Hmmm. It's not so easy to do this with ebooks viewed in a graphical ebook reader. Note he didn't say "text search". He said mining.
Does this suggest noncommercial library books will offer research capabilities that commercial ebooks will not?
I want my ebooks in ASCII format. And that certainly goes for textbooks.
less(1) is my "ebook reader".
If they are scanned noncommercial library books, I guess.
I'm not sure how this is really relevant though. Scanning for this use may be fair use (hooray! some sanity), but the publishers aren't providing an ASCII file to the libraries either, the libraries are making a copy...hence the need for a fair use decision.
Not only that, working with raw text is so much faster than anything else. less(1) is the most responsive "ebook reader" I've ever used. It never chokes on huge files. less -n
Ever try reading 100 or more PDF's in one sitting?
But with 100 ASCII docs, it's possible to skim them fast using less, or mine some text with some UNIX utility.
I like what this judge said. Digitizing books not just about putting the book on a "paper-like" screen with beautiful fonts, it's about enabling new utility. Working with the text.
> It never chokes on huge files
But with a 200MB file, chances are you will only want to view part of it. Unless you have superhuman reading powers. ;)
Dissect the part you want with some filter (sed, awk, tail, whatever) and feed the result to less.
Org Mode.
Just ask for reflowable pdf. Figures, equations, cross-references (with hyperlinks), actual typography and design, full-text search, and the ability to adapt to your viewer.
If you don't like that implementation, then may I suggest looking into improvements to the algorithm, instead of brutally stripping away content at books to fit an unnecessarily crude model?
I'd like a nice ePub, but again, no page-breaks. They'll be wrong for most devices anyway.