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Comment by arihant | Hacker News Reader

The world is not a place where events can be sandboxed to one instance like this.

Luis von Ahn did digitize the entire archive of NYT before flipping reCAPTCHA to Google, and I'm sure it's still helping. But because he did that, he had time to start monolingo project (now duolingo) which is helping translate the Web.

So if reCAPTCHA was not being turned into a tool for profit, it would be sitting in dust at some old room in Wean Hall. Or, Luis would be still with it, and Duolingo would never have existed.

Besides, all work that Luis did on CAPTCHA at Berkeley and reCAPTCHA at CMU is published. Nobody is being prevented from making another one just for books. Amazon, maybe?

reCAPTCHA is being utilized for other things because digitizing books in that manner is not useful anymore. Most publishers now have ebook versions of most of their books, which are already digitized.

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> because digitizing books in that manner is not useful anymore. Most publishers now have ebook versions of most of their books, which are already digitized.

Perhaps for kids looking for new books that's wonderful, but those of us that use books older than your mom, there are no ebooks. Google Books was literally the only place to access that information outside of a few select world-class university libraries.

I was referring to digitizing books as Luis defines it - actually typing in the scanned pages. Not the scanned pages themselves, as Google Books had.

My comment was regarding reCAPTCHA not being used to convert scanned book pages to text.

For books older than my mom, most of which must be public domain, there are a lot online archives. In fact, some of the more common archives like Project Gutenberg, are available as free ebooks on Kindle and iBooks. For more obscure titles, there are field-specific archives from where Google accessed them.

They only got information from publishers and archives. So information you're looking for is out there somewhere in digital form.

> So information you're looking for is out there somewhere in digital form.

Were that true, you'd think Google would be able to find it.

> > So information you're looking for is out there somewhere in digital form.

> Were that true, you'd think Google would be able to find it.

Or not - because of copyright laws. :-(

> most of which must be public domain

The difficult period is approximately between the 1920s and 1990s, where books are under copyright and may have become orphan works (rightsholders cannot be found).

> For books older than my mom, most of which must be public domain

How old is your mom that a book written when she was alive is almost certain to have been written by someone who has now been dead for more than 70 years?

> Perhaps for kids looking for new books that's wonderful, but those of us that use books older than your mom, there are no ebooks.

Project Gutenberg was a thing before Google Books, and those two things aren't the only source of electronic versions of books "older than your mom", or even the only source of free electronic versions, where such isn't legally prohibited by a combination of copyright law and preference of the copyright holder.

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