Slashdot Mirror

Jon Noring writes "Michael Hart's venerable Project Gutenberg, based in the United States, is now being threatened with a lawsuit from the estate of the long-deceased author of 'Gone With The Wind.' The threat is being made because Project Gutenberg of Australia (link not provided) has the digital text version of GWTW on its server (GWTW is Public Domain in Australia), which, according to the estate's lawyers, is downloadable from the United States. Further information, including the copy of the 'take down' letter, and some commentary, is given at TeleRead. It is likely the threat is legally meritless, yet it is troubling, showing how online repositories of public domain works may be impacted by threats from other countries where the works are still covered under copyright."

bbc writes "Distributed Proofreaders has posted its 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers. Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR'ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg."

bbc writes "Distributed Proofreaders has posted its 5,000th ebook to Project Gutenberg. The book, a Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, by John W. Cousin, was proofed for this special occasion by over 500 volunteers. Distributed Proofreaders is a project that distributes the otherwise gargantuan task of correcting scanning and recognition errors in an OCR'ed text. The project has thousands of volunteers, of which many hundreds are active on any given day. It is currently the main supplier of etexts for Project Gutenberg."

Back in 2001 we did a "double" Slashdot Interview with Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg and Jimmy Wales of the then-brand-new Nupedia, which has since become the amazingly useful Wikipedia. This is a perfect time to catch up with Jimbo (as friends call him), and learn not only how he managed to make Wikipedia work and grow so well, but what we can do to help -- and what future plans he has for this outstanding Web resource. (10 of your highest-moderated questions will be sent to Jimbo by email. We'll post his answers as soon as we get them back.)

AndrewRUK writes "Earlier today, Project Gutenberg's founder, Micheal Hart, announced that the project has passed the milestone of 10,000 free eBooks available, with the publication of the Magna Carta.Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, with the aim of "[making] information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search." In the 32 years since the project started, over 10,000 books, ranging from the Bible to school textbooks, and from the complete works of Shakespeare to the USA's declaration of independence, have been made freely available to the public by Project Gutenberg."

clonebarkins writes "The BBC is reporting on a new project to create 3D scans of ancient tablets written in cuneiform. They are using software from Kestrel 3D. Just wait till Project Gutenberg gets a hold of these!"

Charles Franks writes "Two years ago I started building an online proofreading system as a way to help Project Gutenberg (PG) get more books online: Distributed Proofreaders (DP). The concept is simple, we scan books and load the image and OCR output for each page into the online system. Next, proofreaders compare the OCR text to the image making any corrections as necessary, each page gets looked at twice. Finally the output from the site is massaged into a PG e-text and submitted to PG for posting to the archive. Now, nearly 600 books and a lot of PHP code later, we have snuggled into our new home which is graciously provided by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. Now that we have 'real' resources available to us (the original site ran on a Pentium 200 over my 128kbps upstream cablemodem) I would like to invite the online community at large to help us put even more books online. To this end I would like to ask everyone to do 'Just One Page a Day'. Thank you, Charles Franks"

blindambition writes "Fatbrain announced a new initiative called eMatter. Basically, for 1$ per month, you can put your book/paper online, set a price, and people can download it, while you get the royalties (between 50 to 100%) of each copy sold. " Excellent idea, although it's still not open-source writing, like Project Gutenberg. But then again, I suppose living authors need to eat too.

I'm sure a lot of you knew it was coming. The steady stream of emails asking "When is Slashdot gonna IPO" and messages from VCs pretty well proves that you guys knew it as well as I did. Well the cost and overhead of running Slashdot independently finally began to overwhelm us. After much deliberation and careful analysis, we're excited to announce that we've been acquired by Andover.net. Read more to learn what this means. Why did you do this?

Slashdot keeps growing. The overhead and costs associated with running this beast has become astronomical. Hemos and I work marathon weeks, and there still isn't enough time to get everything done. There are always banner ads needing selling, stories needing posting, perl needing hacking, and readers with questions needing answering. Besides that, our single channel ISDN connection is awfully saturated, and the "Business" work of running this website is beginning to be nearly as much work as the "Website" part of the site.

We had 2 options: get cash from some investors and hire a staff, or or find a company that we felt understood what we wanted to accomplish here, and use their money to hire help.

Hiring our own staff would mean hiring suits and marketing people. We decided that simply being acquried would allow someone else to worry about the suits and marketroids- we would simply benefit from their existing business infrastructure, and we could concentrate on what we already know how to do: Run a website.

