The Million Books Project will be posting 10's of thousands of books
later this month on the Archive and elsewhere. These were scanned in
India by the Indian government. Stay tuned.

This fall we kicked off a volume book scanning "in-library" project at
the University of Toronto.
http://www.archive.org/texts/collection.php?collection=toronto

The idea is to get the price per page down using domestic workers.
We now have it below 10 cents per page and targeting 3 1/3 cents, or
$10 for a 300 page book.

This is already much less than the commercial rates we have heard from
libraries of $0.85 to $1 per page.

If you know of people wanting to do alot of high quality scanning,
please let us know!

At a conference on monday we gave a briefing on how it is doing.

The project overview session showed some very nice looking books
including OCR for searching, and printed versions passed around the
audience.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=25165
movies of the scanning robot:
http://www.archive.org/movies/details-db.php?
collection=opensource_movies&collectionid=scanning_robot

Molly told her tales with a robot in toronto, concluding with real
numbers for how much it costs per page and what we expect to be able to
get it down to in the future.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=25193

LizardTech (jeff) announce the open-sourcing of DJVU java client-- this
makes it so people will be able to just search-click-see without
downloading a special app or downloading the whole document.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=25170

HP showed it's pdf-izer that worked to automatically detected chapter
headings.
http://www.archive.org/iathreads/post-view.php?id=25167

Kirtas (lotfi) detailed their commitment and future plans on making the
whole workflow smooth-- work on both the software and hardware.

Utoronto (Sian) said that the book quality was great for them.

Yippie.

The scanner and processing is now all in the same room in a different
library and they are cranking on french texts.

Next, the Internet Archive and Utoronto will pursue funding for
scanning further collections.

Onward to open-access book collections!

-brewster