Slashdot Mirror

Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, by Cory Doctorow
Subtitle: Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004
Link: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/1/0/7/11077
Thanks to Cory Doctorow for making this public domain eBook available!

Instructions for getting a complete mirror: mirroring HOWTO (rsync; ftp; http).

Instructions for getting a complete mirror: mirroring HOWTO (rsync; ftp; http).

Also you can repeaditly stream a text version of War and Peace or some other lengthy book, with a counter on the recieving end showing how many times you have downloaded it.

Download your text copy from project gutenberg. If you haven't read it, please do, it's a great book.

Perhaps an expert on copyright law could confirm things better, but I was under the impression that under the original system (at least in the USA), there actually was a copyright renewal system, by which authors were allowed to renew their copyright exactly once during the year that it would otherwise have run out. More specifically, the Copyright Basics text (that was digitised by PG some time ago states the following:

Works Originally Created and Published or Registered before January 1, 1978

Under the law in effect before 1978, copyright was secured either on the date a work was published with a copyright notice or on the date of registration if the work was registered in unpublished form. In either case, the copyright endured for a first term of 28 years from the date it was secured. During the last (28th) year of the first term, the copyright was eligible for renewal. The Copyright Act of 1976 extended the renewal term from 28 to 47 years for copyrights that were subsisting on January 1, 1978, or for pre-1978 copyrights restored under the Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA), making these works eligible for a total term of protection of 75 years. [..]

It goes on to say:

Public Law 102-307 [http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/bdquery/z?d102:SN00756:|TOM:/bss/d102query.htm l|] enacted on June 26, 1992, amended the 1976 Copyright Act to provide for automatic renewal of the term of copyrights secured between January 1, 1964, and December 31, 1977. Although the renewal term is automatically provided, the Copyright Office does not issue a renewal certificate for these works unless a renewal application and fee are received and registered in the Copyright Office.

Without really knowing the details behind copyright, I don't see why the renewal was made automatic. You'd think that any entity with enough money to campaign for that type of change would be able to organise itself enough to simply renew its copyrights in the correct year, so it might be that there was some other reasoning besides big money interests... or perhaps the politicians simply thought it was silly that people had to actively renew or that it created too many administrational overheads for the copyright office.

At least from my perspective it doesn't seem to have added much value, though.

looks like a link to a website about books to me.

Alright, if you really want to get to get technical, here is a link to a book, Baby Mine by Margaret Mayo, chosen at random from project gutenburg. Happy Reading!

what was the line in 'king lear', blank all the lawers?

I also recenty received some Alice in Wonderland citations with my spam.
Who would have thought Project Gutenberg's biggest use would be for hawking herbal remedies?

The Geutenberg Project has the text of the story "Steam Man of the Prairies" here.
For those who are interested in this work.

"As yet I looked upon crime as a distant evil, benevolence and generosity
were ever present before me, inciting within me a desire to become an actor
in the busy scene where so many admirable qualities were called forth
and displayed. But in giving an account of the progress of my intellect,
I must not omit a circumstance which occurred in the beginning of the month
of August of the same year.
Frankenstein's creation is a wordy mofo. (read it for yourself)

What do to? Well, you're a casualty of corporate sleaze and politics. Read The Art Of War, get back on the horse and don't let yourself become a victim again.

That sounds cold, I know, but what else can you do? Dwelling on the issue won't pay the rent.

What legitimate need does a single person have when downloading 40 gigs of data over a short period of time?

We just dropped off about 300 free CDs at the Berkeley Public Library last week (stop by the Info Desk for a copy), during some recent events. As others have pointed out, libraries don't really want to catalog and manage stuff, nor do they want to worry about broken and scratched CDs. So, give 'em a spindle of 100 burned CDs or DVDs and let these discs walk out the door!

There are a lot of challenges to making this work truly smoothly (like the cost of putting a nice label on the CD, and troubles with competing DVD formats that don't always read correctly, and who's willing to burn them), but if the goal is to get content "out there," why bother with lending when it only costs a few cents to just give away a CD?

At Gutenberg, we're trying to start a volunteer-based effort that will let anyone request one of our CDs or DVDs via a Web form, then we'll send it to them by postal mail -- free! For a few hours of volunteers' time per month, and minimal costs (donated or reimbursed), why not!

• Greg

This could be a great distribution channel for indie bands distributing legal free music as well.

This could be a great distribution channel for indie bands distributing legal free music as well.

I just finished For Us, The Living last night, and I agreed with most of what this reviewer said.

He did miss one glaringly obvious fact about this book, though, to anyone familiar with Utopian literature -- it's essentially a retelling of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward . Bellamy was looking backward from 2000 to 1887, and Heinlein from 2086 to 1939, of course. In addition, Heinlein's idea of how a perfect world would look differs considerably from Bellamy's. But the similarities between the two are spooky, and not to be explained by the inherent similarities between all Utopian books.

