Timeline for A global mathematics library
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 6 at 15:09 | comment | added | Bogdan Grechuk | What if there will be ONE country in the word which openly declare that they do not accept publisher rights, patents, etc., and by the law of this country everyone has the right to scan and put online any information they like? Then this country could create and maintain such database. If would be illegal in other countries, but at least it would exist. | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 21:11 | comment | added | LSpice | @darijgrinberg, I definitely have nothing against those who prefer e-books, and am glad that they're there when I need them (like in the US now—I'm definitely not going in our library, even when it opens). I just don't agree that it's everyone's first choice. | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 20:54 | comment | added | darij grinberg | @LSpice: Having to crawl or climb on a chair to reach the appropriate shelves of a library isn't always fun either :) And I have to say, after seeing publisher after publisher lose the art of bookbinding, that there are many books I'd prefer to print out myself. | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 5:51 | comment | added | erz | @KevinArlin one can print the whole book. Also, I think it is acceptable to print out only the relevant pages and read them from the paper, and once a reference to some early place pops out look it up on the screen | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 4:11 | comment | added | Kevin Carlson | @erz Many books cross-reference themselves across hundreds of pages constantly. There's a reason books are books, and not sequences of articles. | |
| Jul 16, 2020 at 3:05 | comment | added | erz | @LSpice your friend can print out the relevant pages | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 23:18 | comment | added | LSpice | @darijgrinberg, I'm not sure that LibGen is the preferred resource over library books for everyone. A, uh, friend of mine definitely consults it whenever needed to stock an electronic library (say, for books to take along on travel), but, pre-pandemic, I would almost always go to the physical library to get a book (not an article). It's just too hard to browse, properly to bookmark, to compare side-by-side, etc. in an electronic reference; the electronic reading experience remains sub-par for me. | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 20:23 | comment | added | darij grinberg | De-facto, Library Genesis is the library everyone uses these days as a first source for mathematics books; physical libraries are consulted as a last resort, for the rare books that are not (yet) on Library Genesis. But there is a huge gap between having a scan and having a readable "true PDF" or TeX file. MathPix is a promising OCR tool for mathematical formulas, but it has its limits, and typesetting can be very diverse. (Not to mention that lots of scans aren't good enough to leave OCR to machines.) | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 20:07 | comment | added | Daniele Tampieri | Nice answer and also nice cited article. And I also partly agree with your conclusions: if the problem is dealt only on a pure economic interest basis, if Google has not succeeded, then no one will. However I hope that there will be more space for science and a little less (but reasonably sufficient) space for business. After all, the Taj-Mahal, St. Peter's Basilica, and almost everything it made by men that is worth to see, has not been built with the aim of making money about it. | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 19:08 | comment | added | Gerhard Paseman | So end run around the old system: publish newly created mathematics (and synopses and surveys of older math) under a free-to-distribute license. Just because it was done the old-fashioned way does not mean it has to stay that way. Gerhard "Get Rid Of Tradition,... Tradition!" Paseman, 2020.07.15. | |
| Jul 15, 2020 at 18:40 | history | answered | David White | CC BY-SA 4.0 |