fusso - 25-11-2019 at 10:14
"Old textbooks" refer to textbooks that were published before word processors were invented. They look yellow, have uneven background colour and used
antique fonts. Some of these books were scanned and text was extracted into a copiable format. But I've never seen any such books converted into more
modern format, ie the background colour looks as new as if they were edited by word processors, use modern fonts, such that someone would thought that
they were published in this digital era. Do these modernised textbooks exist, or has anyone on earth ever attempted this?
andy1988 - 25-11-2019 at 11:01
Yep, see the Internet Archive. You will find many books with expired copyright there, those are in the public domain. You can download in various formats,
including optical character recognition (OCR) data/formats; the text is searchable and selectable via computer interface.
A business model of some publishers is to take those free public domain books and sell them via outlets like Amazon/ebay... for $10 or whatever as an
ebook or print copy. With minor modifications like a page long professional introduction about their outstanding historical book publication company.
Chances are if you Google search on for a book in the public domain you'll be presented with these store page listings and not see a result for the
free Internet Archive (Google has an incentive I expect...). I suggest searching the Internet Archive for the old book before you search Google for
this reason.
[Edited on 26-11-2019 by andy1988]