Let's agree, for argument's sake, that it is technically possible I am talking about books in the public domain or people who live in countries that don't have copyright laws that would restrict this activity, OK?
There are many novels in the world, and there are many people in the world.
As a rough estimate there are 147,093,357 "items" (mostly not novels, but its a number) and there are over 309,000,000 native English speakers in the world. I can read a novel in under a week so if we wanted to have every item in the library of congress read... and we had some kind of magical level of both participation and efficiency... it could be done in under a week. Nifty huh?
What there aren't many of are good quality, readily available, electronic copies of most novels published before about 1971... and really before the eBook market really started taking off in about 2010.
So that brings me to the [Crazy Idea]: Set up a way for people to adopt a novel, they would get (or create) a scanned copy of the book and they would spend some spare time over the course of however long it took to clean it up, format it into a properly transmutable format (like epub) and provide it back to the world.
Obviously they would start with an OCR system to get the basics but would have to go word by word to ensure the accuracy of the conversion and mark up the formatting. Ideally these books would be committed to a versioned repository and verified by general consensus, with minor patches being applied when someone noticed a wrong word or comma that should actually be an apostrophe and such.
Of course, no really good idea is truly unique so it turns out http://www.pgdp.net/c/ already exists.
I learned this from NPR, but apparently when you're entering a Captcha and you get two funky words? One of those words is scanned from a book or document that the computer didn't recognize, and they cloudsource it over Captchas to figure out what it is.
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