I do stand corrected.
Now, how much of those scans were OCR'd, indexed and done properly and not just some raw scan?
/edit to add
I was curious, because I really didn't remember a lot of earlier books included in the scans. So, I sauntered over to the less polite side of the Internet and looked at what is available on Torrent.
And, lo and behold, even things like the Complete Ninja (which is hardly an obscure book) is an amateur scan.
There were THOUSANDS of titles for 2e. There are almost as many titles for 2e as there are for 3e including OGL material. It's a close race. I'd be very surprised if a majority of those titles were scanned. Never mind the hundreds of 2e Boxed sets. And, yup, it's a couple of HUNDRED boxed sets.
I believe it's [MENTION=60075]Windjammer[/MENTION] who has compiled the lists of publications. It's FREAKING huge.
I'm pretty sure that most of the back catalog was scanned in, and only a relative handful were missed . . . . but I'd have to go research that, and I'm waaaaay too lazy.
But, yeah, for the most part, the quality was crap. WotC began scanning the physical books in house, not with equipment any better than your average home PC scanner and accompanying software, and it certainly was never made a priority for better equipment, software, or serious manpower. After a time, WotC outsourced it to a former employee who was running his own d20 business (can't remember the guys name or the company name) and the quality dropped even further. I don't really blame the guy WotC outsourced it too, he did the best he could with the resources given. Remember this was actually BEFORE the sale of game PDFs became "standard", WotC was ahead of the curve. And the value of taking the time to do it right wasn't the priority, it was being done simply for fan service and received very little resources.
The outsourced guy even asked the fans to contribute hard copies of back catalog items WotC didn't give him, I know because I contributed. The outsourced guy and the fans involved knew what kind of quality we were getting into, but felt a crappy quality digital record was better than none. Kinda odd, considering the recent announcement that WotC just had a rather complete (sounding) archive shipped from Wisconsin to Washington.
I have a ton of the old ESD pdfs so I can talk about them some.
They're... semi-OCRed. I can cut and paste some text in some of them but it frequently skips lines/words/etc. when I try to select sections. They do also have section bookmarks... mostly. These are very uneven in granularity/usefulness from PDF to PDF. Some lack them entirely.
The worst thing though, is maps, whether on the inside covers or poster-sized stuff. The poster sized stuff is all cut up page by page so you couldn't do a large format print even if you wanted, stuff wouldn't line up even if you tried to tape it all together because some pages are scanned crookedly and edges are missing, etc., etc.
For the most part, they're effectively useless for printing; even the 'good' ones look pretty bad.
A vaguely-passable quality product would mean redoing the scanning process entirely from scratch, there's no question about that. A good quality product would mean redoing the type and layout entirely using modern publishing tools.
Were I WotC I would feel pretty iffy about putting out anything as a branded product that wasn't at the "good" quality level I mention above, like they're doing with the 3 1e rulebooks.
EDIT: And yes there are several products missing, the most important of which is probably City of Greyhawk (he said with no bias at all...) Orcs of Thar was also unavailable, which I always chalked up to it being probably the most racist product TSR ever put out.
Yup. If WotC took the existing pre-3E scans to sell now, the would get reamed for pushing a poor quality product, they are most definitely the company that cannot win to a certain segment of their customer base, of D&D fans.
My hope is that WotC is taking the time now to do it right. Good quality reproductions or scans made available digitally, either individually or as part of a DDI subscription deal, or perhaps even both. I doubt the format will be PDF, but we'll see . . . . well, hopefully we'll see, at some point, that is.