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   Peter Hosey (boredzo@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Dec-2023 22:49:32 JST Peter Hosey

   There should be, like, a Federal subsidy program to pay publishers to make digital editions of old books.

   (I don't mean scanning them in and OCRing them. The Internet Archive does that already, the effectiveness of OCR is limited, and they're constantly constrained by copyright.)

   There's a ton of knowledge in books older than, say, 2010 that ought to be more available, but may not be judged profitable to republish in digital formats by the publisher that owns the copyright.

   • Tobias Hellgren repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Peter Hosey (boredzo@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 06-Dec-2023 22:49:32 JST Peter Hosey

     in reply to

     A more radical idea: A Federal copyright-buyout program. Like a gun-buyback program, but for taking books out of copyright and into the public domain. Tell the publishers, hey, you're not making money off those out-of-print titles right now anyway, why not get some lump-sum buyout payments for 'em?

     You could couple it with something like what the Internet Archive does now, plus human review/editing for every title, as a jobs program.