanning had made it possible (knowing that the typography
of the PL makes the AASS look like the work of Plantin).
"What's the secret?" I naively asked.
"India," was the response.
They'd sent it off to Bombay, where it was entered one keystroke
at a time.
Or actually, two at a time.
They discovered that the way around the occasional typo from the
Bombayians whose Latin *might* not be up to snuff was to have it
done twice, using some software to discover the discrepancies, which
were then directed to a resident Latinist for resolution.
As to the price, I didn't enquire what it cost them for the Indian
service, but *some*how I feel that the guys in Bombay *might* not have
had the same health & retirement benefits as the fellows in Belgium
who worked on the same project.
Question for Patrick (and anyone else):
At what price would *you*, personally, consider buying a copy?
Surely Earlham would pick it up at $450, while not even considering
it at $ 45,000.
It being a largish planet, there are a *lot* of Earlhams out there.
To say nothing of individual scholars like Patrick (and, what, a third
of this list?) who would seriously consider having such an
enormous resourse for their very own (*imagine!*).
How many $45,000 copies are the publishers thinking of selling?
100?
500?
Seems like a bit short-sighted to price it at that high level and
something of a throwback to the days of hard-copy reprints.
But old ways of thinking die hard.
Maybe I'm just p.o.'ed because I know that at $45,000 a pop there
might not be very many used copies comming up on the market for
a while.
Best from here,
Christopher
Christopher Crockett
[log in to unmask]
Future curator of the
Centre des Etudes Chartraines
a home on the Web for Chartres-
related scholarship from all disciplines,
comming soon to a web site near you.
And Pres. & CEO of
Christopher's Book Room
P.O. Box 1061
Bloomington, IN 47402
(Corporate motto: "Will sell Books for Food")
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