Another 120 pages of the book through the scanner, hum, turn, hum, turn. I shall be doing a fair bit of this during my evenings, I think.
Meanwhile I did indeed get a reply to my enquiry to Keston College about the works of Michael Bourdeaux. Then I got an email from Dr Bourdeaux himself, in the kindest terms, and full of information of interest to us all. I’ll reply to it tomorrow when my brain is working a bit better!
This led me to look and see which of his books I actually had on my shelves. “Faith in Russia” turned out to be present twice, in different editions, bought second-hand in both cases.
My heart sank when I saw it was published by Hodder and Stoughton, but I cheered up again when I discovered that he had retained the copyright. Never sell your copyright, chaps. The publisher doesn’t need it — they get “publishers copyright” for 25 years anyway — and it just means that the purchaser, who will only pay pennies for it, will be able to keep your book out of print for the next century.
I thought that I had others also, but I can’t find them. I’m more or less sure that I read some kind of biography about him, but I can’t find that either. A book that he wrote on Gorbachev and glasnost and how it would affect the church is here somewhere, because I remember it was a funny size. Can’t find it, tho! Maybe I need to implement a system to my shelves.
Bourdeaux’ books, indeed, do not appear on second-hand book site www.abebooks.co.uk, or not in any numbers, which suggests that those who have them are keeping them.
Onwards.
Ever wanted to know about ancient map-making in the Greek and Roman world? Well, now you can. Harley and Woodward’s Cartography in prehistoric, ancient and medieval Europe and the Mediterranean is online in chapter-sized PDF’s here. It’s a two volume collection of papers, in truth. But it contains much interesting information for those of us who are not cartographically inclined, and have never read the ancient gromatic writers. Indeed do any of the latter even exist in English, I wonder?
Have you thought of building a book scanner. I built one for next to nothing if I don’t take into account the camera. You can find picture of mine here http://diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=925. I can scan a 500 page book in about an hour or two and the result is as good as what you get on Google books.
Cheers,
Mats
Google books has a prompt that says “PLAIN TEXT” (sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t) that does much of the OCR work for you, I was getting four pages of German at a time out of Google books, running that through Goggle translator (in another open window) then pasting those results in a word doc for cleanup. Sat at my desk all day translating only getting up for iced tea.
The idea of a book scanner is a good one. But I never had a lot of luck with getting the pages facing the camera straight, when I used a camera.
@sftommy: I also use Google translator like that. OCR isn’t the problem — I have all the tools for that. It’s the capture of raw page images. If the book is 600+ pages, and heavy, it’s a tiring business.