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While I'm actually very fond of reading large amounts of text on the computer - I've been making my way through many of the classics via Project Gutenberg - there's nothing that quite replaces the feel and smell of having a book that's over a hundred years old in your hands. At that, I've only had luck with reading books with the print part of it. Illustrations and things often slow to a crawl. So nice that real life has no lag...

As the "profitability" # -- i.e. a certain number of sales required to keep editors, lawyers, accountants, marketing reps and CEOs employed has risen, a number of these "academic publishers" have started to offer works well outside the traditional scope of academic publishing--I'm thinking University of Nebraska with SciFi; U of Chicago with mysteries, etc. They're offering up genre titles these days and selling into the 10s of thousands, which to a small press (with fewer executives, reps, etc.) is a comparative gold mine.

Could be worse. It's not clear whether, say, Phil Wylie, who wrote the inspirations for Superman, or R. Gulik, who scrawled Judge Dee could be published by the mainstream anymore, but their books are selling, and some of these nonprofits are operating in every sense like a for-profit, save at tax-time.

It may also be that the tiny academic presses, which sell, say, 200 copies a year of a book on squid larvae (at $80 a pop), are terrified at the onset of google print, as it does put into question the reason for their existence, but, hey, in a few years that squid larvae enthusiast will just put his book up on the web free, anyway.

I'd be willing to bet, however, that many of those presses signing up for the queries are firms that offer rare 18th century reprints for $2-300 a copy; but, well, Project Gutenberg's gonna eliminate that business model in short order no matter what google does.

Project Gutenberg
Lots of literature. And most are just straight text so you can read them with anything.

Do I dare to hope it will come preloaded with Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and the full collection of Project GutenbergeBooks?

(I remember how intriguing it was when Steve Jobs premiered the NeXT with the American Heritage dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare as standard equipment...)

Well, there's the Distributed Proofreaders project for Project Gutenberg... but PG isn't a "we must be the source" attitude from what I've seen. As far as PG is concerned, the more eBooks, the better.

DP probably isn't threatened either - they just shift focus to books that are not in the Harvard collection to avoid duplication of effort.

Heh heh... glad someone would enjoy it. Once you're done with that, check out Project Gutenberg's copy of my absolute favorite: http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/7/7/2776/2776-8.tx t

Ok, back to topic - CURSE THOSE SPAMMERS!!!

What, faacism Your kidding right? Its more like the Communist Manifesto. Heres a gander at 10 Karls points:

1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rent to public purpose.

The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1868), and various zoning, school & property taxes. Also the Bureau of Land Management.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

Misapplication of the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913, The Social Security Act of 1936.; Joint House Resolution 192 of 1933; and various State "income" taxes. We call it "paying your fair share".

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

We call it Federal & State estate Tax (1916); or reformed Probate Laws, and limited inheritance via arbitrary inheritance tax statutes.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

We call in government seizures, tax liens, Public "law" 99-570 (1986); Executive order 11490, sections 1205, 2002 which gives private land to the Department of Urban Development; the imprisonment of "terrorists" and those who speak out or write against the "government" (1997 Crime/Terrorist Bill); or the IRS confiscation of property without due process.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

We call it the Federal Reserve which is a credit/debt system nationally organized by the Federal Reserve act of 1913. All local banks are members of the Fed system, and are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transportation in the hands of the State.

We call it the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Transportation (DOT) madated through the ICC act of 1887, the Commissions Act of 1934, The Interstate Commerce Commission established in 1938, The Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Executive orders 11490, 10999, as well as State mandated driver's licenses and Department of Transportation regulations.

7. Extention of factories and instruments of production owned by the State, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

We call it corporate capacity, The Desert Entry Act and The Department of Agriculture. As well as the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of Interior, the Evironmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service, and the IRS control of business through corporate regulations.

8. Equal liablity of all to labor. Establishment of Industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

We call it the Social Security Administration and The Department of Labor. The National debt and inflation caused by the communal bank has caused the need for a two "income" family. Woman in the workplace since the 1920s, the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assorted Socialist Unions, affirmative action, the Federal Public Works Program and of course Executive order 11000.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

We call it the Planning Reorganization act of 1949 , zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) and Super Corporate Farms, as well as Executive orders 11647, 11731 (ten regions) and Public "law" 89-136.

