Archive CD Books Project for genealogists
A project I stumbled upon while looking for cheap planetary scanners for Project Gutenberg a while ago is the Archive CD Books Project, despite what its name suggest a commercial enterprise that scans and OCRs books for genealogists. Although that sounds a bit like Project Gutenberg, in many ways it seems antithetical to it. The Archive CD Books Project locks up its products in a license and a contract that explicitely forbids further distribution, even though the books themselves are in the public domain, whereas ‘PG’ encourages wide distribution of all its ebooks.
Despite the fact that genealogists could run books through Distributed Proofreaders for free, many seem to value the service of the Archive CD Books Project, considering Rod Neep’s large staff, not to mention the international partners in Ireland and the Netherlands.
Other well-known examples of book scanning efforts, apart from generic PG-like projects, are Blackmask for pulp fiction, and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library for christian books.
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