Idea: the next Google Books

1) Take a collection of books from Project Gutenberg or Google Books on a given time period

2) Apply Named Entity Recognition to build a cross-book NLP index

3) Load this into a public Roam graph

4) View what N books have to say about a given event https://twitter.com/Conaw/status/1307107745397604354">https://twitter.com/Conaw/sta...

You want to do this for one time period to debug the NER and demonstrate the value proposition.

As you add genres, you& #39;ll need to address new difficulties (eg Unicode). Once it works for all old books...then extend to Sci-Hub & Kindle?

See related tweet: https://twitter.com/mekarpeles/status/1307546539376566274">https://twitter.com/mekarpele...

If this adds enough value, perhaps the next generation of authors will open source their books, load them into Roam, encourage annotation/updates/interaction, and monetize by charging for the community rather than the content.