I wouldn't hand this Heinlein book to someone not already familiar with Heinlein, or to anyone just looking for a good story. It isn't a good story. I would, however, hend it to someone interested in political thought and social engineering without hesitation, even if I thought that person would not be interested in Heinlein the storyteller. Nearly all of Heinlein's ideas about people, politics, and society are here.

Um... Linux is only producing toys?! I admit that saying non-gpl or non-linux was a wasteland was utterly incorrect, but what good is a counterargument that is just as obviously wrong!?

What about ogg (vorbis, speex, etc), vmware, Mozilla, Bugzilla, the growing spectrum of GUI's and GUI-based and web-based tools that Unix ain't never had? What about apache, perl and python (all born under Unix but solidly linux-born nowadays), and the device-specific linux flavors like embedded linux is in, and 'recreational' systems like ReplayTV and mythTV (admittedly still a bit more cooking needed), and so on? That last pair are 'serious toys' (or only deserves 'toy' if you're saying it with a degree of respect, not dismissiveness). We just saved a ton of money implementing a linux-based project/issue tracking tool (my last employer blew six figures writing one inhouse).

Frankly, freshmeat is at least 75% never-seen-life-before-linux (I don't intend to prove a majority, just the existence of a LOT of counterarguments to your toy argument). Over the last 15 years there *are* a lot of innovations coming out of some Unix stalwarts (AT+T, Sun, SGI, Apple). But there used to be so many Unix vendors. Most are gone, but a few sellers of 'dead' Unix flavors remain. These vendors whack the dead horse every year for another chunk of revenue, but otherwise ignore Unix. Or, in the case of SCO, they go lookin for a bigger horse to poison, so they can make money off it, a la Dead Souls.

Online books are not so exotic as you might think:

• Project Gutenberg has a growing collection (10000+) of classic texts whose copyrights expired.
• The Online Book Page is a huge list of online books, some of them copyrighted, some of them not.

Unfortunately, free online computer books are still very rare, for obvious reasons.

ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/cdimages/ pgdvd.iso (md5sum 59d8a193874349181122ff52e2e3e114, size 4139646976)

Help yourself, make a bunch of copies, and be sure to give them away! If you'd like to donate a few copies (or a few hundred) for the giveaway, drop me an email

Distributed Proofreaders is the main source of public domain electronic books. It is part of Project Gutenberg. DP consists of thousands of volunteers doing hundreds of books each month, and some of our math books, for which DP is using LaTeX. Thus, the project needs savvy (La)TeX folk to correct the OCRed texts.

Thus, if you have a spare ten minutes now and then, you can make a significant contribution to public domain and mathematics. The finished e-books are free, downloadable, and computer-searchable. Sign up here!

The work is done through a web interface that lets you compare a scanned page image against OCRed text, and make any necessary changes to the text. The interface works with most browsers, from IE and Netscape to Mozilla and Opera. (I have proofread a couple pages myself, and can vouch for it being straightforward.) You can do one page whenever you have time or a hundred a day -- it's up to you. No commitments, no schedules.

If you'd like a change from mathematics, there are plenty of other books to do: from classics to pot-boilers, in English, French, German, Dutch,
Finnish, Swedish, etc.

You don't. This article, The Dissemination of Art in the Technological Age explains many of the issues in the United States. The owner of public domain art, (i.e. copyright expired art, e.g. a 17th century painting), typically a museum, physically controls the art. Museums forbid unofficial photography, supplying the market only with official Museum owned or licensed photographs that are copyright starting at the shutter click (today), not the first brush stroke (e.g. 120 years ago), so the public domain art is locked up, and the market pays for the copyrighted (till a court case says otherwise) official image.

Mac refugee, paper MCSE, Linux wanna-be...

As with the last story about project Gutenberg, I have the same comment. I love the philosophy of project Gutenberg, but the fact that they continue to use plain text as the canonical formatting makes the collection seriously less useful. Using XML would give only advantages.

What advantages? Advantages like indicating what words are actually part of a title, so that a reader could display titles in large print and provide a table of contents. Advantages like having real bold, italic, and underline. Advantages like being able to handle characters not in ASCII. Advantages like allowing a reader to break lines however makes most sense for that situation (for example, handhelds are going to have shorter lines than a large monitor). The list goes on.

Their argument for continuing to favor ASCII is to support the widest possible usability, now and in the future, since markup languages can come and go. This doesn't stand up to scrutiny though, for the simple reason that XML contains strictly more information than plain text. XML can be flawlessly converted to plain text by a program, but the opposite is not true: plain text cannot be converted to XML. Was that line break the end of a stanza, or simply a line of a paragraph? Is that single line in all-caps a title or is it a paragraph of shouting? This information simply cannot be extracted from plain text. Not to mention the problem of characters that aren't in ASCII.

