The software is equally fine, with beyond-faithful reproduction and display. You can see what amounts to a digital photograph of the original, and then look at an extremely similar rendition that incorporates all of the database features such as searching. Gabriel C.M. Yu is chairman of ITVentures Ltd., which controls Digital Heritage. But I stopped by his offices, high in a skyscraper overlooking Hong Kong's fabled harbor, mostly to hear about the Siku Quanshu. Yu takes justified pride in the project.
Libraries are the major customers so far.
He doesn't seem to care much about direct return on this investment, for several reasons. For one thing, the project has been as much a labor of love as a business deal. But the technology his team created for this project seems likely to pay back many times over. Some of the techniques are quite complex, largely because of the language. The electronic Siku Quanshu was developed using an extremely comprehensive Chinese character set.