Digital carbon copying of books begins
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Many years ago, around 20 to be precise. Frank and Sylvia Thornley established what would become quite possibly the most important business with regard to the future of the Internet in the UK. The Compulink Information eXchange, better known as CIX, started life as a back bedroom BBS which allowed users to download public domain software sourced from trips to the US and chat with other techie types. It quickly went on to become the first commercial online conferencing system in the UK as well as the most influential, what with its membership of journalists and technological innovators. As for why it was so important in the whole Internet scheme of things, considering that for the first ten years of its life it was a dial-up proprietary and private system which hardly scraped the very boundaries of the emerging Internet, well that is simple: it was where UK consumer Internet service provision was born.
One CIXen as we like to call ourselves (and yes, I remain a loyal CIXen to this day) was a chap named Cliff Stanford. One of his claims to fame is as the founder of probably the first online auction system, which operated as a conference on Cix and predates eBay by many years. However, his main achievement and the one that he will surely be remembered for was as founder of Demon Internet, the very first consumer dial-up Internet Service Provider in the UK and one of the first in the world to successfully market an affordable service for your everyday punter. Demon started, funnily enough, on CIX. It was there that Cliff set up a conference called tenner-a-month with the simple aim of getting enough people to pledge to pay ten quid every month, with a year’s worth of post dated and signed cheques up front, in order to get access to a bit of 64k Internet leased line that Cliff would rent. Pretty quickly the required couple of hundred souls were recruited and Demon Internet was born, the rest is history.
Cliff Stanford eventually, and inevitably, cashed in on the Internet boom and sold Demon for a very healthy figure and pocketed enough millions to start various other ventures and live really rather comfortably. Frank and Sylvia Thornley also ended up selling their back bedroom BBS that did good, and all but disappeared from the UK Internet arena. Until now, that is.
I heard for Sylvia the other day and it appears that she is involved with another inspired online venture, this time something she refers to as a book recognition project. Ultrapedia has so far ‘recognised’ some 35,000 books that are either out of print or otherwise in the public domain. Courtesy of operating one of the worlds’ largest Optical Character Recognition farms, the parent Secret Studio company feeds a steady stream of books, in PDF image file format, to its servers and converts them into ‘recognised’ versions of the book.
The point being, once recognised the books can then be subject to full text search and retrieval. The nature of the OCR technique appears to be such that the look and feel of the original book is retained, which is quite unusual to be honest. I am more used to seeing plain text scanned versions which are, frankly, hugely boring on the eye and as such difficult to read on screen. By allowing the search engine to deliver what is, in effect, a carbon copy of the books rather than just a text extract, Ultrapedia is doing something truly innovative and exciting methinks. Browsing the library shows a thumbnail of the title page of the book and comprehensive details including book title, author, publisher, genre, ISBN, publisher, no of pages, size of book, summary, editor and format for most of the books.
OK, so it is still in Beta but that’s no biggie (think any kind of Google service after all) but it does seem to work more often that it doesn’t. Anyway, with the Thornley involvement I suspect it might just go places and change the way we think about digitisation of library resources…
Rated: 95% (4 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Coursework - January 25, 2008 on 5:49 am
Great info about the history of Digital carbon copying!
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