10. Free education for all children in government schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. etc.

People are being taxed to support what we call "public" schools, which train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based "Education".

Seems to me you read teh wrong part of that website ;-)
Cheers,
]-[ellbilly

The Country of the Blind by H.G. Wells. (search the page for "Chimborazo")

This is a short story about a guy who discovers a land where everyone is blind and he thinks he can rule them because he has sight. He soon finds out that it isn't as easy as that.

Just let me know when they find Mark Twain's Curious Republic of Gondour

I took a course on the philosophy of modern physics at university and on the our text books was Einstein's own called Relativity : the Special and General Theory fairly informative and yet accesible. It is available for free from Project Gutenberg. Just click on the first link.

Yeah! Didn't you ever read those documentaries about Doctor Fu Manchu? They're just plain evil over there. Luckily, their women go ga-ga over our round eyes...

I am at the moment reading Two Treatises Of Government, by John Locke. He discusses the nature of property. Society did not provide my labor, I did. Society did not provide the raw materials. God (or nature) did. These are the two components of property. Society did not provide either.

Society is just a collection of people who interact with each other. The property of the society is nothing but the sum of the property owned by the individuals. However, each individual is capable of owning property independantly from society. This means that there is nothing that society can give, without taking from an individual, because society owns nothing independantly from any individual.

This means society cannot provide property. Only individuals can produce it, and society has no way of obtaining it, except by force (theft, or robbery). So, if society provided someone with some property, it is stolen goods,[1] and society has no rights to it. If someone expects society to provide him with propery, his expectations are wrong.

[1] Well, I guess it could also be donated by the individual, but usually such donation is from one individual to another, society is not a party to the transaction.

Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Plato, and lots of others are available copyright-free at the Gutenberg Project.

Project Gutenberg contributed an amici brief with Prelinger & the Internet Archive. We welcome the opportunity to show how the use of p2p for legitimate copyright-free works has grown since we wrote the brief (and it was large then, already).

With the help of Magnetlinks (an open standard), all of the Gutenberg content is now available for direct download to enabled p2p programs via the Gutenberg search page. This is very cool, and helps our free eBooks to get around. If you use p2p software, consider sharing Project Gutenberg content in your "shared items" location.

On a somewhat different note, to anticipate a frequent /. contribution: it is still quite unclear whether individual readers (or listeners) violate copyright when they view/read an item for personal non-commercial use in many situations. For example, if you own a print copy of Orwell's 1984 and are in the US (where it's still copyrighted), is it legal for you to view the online copy of 1984 from Project Gutenberg of Australia? Or, if you are in Holland, can you view James Joyce's Ulysses from Project Gutenberg even though it still has copyright protection in life+70 countries? What if you already own a copy of the book? The core issue, yet to be decided for any media I can think of, is what happens when you purchase an "item" - did you purchase a right to use the item in various forms, or some piece of plastic or dead tree? The MPAA/RIAA & like-minded companies want all the benefits, so that if you lose your dead tree you need to buy another one (because you don't have the rights to the intellectual creation, just the crud it was printed on), but if you want to put a CD on your MP3 player you can't (because you own the piece of plastic, not a license to the music). The intersection between fair use, licensing and Title 17 (particularly the DMCA extensions) has not been addressed fully, and overlaps with issues like the applicability of EULAs. There's lots of work yet to be done.

Now imagine that, from any web browser, you can access any book in the LoC for which the copyright has expired. I like that idea!

That's the idea of Project Gutenberg. It's been around for quite some time now, and everybody is free to join their distributed proofreading network!

"There are plenty of books that are out of print with no copyright restrictions on them. Since google has plenty of resources and aims to put all available information in the hands of users, would they please consider putting up the entire text of such books online? "

Project Gutenberg already does this.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem as if Google can search Gutenberg texts. In this case, you could always download the texts from Gutenberg and index them yourself. Gutenberg texts have expired copyrights.

