There is a course at the University of Northern Iowa called "The Anthropology of Zombies" this semester
That sounds better than a course offered by an English department but until there's one cross-listed between Criminal Justice and Medicine, it's all just talk!
I think you're underestimating the public good from what Google provides but even so, the universities get their own copy of the data for their books so they can do even more with it, as copyright allows.
To borrow a phrase from Michael Jackson.. What have you done for me lately?
That's Janet! Miss Jackson if you're nasty.
InftyReader is a program that specializes in doing OCR on scientific documents and mathematical formulas. It saves documents in a variety of formats including LaTeX and MathML.
Two unfortunate things about it: 1) it's a Windows binary 2) it costs $900USD for 2 concurrent use licenses. It was free until they licensed a conventional OCR engine to better handle the text (its non-math recognition was pretty bad before).
The tricky part of the argument is this. It's not the publishers who are fighting this. They love expanding the e-book market. Indeed the publisher selling the e-book rights might never have bought the audio rights from the author.
According to a panelist recorded for The Command Line Podcast, publishers typically do buy the audio rights and a whole bunch of other rights from the author but usually don't to use them unless a work proves to be popular enough to justify the added expense to produce an audiobook edition.
However, I think the panelist is most familiar with a niche genre so what's typical in her experience may not be typical in others'.
I heard a long Quirks & Quarks story about Vitamin D a few weeks ago. The US and Canadian RDAs for Vitamin D, 400 IU, are based on amounts meant to aid bone health, not for these other benefits. The amount in the typical multivitamin will be 400 IU, not the 800 IU recommended here. Unless you wash down your multivitamin with fortified milk every day, you're probably not going to ingest the amount Vitamin D they think you should. Balance that with your sunlight exposure in your region. I'm in New England so as long as I don't keep myself cooped up, I'll get enough Vitamin D from sunlight alone maybe half the year.
A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson
