Astonishing Perfection

 

Astonishing perfection is familiar to me from Japanese culture, but there is, among us Jews, one custom in which it appears proudly: whoever wants to finance a Torah scroll turns to a Torah copying expert, pays him a respectable sum of money, and waits many months to his finished copy. But if there was one wrong letter in the book no one should read this book, and all the tremendous effort was in vain. This custom express respect for the Torah, for the book, for the word.

And I'm telling you all this so that you'll understand correctly the magnitude of the disgrace of Google's Global Library Project that has negligently copied millions of books using sophisticated scanners, and their many errors are accessible for free, to anyone who wants them, at any time,  on the Internet. To fix them require more resources than Google allocated to upload them so that most likely humanity will have to live with these errors until the sun goes out, if at all. 

See: http://firstmonday.org/article/view/1972/1847