When I digitized the first-edition OED, it took me about a month of nights, using equipment the Internet Archive let me use.  That means I was doing about 1000 pages a night, including nights when I didn&#x27;t work and nights when I got lost reading it.  It doesn&#x27;t take even close to a month to build a book-digitizing machine (thanks, in large part, to the Archive sharing information about the approach that worked for its Scribes), so the labor is the majority of the cost.  Based on this and on US$15&#x2F;hour for an 8-hour day, digitizing a letter should cost about 12¢.<p>12¢ per letter, but then how do you &quot;create and maintain an archival site&quot;?  You make a torrent and seed it.  If each 12¢ page is 35 megapixels (A4&#x2F;letter at 600dpi), then 8:1 JPEG-2000 compression should get you about half a megabyte per page.  Half a megabyte of disk space is 0.0015¢.  I pay about US$32 a month for my internet connection here in Argentina, and it can sustain about half a megabit per second, upstream, which is 164 gigabytes per month; so uploading that page to the swarm takes about 8 seconds and costs 0.01¢.  You probably only have to do this once, but you might need to occasionally step in to resuscitate the swarm if all the other seeds die.<p>So, to sum up, this &quot;very considerable expense in itself&quot; costs 12¢ per letter to digitize, 0.0015¢ per letter to create, and 0.01¢ per letter to maintain an archival site.<p>You&#x27;re right about the copyright questions, which could easily cost US$1000 (100,000¢) per letter.   And <i>that</i> is the <i>true</i> unseen theft of <i>the world&#x27;s</i> literary history.