Ever seen pages like these?

jhammond · Mar 18, 2013

Hello everybody,

Regarding such bitmaps : sample 1, sample 2, sample 3 (you may need to wait a bit for it to load)

There are a lot of such book pages on the "data entry" market, meaning publishers need such bitmap pages to be manually typed out. We're acting as in intermediary and outsourcing such jobs to parties in the Philippines and India. This is strange because usually the rightful publisher already has a textual format of the book they have rights to, requiring no "manual data entry". Have you ever seen anything like it? Are these extracted at the printer which is why they do not have the original text?

From what I can glean, quick searches reveal the sentences to be within "old classics" and such. Probably some new publisher trying to get old bestsellers up into the ebook market?

Do you know which publishing house or type of organization could possibly be providing such bitmaps? I'm trying to track this back to the final client, since we're an intermediary we don't really know how far back the chain this goes, and how legal such "data entry" jobs are in the first place.

Thanks for any help.

Torgo · Mar 18, 2013

I don't really understand the question. Those pics show pages typeset really horribly - almost unreadably - in script-type fonts. That's not a good idea, but that doesn't seem to be what you're asking?

Rekeying books happens quite a lot because a lot of the books on a publisher's backlist won't, in fact, be held in digitally-accessible forms. Often they will have spent years being printed from film - essentially from photographs - so don't exist as Word files or PDFs with properly separate text. Thus the only two ways to get such a thing would be (a) double-rekeying from scans or (b) OCR'ing the scans and laboriously correcting. OCR for books set horribly in script would be a lot harder, so in those cases you'd have to rekey.

It's only in the last ten, fifteen years or so that you can rely on most books being originated as PDFs rather than as some less friendly format.

Susan Coffin · Mar 18, 2013

Jhammond.

jhammond said:
Hello everybody,

Regarding such bitmaps : sample 1, sample 2, sample 3 (you may need to wait a bit for it to load)

Okay, I'll bite. Those pages appear to be PDFs from large volumes. What volumes are these? Where did they come from?

There are a lot of such book pages on the "data entry" market, meaning publishers need such bitmap pages to be manually typed out.

Okay. Well, I'm sure there are plenty of data entry people out there.

We're acting as in intermediary and outsourcing such jobs to parties in the Philippines and India. This is strange because usually the rightful publisher already has a textual format of the book they have rights to, requiring no "manual data entry".

Who is we?

Have you ever seen anything like it? Are these extracted at the printer which is why they do not have the original text?

I have no idea. Where did you get them?

From what I can glean, quick searches reveal the sentences to be within "old classics" and such. Probably some new publisher trying to get old bestsellers up into the ebook market?

Could be. So, if you have copied these from the internet, have you obtained permission from the copyright owner (see bold)? Whomever is publishing those pieces into a volume would own the copyright now, I believe. Perhaps they copied them from volumes with expired copyrights?

Do you know which publishing house or type of organization could possibly be providing such bitmaps? I'm trying to track this back to the final client, since we're an intermediary we don't really know how far back the chain this goes, and how legal such "data entry" jobs are in the first place.

Thanks for any help.

I have no idea. Have you tried contacting the owner of the website where you obtained these pages?

I am not sure I follow what you are asking. You might want to clarify who you are and be more specific with your questions.

Old Hack · Mar 18, 2013

You should be asking your client these questions, or consulting a lawyer who knows how pubilshing works.

AW is not the place for you to get legal advice. Locking this.

Ever seen pages like these?

jhammond

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.

Susan Coffin

Tell it like it Is

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman