Date   : Sat, 21 Jun 2008 19:59:02 +0100
From   : C.J.Thornley@... (Chris Thornley)
Subject: The Micro User

You could OCR them instead. With recent improvements, like with Omni page 16
that seems to come with most recent scanners like the canon range. The
recognition quality is very good and the output could easily be compressed
as pdf for archive purposes. 

I have recently scanned a few novels, to turn them into eBooks, for a pda.
The file sizes of each in pdf are less that the capacity of a high density
floppy disk.

The majority of the older magazine are either in Black and white or 4 colour
gray. The only colour items seem to be the cover and adverts.

Chris


               />      Christopher J. Thornley is cjt@...
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-----Original Message-----
From: bbc-micro-bounces+c.j.thornley=coolrose.fsnet.co.uk@...
[mailto:bbc-micro-bounces+c.j.thornley=coolrose.fsnet.co.uk@...
uk] On Behalf Of Brian Foley
Sent: 21 June 2008 18:15
To: Andrew
Cc: bbc-micro@...
Subject: Re: [BBC-Micro] The Micro User

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 10:28:41AM +0100, Andrew wrote:
> In message <314mFTNIO6388S10.1213970833@...>
>           "Dave Moore" <dllm@...> wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Side note: Dave Edwards has two full sets of Acorn Users and has 
> > offered to tear apart and scan one complete set. All he's asking for 
> > is TEN people to express their interest and he'll get going <ref:
> > http://www.stairwaytohell.com/sthforums/viewtopic.php?p=12472>. So I 
> > urge as many people on the list as possible to contact Dave and 
> > offer him some encouragement!! (either via the contact form @ 
> > acornelectron.co.uk, or via the STH forum)
> > 
> To be honest, it does seem a shame to destroy any old Acorn magazines 
> given the non-permanancy of the web. I'd prefer a slightly distorted 
> image and the knowledge that they still exist in a well-kept library.

If they do eventually get scanned, I'd be all for buying a half decent USB
hard disc, posting it to the scanner, and getting an offline backup of the
originals that way.

If several of us did this, we'd have a multiply redundant, geographically
distributed set of backups which should be safe for some time to come.

For some back of the envelope calculations, an uncompresed 300dpi colour
page would be about 24MB, greyscale 8MB. If an issue was roughly 50% B&W and
150 pages, you'd get about 2.4GB an issue. At 268 issues, that brings us up
to about 640GB.

Lossless compression would probably bring that down to significantly less
than 500GB, and a 500GB Western Digital MyBook is about 70 quid on
amazon.co.uk.

I'll grant this doesn't address the issue of keeping the scans available
online, but at least there'll be copies of it somewhere.
Perhaps at some point we could donate a copy to archive.org, although I'm
not sure what the legal situation would be like there.

Cheers,
Brian.

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