Wild guess, (and I haven't tested it at all, but might...) but this could possibly be because War and Peace is no longer protected by copyright. (And is available for free from Project Gutenberg).

Does anybody know if they're using texts from Guternburg for this? It'd be a good combination.

site:gutenberg.net "It was the best of times"

They could already be using Project Gutenberg for tons of material. I doubt this will really affect them much.

Uh... hate to break it to you, but most campuses name buildings after whoever fronts the cash, not after anyone "inspiring".

Hate to be the one to let you in on the big secret, but the reason the academics are up in arms is that this is a 20-year trend which is worrying. This isn't at all true. With the exception of founders naming their schools after themselves, as your oh-so-sage example trips over, the bulk of buildings on school campuses - even donated ones! - are named for luminaries, not people with pocketbooks.

When you struggle to find evidence, please consider that until recently, benefactors almost never gave single buildings. Consider, for example, that every single Rutgers campus and every building on both Livingston and Douglass campuses except for the dorms which have names are named for intellectuals.

I find it particularly ironic

Watch futurama until you know what the word ironic means, please. Oh, and when you get m-w.com to back you up, please go ask a scholar what decimate means and look that up too. When you get confused why that happened, look up translucent, aenima and etiquette. Now finally beginning to grasp that dictionaries gloss over significant usage even when etymological, start your actual education with Ambrose Bierce's "A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults," freely available at Project Gutenberg.

Oh, and while you're pretending to know things, the person you're talking about is not the Stanford for whom the school was named, but rather his father, who built the school in recognition of his son who, while voicing strong opinions on the then-abominable state of American higher education, had died of Typhoid. The son was, in fact, quite the academic, though he died too early to make much personal contribution.

Nice try, though; you got some moderators to fall for your plot. Mod parent down, please; +4 insightful isn't exactly fair to Leland's (false) memory.

Uh... hate to break it to you, but most campuses name buildings after whoever fronts the cash, not after anyone "inspiring".

Hate to be the one to let you in on the big secret, but the reason the academics are up in arms is that this is a 20-year trend which is worrying. This isn't at all true. With the exception of founders naming their schools after themselves, as your oh-so-sage example trips over, the bulk of buildings on school campuses - even donated ones! - are named for luminaries, not people with pocketbooks.

When you struggle to find evidence, please consider that until recently, benefactors almost never gave single buildings. Consider, for example, that every single Rutgers campus and every building on both Livingston and Douglass campuses except for the dorms which have names are named for intellectuals.

I find it particularly ironic

Watch futurama until you know what the word ironic means, please. Oh, and when you get m-w.com to back you up, please go ask a scholar what decimate means and look that up too. When you get confused why that happened, look up translucent, aenima and etiquette. Now finally beginning to grasp that dictionaries gloss over significant usage even when etymological, start your actual education with Ambrose Bierce's "A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults," freely available at Project Gutenberg.

Oh, and while you're pretending to know things, the person you're talking about is not the Stanford for whom the school was named, but rather his father, who built the school in recognition of his son who, while voicing strong opinions on the then-abominable state of American higher education, had died of Typhoid. The son was, in fact, quite the academic, though he died too early to make much personal contribution.

Nice try, though; you got some moderators to fall for your plot. Mod parent down, please; +4 insightful isn't exactly fair to Leland's (false) memory.

In comparison, H.G. Wells died in 1946. If Wells had lived under current US copyright law (life+70), WotW would not be public domain until 2016.

I think you're thinking of European copyright law..
In the US, anything published before 1923 is out of copyright. Some stuff published after 1923 but before 1968 or so may be out of copyright if it wasn't renewed on the due date... Project Gutenberg has loads of books that are out of copyright under the pre-1923 rule, that are still copyright in Europe (including most of H.G. Wells's books)

Available from Gutenburg here.

From the article:

[R]esearch [...] determined that for all types of tasks, subjects lost time when they had to switch from one task to another.

I agree with you that the above observation is not new. Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations commented on the very same phenomenon. In fact, his observation appears in the very first chapter of the book:

A man commonly saunters a little in turning his hand from one sort of employment to another. When he first begins the new work he is seldom very keen and hearty; his mind, as they say, does not go to it, and for some time he rather trifles than applies to good purpose. [Emphasis mine.]

