The local university has a room with a drawers and drawers full of microfilms containing English books from 1475 through 1800. Every so often, I'll go and print out a book or two, with the result that I've now got a filing cabinet full of old books on various subjects I'm interested in.

Unfortunately, that's space that could easily be used for other things, so I thought, Why not scan them in and put them on CD-ROM?

And then I thought, Why not turn them into PDFs and put them on the Internet for anyone else who might find them useful?

Tangent: this is why I shall never be a successful businessman. A successful businessman would have thought, Why not print them and sell them for a whole lot of money? Then again, a successful businessman would be dealing with something of greater interest to the general public. About the only people who might be interested in these are SCAdians and other reënactors, who are notorious for spending great amounts of money on alcohol, armor and occasionally clothing, but rarely on books. Generally speaking, of course; there are some who buy entire libraries, but they seem to be vastly outnumbered by those who don't.

I've scanned three and a half books in since Friday night (along with doing other things, such as band rehearsal, seeing X2, and so forth), and have come to a few conclusions:

1. I'm definitely going to have to quit cleaning up the images, or I'll never get through the filing cabinet.
2. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors saw nothing wrong with taking several paragraphs to explain something that could have been said in one sentence.
3. If The GIMP didn't have scripting capabilities, I'd have given up halfway through the first book. It's very nice to be able to select one menu function which changes the image's mode to black-and-white, crops out all the whitespace on the borders, rotates it to the proper orientation and then sends it to the clipboard so it can be pasted into another application. Now if only I could get the script to actually perform the scanning, and close the window after the image has been sent to the clipboard...
4. I need to learn OpenOffice scripting, so I can perform the same sorts of time-saving measures on the other end.