Initial reference book library/archive idea

Stephen's post about Amiga books still found in UK libraries got me thinking about something. Books about Amiga subjects must be getting quite hard to find these days, but there are still a lot of Amiga fans out there who I can imagine would be very interested in a central location to source these reference books.

Therefore I think it would be great to create an Amiga book archive containing scanned Amiga reference books in PDF format for everyone to access and download.

This could include the official Commodore Amiga manuals that were included with the system, plus reference books about anything related to the Amiga.

Obviously as the software section is already up and running, and manuals and reference books for specific software could also be interlinked into each software entry on the site, so an Amiga book archive would also aid the increase in reference content within the software section.

Do you all think this is a good idea?

And if so does anyone own any Amiga reference books and are willing to start scanning them in? I own a few and will get scanning when I have some time.

It would be great to create the PDFs so they are fully OCR'd, allowing users to search the text of each reference book.

I also think it would be a good idea to approach each of the book publishers and/or the authors of each book series and see if they will officially grant classicamiga permission to provide their books for download on the site. That way we wouldn't be breaking any copyright rules.

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Originally Posted by Harrison

I also think it would be a good idea to approach each of the book publishers and/or the authors of each book series and see if they will officially grant classicamiga permission to provide their books for download on the site. That way we wouldn't be breaking any copyright rules.

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Do you think they will allow you to do that? :hmmm:
the official amiga books, that came with the original amigas, i found it hard to believe but... maybe the non-official ones.
But definitely it would be very nice

The thing is, who actually owns the copyright to the original manuals and supporting books that came bundled with the actual Amigas? Does anyone still own their copyright?

I was initially thinking more about the independent non-official authors and publishers such as Bruce Smith. I've already emailed Bruce Smith to ask about his books, and from his blog site it would seem to indicate that Bruce Smith Books Publications is no longer in existence, which might be a good thing for us. I can imagine publishers that are still publishing new books would be less likely to allow us to reproduce their publications for download.

Very good idea. I've got half of the Workbench 3 manual scanned (the first 100 pages) if someone wanted to finish the job off.

Sounds like a great idea. I have an entire programming manual (not sure for what language though) that I could scan in for the site...

Have checked. The manual I have is for Hisoft Basic.

Ah! I've got that manual too. A big A4 sized one with clear plastic cover and plastic spine bound, like you can get Staples to do if you get their printing/copying department to print out a presentation for you. Quite a big book too.

I tried learning Hisoft Basic and it was quite a nice programming language. However I gave up as I suddenly realised it was probably pointless as the language wasn't available on any other platform so wouldn't be of much use in the future. Shame really. I might play around with it again when I get the time and see what I can make it do. Maybe even code a few simple demo routines to make a high level coded demo.

My one is A5 format, but as thick as me!!!

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Originally Posted by v85rawdeal

My one is A5 format, but as thick as me!!!

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2,304,216,251,122,354 pages in a book? Geez that's one thick book.;)

As for scanning i have one Amiga book and thats "Complete Amiga C" and that's quite a thick book as well. When I've finished all my other scanning projects (I'm currently scanning in as many Top Secret/S.I. RPG books I can lay my hands on and am the only person in the world scanning them) I may start on this however OCRing is a bitch. The OCR software in Acrobat Pro 9 is useless and at the moment I have ABBYY Finereader 9.0 for OCR software and it takes an age to do one page let alone the 900+ in the book I've got so if i do scan them I won't be OCRing I'm afraid.

I don't own any Amiga related book, I own some other great gaming books, but nothing related to Amiga.

A good list of Amiga reference books for us to utilise for this project is found at http://www.amigau.com/aig/books.html There are a lot more listed there than I initially thought were published for the Amiga. It is going to take some time to try and track that lot down, or anyone owning them and willing to scan or donate them. But then, that is half the challenge! ;)

I'm currently creating a few PDF's of RPG's at the moment and I'm using Acrobat 9 Pro Extended and the OCR option on that is very good and allows for searchable text. I need to play around a bit more to look at adding bookmarks etc. What I'll then do is update some of the AMiga instruction manuals I've already scanned in and add them to the ftp so you can see what you think.

Sounds great. Acrobat is really good, but it can sometimes over complicate things.

I've added the OCR'd files to the ftp in the food folder as that's out of the way and shouldn't interfere with anything.

This is a great idea, alot of books are getting harder to find.

I would suggest upload PDFs and if anyone complains, take them off.
Looking for authors whilst a good way, would take too long for budding new users.

Nuance Omnipage is a good OCR program.

I was trying to find the rare book Arexx Cookbook and the only place that has it is at the Library of Congress (all us books by law are there i think).

Anyone live nearby ?

I agree. I've been trying to contact authors for a couple of years now to gain permission. So far Only Future Publishing and Bruce Smith Books have been in communication with me and said they are fine with it.