This observation no doubt appears even earlier in literature. I just happened to recall reading it in Smith.

I think you mean Henry David Thoreau .

Prolific writer of his time who needs to be read a lot more especially given the times we live in.

• 5 The adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• 84 The adventures of Tom Sawyer

Anyone see any more on that list that are public domain?

-jim

• 5 The adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• 84 The adventures of Tom Sawyer

Anyone see any more on that list that are public domain?

-jim

When I started mirroring the Project Gutenberg collection (~120 GB) last year, I would sometimes use that corpus of data as my DC++ share, in order to meet all the hub requirements and remaining perfectly legal.

It was interesting to see people downloading pictures like "girl.jpg", which invariably turned out to be wood-block illustrations from 19th-century children's books.

Granted, I might have shared something more difficult to acquire, but the data were already on my computer, and text files (albeit tens of thousands of them) are nice and gentle on the bandwidth.

if not, give it a try:

1. Download a text: (say Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The new site has a vastly improved interface; listing books in available formats (always plain text, sometimes pdf, palm doc, tex)

2. Have at it in you text reader of choice. If you are on the mac, I highly recommend the free tofu. It breaks the text into columns that are high as the window. Navigate by shifting columns or pages of text. This simple change makes a huge difference when reading large amounts of text. It makes reading books on my laptop pleasant rather than an ordeal.

What about on other platforms? What are the best programs for reading etexts?

Yeah! I'm one of the "several" that Jon's referring to. I got a real kick out of recent book that was posted by us to PG...

Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living

The price may be right, but donating is good too.

I use --exclude \*.zip --exclude \*.iso --exclude \*.mp3 with wget to achieve similar results. The advantage of this is you get all the images and indexes, without wasting space on computer synthesized spoken books (yech), zipped files which you already downloaded the contents of, and 4.7GB/700MB DVD or CD ISOs. On the other hand, the Project Gutenberg CD and DVD Project is worth looking into for "best of" collections if you don't want the whole library.

DP is 'semi attached' to PG -- I think you'll find that we are much more concerned both with keeping page and edition information, and with marking such information up in an appropriate way, than some of the traditionalists inside PG are.

For example, many of use make sure that we produce a valid XHTML edition of each project, and that the page numbers and edition information of the source are preserved. For an example text, see Graham Wallas -- Human Nature In Politics. We are currently working on a markup and stylesheet which will improve the end-user experience in several ways (and then, sigh, we will have to go back and move all the books we've already done to this new system. This may take a while :) ).

We've also recently become much more aware of the need to make useful texts which can be used for scholarly purposes in the future, leading to such improvements as retention of all page numbers.

At the risk of going over very old and well-trodden ground, if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text, and used a markup that could have kept page numbers and other meta-information for scholars, while giving the common reader a clean text with a suitable style sheet. But even today on the PG website is a "justification" for sticking to plain text making it clear that scholars don't even figure in the intended audience for PG texts.

Just be aware that the Gutenberg is some 135GB, and much of it is gif jpg and mp3 (spoken work books). So i just used --include in rsync to download the .txt .htm and .html files. Its a more manageable 10GB download.

let me stick my pirated version of War and Piece in my Hello world application.


How did you manage to pirate a work that is in the public domain?

In any case, it is only a bit more than 3M uncompressed ascii, so you probably could hide it in the bloated mess that many compilers would make of Hello World.

Remember that according to Godly people, nothing is impossible by him.

Not only according to those.

3.02 A thought contains the possibility of the situation of which it is the thought. What is thinkable is possible too.

Loc. cit.: The Project Gutenberg EBook of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

CC.

Who are Penguin's biggest competitor(s)? Send visitors there.

Problem: Penguin steps on your foot.

Solution: Give free advertising to Penguin's competitor(s).

Or maybe send them to Project Gutenberg?

