[Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

[Jonathan Gorman]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2006, Karen Coyle wrote:

> On the plus side, you can have your computer read it aloud, which is not 
> possible with most commercial e-books since this is considered to be covered 
> under a separate "performance" contract with the author.

Unless I missed something, the pdfs are just 
images, no text included at all. You seem to be agreeing with that 
in your earlier points (can't copy/paste etc).  I don't have 
time to deconstruct them now, but it sounds right.

But if that's the case, you'll still need to run some sort of OCR to get 
the "script" for a computer program to "speak it".  If you do that you get 
some of the advantages you posted before....


So is google offerring some sort of accessability service I'm not aware 
of?

Quite curious,

Jon Gorman