Re: Apple //c Technical Reference Manual

["Matt Lichtenberg" <kerobaros@gmail.com>]

Forgive my muddled brain for this post; it's a Sunday, and I'm relaxing
as befits that fact.

Eric Shepherd wrote:
> photocopies.  If Syndicomm were actually profitable (it roughly breaks
> even on average) enough for me to spend more time at it, I'd look at
> recreating the books in proper PDF format with real text instead of
> scans, because that would produce the best output -- and because
> printing hundreds of pages of full-page scans takes a very long time.

Well, I hate to volunteer the community, but if we all worked together
to create a higher-quality PDF or similar clone of the manual.. what
would the legalities be surrounding that?  Would the people who've
already bought a copy from you be entitled to a copy of the
higher-quality version?  Would it become community property?  Would it
be legal in the first place?

> Yes and no.  I sell every product I have a license for that I also have
> a master for.  There are a couple of products that I could sell legally
> if I had masters, but there are none.  These include the ProDOS 8
> Technical Reference and the Apple IIe Technical Reference.

Again, would it be possible to recreate these in some form from the
copies that the community has, and do the same as I mentioned for the
//c book?

> I have personal, original copies of a number of the products I sell
> but, for what I hope are obvious reasons, I don't want to tear up my
> only copies of anything in order to rescan them.

Well, obviously. ;)

> Not to mention that scanning hundreds upon hundreds of double-sided
> pages is extraordinarily tedious (much more so, in fact, than scanning
> single-sided pages, since a minor mistake can result in a horrible
> mishmash of a PDF).
>
> If I had spare copies of the books -- and if I thought that rescanning
> the books would result in enough additional sales to justify the
> expense -- I would seriously consider buying one of the new
> double-sided auto-feeding scanners Epson just released, which would
> make rescanning the books relatively easy to do.

I hate to point this out, but my workplace (a computer lab at a local
college here in St. Louis) has an auto-feeding scanner.  It is
single-sided, to the best of my ability, but the computer it's attached
to has a recent copy of Omni-Page on it.  I've used it to scan a number
of the school's books for its own use, and other than a few small
PEBKACs, I've had no problems.

> In a perfect world, I'd have real masters and none of this would be
> necessary.  Heck, in a perfect world, I'd have the original Word files
> used to create these books in the first place and could print from
> that, which would be faster and result in lovely output quality.

Maybe we can work together to accomplish something similar to this.

-Matt