Stephen

More people with color PDAs with removable memory slots

Cheaper flash media (getting there)

Elimination of copy protection (Project Gutenberg and Baen.com are my primary ebook sources)

The promise of e-books is simple: they have the promise of using Moore's law to lower costs. Try going to Project Gutenberg. You can download a DVD image that contains 9400 books. It fits in 4GB, which is the capacity of one of those mini iPods. If you could go through one book a day, it would take you twenty five years to go through the contents. And Project Gutenberg is able to process more books every year. It's clear you could never catch up.

What's nifty about this is that any place which has even a modest computer and/or internet link can now be a library. Many classics are available for discussion, distribution, adaptation and just general enjoyment.

The one problem: sometimes you really want a book. Something with a small convenient form factor. That you can slip into your pocket. Read on the bus. Read in your bed. In sunlight. In dim light. Something you can scribble in. Fold the corners over. And something cheap enough that if you lost it, you might feel bad, but it wouldn't be a catastrophe.

Luckily Moore's law will eventually provide a solution to this too. If we set the ultimate price of an e-book to be the cost of a hardcover book, then low-end PDAs are already within a factor of two. Eventually, e-books will be cost effective.

I've taken a circuitous route, but here's the rub: while there is plenty to read, not everything you want to read will be available. The reason? DRM. Sanford writes:

We'll need a great eBook reader with trendy clout and not just livable, but convenient, DRM to really break open the market.

The problem is that there is no such thing as convenient DRM. DRM is always inconvenient. It exists only to prevent the consumer from doing something he might want to do, and gives absolutely no benefit to the consumer. You can look at one person's experience, and imagine it multiplied a million times over.

I'm not paying for that headache, thank you very much.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to store all these dead trees.

I see my self as part of the new generation that uses ebooks for a number of reasons.

The biggest reason is that I can increase the font size at will, decreasing the stress on my eyes. Hopefully, I'll put off that laser surgey as long as possible.

Another reason is that there are many freely (as in speech and root beer) available books on the internet.

Also, if you take public transportation to work every day, the less weight and size to carry, the better! Slowly, I am seeing more and more people with their ipaq or axim reading their favorite ebook.

The lastest reason is that you can read slashdot! Do I need another reason?

andy, have you seen Project Gutenberg? While it's not big on new works, there's a ton of great classic stuff, fiction and non. Also, there's (for example) the UVA ebook library. It sez "for MS and Palm devices" but no worries, there's HTML as well. A quick google search about ebooks will yield fine results.

I'm not in the UK or anywhere in the EU, but for those who are I'd like to point out that about now would be a very good time to bring to the attention of your politicians things like Project Gutenberg, which directly benefit from the expiry of copyright.

Certainly part of the problem is that it's not always clear what possible benefits there could possibly be for ever letting works exit copyright. Gutenberg is an active project that's both becoming succesful, and demonstrates that people are out there trying to make an active effort to benefit from existing law.

If politicians don't realise that people are benefiting from existing law, they'll have far less reason to consider not changing it when lobbied by the corporates. It's a bonus that Gutenberg can quite correctly claim that rather than ripping off other people's work, it's saving and making accessible a lot of valuable resources that most likely would simply have vanished otherwise.... and without a reasonable expiry of copyright this simply coldn't happen.

The bet was made in 1972. Did You have an encyclopedia on CD back then? On diskette? Must have been awfully abridged. Project Gutenberg was started just the year before in 1971- I doubt you had a computerized dictionary, let alone an encyclopedia.

The Mars Society
Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders
Wikipedia (sorta, soon it'll be 501(c)(3) )

...courtesy of Project Gutenberg..

Most of the 'classics' have entered the public domain. Check out Project Gutenberg.

Yes, you knew this, but I'm just pointing it out to those who didn't... :)

Project Gutenberg is your friend...

Baen is realy nice to, if you like Military SF and fantasy. They have a nice free library, and none of their e-books are DRM encumbered. Once you've burned through the free library the non-gratis e-books aren't that expensive either, and still not DRM encumbered. You may also want to check out Project Gutenberg for some older fiction.

• Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions -- Vol 1
• Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions -- Vol 2
• Memoirs Of Extraordinary Popular Delusions -- Vol 3