> As any researcher can attest, our digital libraries now hold a century of scanned work of questionable quality
I keep thinking so much collaborative potential is not being utilized. Imagine each (unique) Google Book is basically an editable wiki where people can directly correct OCR errors as they come across them (with an associated Talk page where they can give explanations, etc)
The insurmountable problem is that Google doesn't have, and can't get the rights to distribute all these books. Even regular Google employees can't see them (and I tried when in Legal there).
So this is neither a hardware problem nor a software problem. Unfortunately.
You are right! I was really thinking more about books published before the 20th century (which constitute the majority of my own usage of Google Books), and I had in mind something like a collaborative WikiSource integrated into Google Books.
I keep thinking so much collaborative potential is not being utilized. Imagine each (unique) Google Book is basically an editable wiki where people can directly correct OCR errors as they come across them (with an associated Talk page where they can give explanations, etc)