Dilwyn Jones escribió: >> Is there already a repository of scanned documents with QL? > There is the documents section on my website, where I have some > manuals for old disk interfaces, QL manual and so on. But no books. > www.dilwyn.uk6.net/docs/index.html > and there is a list of QL books (none scanned) at > www.dilwyn.uk6.net/gen/books/books.html
Your page is one of the most famous and visited here. I know very well how useful are these sections. I'm always surprised how much information (in text editable format) you've been able to gather. >> What do you think? What would have problems? Besides the poor quality of >> some scans and the tedious work involved in doing so. > Plus of course copyright issues. It is possible that companies might > not object so long after most QL books went out of print, but remember > that copyright persists for many years. Of course. We have contacted the spanish companies that we have been able to get his license and be available on our website those manuals and books and programs too. In some cases, companies no longer exist or have changed their names, and we have to do a real investigative work. We never have given a negative. There are several reasons for this. Mainly that no longer profit from their stock issues because they do not have stocks and they will not reissue. These companies use rights to exploit from a material translated and that only belongs to our language translation. But in most cases, companies are not legally imply and do not give their permission directly, but also not object. I think in the international market could be a similar circumstance. For us it would be more complicated contact with English companies on their books and manuals of programs, and we'd like to know if someone has already tried. I think particularly that the publishing companies are not going to object. The companies producing software or who have obtained the rights of its programs if it might make objections. But in this case would find that many companies no longer exist or have changed their names, so their rights in that software has been extinguished. Today, I know who the commercial software is virtually confined to the resale. They might be partially affected. but I think that the manuals are obtained along with the original software, and they usually do not get benefits from the direct sale of manuals so that this initiative would also not a problem for them. The most affected would be the resellers of books. Also here is an alternative, as there are many people who still prefers to have edited the original material because they are collectors. But what will happen when there are no more books for sale? The books and manuals are not copied as the software. > > It is very tedious work, even using a good modern scanner and modern > OCR software. > With a modern scanner is easy to scan books with separate pages, but not bound books. The OCR is still an added complication. I prefer books without OCR. Using only black and white (1 bit) a book of some 188 pages can hold only about 2 MiB. An example: the spanish translation of the A. A. Berk "QL SUPERBASIC" marketed by the Spanish company Indescomp, weighs 2.318 KiB. you can see it in our web, in "Utilidades" > "Manuales" direct link: http://sinclairql.es/manual.htm link to the book in PDF: http://sinclairql.es/man/lengs/qlsuperbasic.pdf link to a list of the spanish books: http://sinclairql.es/editado.htm > Quanta have started on the task of scanning the old newsletters (the > old ones, where the original documents are no longer available on > disk) to preserve them as searchable PDF documents. I think it might > be a very long, very slow, very tedious job just for 40-page > newsletters, never mind whole books! We know this well. we did with the newsletters of the club QLAVE (a Spanish club like QUANTA) Fortunately, Salvador Merino, the operator of the material, did a splendid job. > But good luck if you decide to do this job, Javier. If we see no more objections, we will scan some books to PDF format, the most necessary and those that never were published in Spanish. Tank you Dilwyn Javier Guerra http://sinclairql.es Sinclair QL spanish resources _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
