But we can’t expect more; because I’m getting messages that the whole thing is a bit of a scam. The images are all real; but they cost something like $4,000 each to produce, when you look at the budget (I have no final figures yet).

Of course no conceivable photography of pages in a book, however fragile, could cost that. The equipment is an overhead, but doubtless $40,000 would buy the ultimate resolutions possible. Staff time is perhaps $30-$40 an hour. So what on earth do they do, at that price, for 100 hours per image?

In truth the project may well be a fraud; a trick to obtain a very large sum of money, and spend most of it on other things that the staff consider more important. At that sort of price, of course, they’ll be very happy to ask for more money.

I hope I’m wrong; I don’t yet know the details. But they most certainly did something of the kind when they photographed two Gutenberg bibles. It cost $22m, I believe. They took a couple of thousand images. Average price per image was $10,000. Form your own opinion about that!

It’s a nice way for the staff to feed money into payrises and new equipment, instead of photographing masses of books and making them available online. It’s not so nice for the rest of us.