What do we intend to do? Well for starters we'll be able to pay several of the guys who have been volunteering their time for so long. Plus, we'll be able to hire people to help sell banner ads, and the administer the servers, and maybe to debug code. Basically, a support staff so that Hemos and I can simplify our lives, and Slashdot won't have to depend on us 24/7. And we have new things that we want to do on Slashdot, so offloading tasks from me will us to focus on other things that we want to do around here.

We'll start doing things like content mirroring. We'll have more servers, and hopefully soon servers will pop up on each coast. And we'll be able to have experts help pull it all together. The end result will be a faster, more stable Slashdot.

Why Andover?

We talked to several companies: Some that you've heard of, and some that you haven't. We were looking for a company that would guarantee us complete and total creative control, but provide us the financial resources necessary to expand Slashdot in the way we consider best "right". And whoever became involved, they had to be "Outside" the linux/open source world to a certain degree: we didn't want anyone to think that a company might buy us simply to gain an advantage in the story select.

Andover is good for that- they aren't a "Linux" company - they run Linux, and they read Slashdot, but they don't sell a distribution, or Linux boxes, or anything related to Linux . In fact, we've only mentioned them on Slashdot a couple of times in the past.

Best of all- they're smart guys. They understand what Slashdot is, and they respect that they can't change it without destroying what it is. So they are happy to guarantee (it's even in the contract!) that Hemos and I would retain full control of the site, while taking advantage of their business resources to take care of that icky part of running this monster. To guarantee that, I've also been appointed to the Andover.Net board. (I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to wear a tie)

What is Andover

A Media Company. An internet company. They run websites. Sorta like Earthweb or Internet.com. All of their existing sites are done essentially in-house. They have several sharp hacks over there and I'm looking forward to working with them. They also have top notch guys-with-ties, and a real keen grasp of where things are going in this business.

Conclusion I couldn't be more excited about this. I finally will have the ability to expand Slashdot the way I want to. I'll have the ability to pay people that have been volunteering hundreds of hours of time to help. And I have complete control over Slashdot's future, without the financial burden that has been growing over the last year. This couldn't be better for Slashdot, and I hope I haven't offended anywone to bad. We fundamentally will not change anything, we'll just have a better infrastructure to do what we've always done.

The final cool part of this is that I get to say thanks to you guys. Most of what we're getting is a piece of Andover.Net. And after I pay off my student loans and Hemos pays off his credit cards, we want to make sizable donations to some causes that we think are important. This seems like the best way for us to give back to the community that made us successful.

• The Free Software Foundation - How can we not give back to them for making so much cool stuff possible.
• Debian - I love Debian. I just want to make sure that they keep going strong. Debian's success is critical to the future of Linux. Besides, I wanna make sure that my apt-get command gets the newest version of everything cool.
• Project Gutenberg - Keeping books online and making them available to the world is important.
• The Macatawa Area Community Network - They give free network access to our hometown. They were the original home of Slashdot- and they let us keep it there for several months even when we were saturating their T1 every afternoon.
• Hope College - We both graduated and we want to set up a scholarship or something there. I want it to be for a "Hot Chick Going into CompSci" but we'll have to see if they'll let me do that...
• Foresight Institute - So hemos is obsessed with nanotech. He wants to give them money in exchange for a campbell's soup can of nanites He's wierd, but hey.

We're happy about this, but I know not all of you will be. To those of you who think I'm wrong, I'm sorry. I really believe that this will allow me to make Slashdot into something even better then it is today, without sacrificing what it already is. Its been a crazy ride so far, and now its only going to get crazier.

If you want to contact jeff or I, you can email malda@slashdot.org or hemos@slashdot.org. We'll try to respond, but I suspect we're going to get flooded, so be patient.

Update: 06/29 02:12 by CT : Just FWIW, this has no effect on the Slash source code release. It will still be released whenever I have time to work on it. In fact, hopefully now since I'll have some help around here with the sysadmin stuff, I'll be able to focus on it some more...

AMK writes "An Open Source Books campaign has been started, which aims to fight the recent extension of US copyrights to 95 years after the author's death, instead of 75. This doesn't benefit the authors, who are dead, after all, but does damage efforts like Project Gutenberg. See this Wired story for more information, and add the "Open Source Books" icon to your Web page. "