On digitize public-domain Chinese books or other resources

Sorry, maybe I should put this thread into the discussion page for China TF, I only want to track the progress of the recommandations by China TF recent days.

For your questions, I put my answer below:

  • Would substantial political issues be raised by some of the material? With Google's relationship with China predicate problems of any sort? How would Wx ensure that international copyright standards be upheld (positing that some material in Chinese may violate international copyright law)?
    • I don't think these materials could cause any political or legal issues, because the author of them all died hundreds or even thousands of years ago. These knowledge are belong to all humankind.
  • And with come older books containing characters not readily understood by modern readers, how would they be presented?
    • Unicode support most of the Chinese characters, in fact Unicode pick these characters from Kangxi Dictionary which compiled hundreds of years ago
    • The Chinese characters are stable for thousands of years, well-educated users, esp. from Hong Kong and Taiwan can recognize most of them without any difficulty.
    • Some classic books are published by modern publisher, they had already normalized these books and no special characters are there.
    • Some material, esp. from oracle bone, bronze ware are not supported by Unicode, we may not digitize them right now.
Mountain11:38, 7 April 2010