Suppose that XML is just a fad, that it's a horrible joke being perpetuated by hordes of clueless professionals who love buzzwards. Suppose no one uses XML in 10 years. Even if this is true XML is still a better choice than plain text because XML has enough information to automatically convert the books into whatever superior format emerges in the future. Plain text does not.

My source for public domain-sourced ebooks. Now, they are missing some stuff I'd like to see, but they really do have a ton of goods there. And, even if your reader of choice isn't plucker, all of the books are available in very simple HTML markup for conversion to your format of choice.

And there's always the venerable Project Gutenberg; most of their stuff is in plain, portable, ASCII. They also have a CD of some of the best stuff available.

Lots of plans for the future:

• Post-#10000 formatting changes. We'll be rearranging our directories to make it easier to find things. Likely we'll go with something OAI (OpenArchives.org) compliant
  
• Conversion on the fly to many formats. We'll putting eBooks into XML format (mostly using teixlite.dtd, we think) for conversion on the fly to many other formats.
  
• New ways to donate. "Sponsor a book"
  
• More contemporary content. We receive donations nearly every week from currently published authors who want to make their stuff available to a wider audience (i.e., our Doctorow's Down and Out)
  
• Your ideas! Visit gutenberg.net to sign up for newsletters, find out how to get started producing an eBook, and find eBooks
  

Thanks especially to our main and backup distribution sites, iBiblio and The Internet Archive. And thanks to the THOUSANDS of volunteers who have brought us nearly to our 10,000th eBook.

Dr. Gregory B. Newby

Chief Executive and Director

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
http://gutenberg.net

A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with EIN 64-6221541

gbnewby@pglaf.org

And, your Weblog idea falls in the memory space. You are trying to save the written conversations with one or many in a chronological fashion. So, in a way you are trying to create an institutional memory.

You could show your students what a wonderful "institutional memory" Google is. Do searches or exact quotes by remembering just a few words of the quote. By showing how easy it is, you can teach your students to be more precise in their use of references and paraphrasing ideas.

You could also show the students a wealth of english literature on the web that is freely available, You could introduce them to efforts like the Guttenburg project http://www.gutenberg.net/ and let them know that good books don't have to be expensive or out of easy reach locked up in some library somewhere.

You could explain to the students as to how things can be so easily checked for plagiarism, that it is better to give credit where it is due rather than claim it. It might help cultivate a new generation that has no hesitation in acknowledging where the ideas came from - thus, later allowing for a better public discourse in their civic life.

You could show them the power of weblogs in the evolution of ideas, by exposing the various stages of idea development to criticism by peers - seen and unseen. Though a lone author can come up with a great work after being in isolation, I think the probability if a great work is higher if it is exposed to some criticism as the ideas are coalescing in the writers mind. You could also introduce them to literary discussion groups.

You could expose your students to the chunking of ideas in electronic and cyberspace , because ideas have to be expressed in screenfuls, and thus a sort of an unnatural frame is created around the idea. You could also expose them to the different style of organization of chunks of ideas needed when the reader has some element of choice in deciding the sequence. If there is another post on this subject soon, I will try to put more of my thoughts across. I think, as long as you keep you focus correct, and not get caught in the computing aspect, by explore the networking aspect, you can't go wrong. After all, what is writing - it is just a network of words and ideas.

What stops anybody of scanning a book in plain, good ol' ascii text and releasing it on the internet.

Nothing at all (assuming the book is out of copyright).

Then again, it's sort of redundant to mention the PPR in this story, since it tends to turn up in Google searches.

Bartleby.com has all kinds of reference books available, and lots of other stuff online. Like all of the Harvard Classics.

I'm suprised I'm the first to mention Project Gutenberg. Maybe people don't think of it as a reference site, since mostly it's good for downloading whole public-domain texts. But various volunteers (including me) are now in the process of proofreading the famous Britannica 11th Edition for inclusion in the Gutenberg set. At the current rate, it'll be done in about a year. But perhaps with more volunteers...

• corewars tourney (like KoTH)
  
• robocode tourney
  
• write tutoring/educational software that could be used by remedial/ESL students, or even for a local elementary school (GPLed, of course -- there isn't near enough GPLed educational software/games out there in the world)
  
• solicit suggestions for projects from the faculty and staff of the school (get on their good side for once, and sharpen your skillz while you're at it)
  
• someone else mentioned a school blog...
  
• Gutenberg Project mirror
  
• Anything that either promotes open source software or gives service to some local group that can use the help
  

I can read faster than Text-To-Speech for short periods. For whole books, TTS is faster. Can you out-read TTS for whole books? I wish my eyes would let me do that. Maybe I could when I was a teenager ?

Still, I wish that TTS could read @1KSyllable/Minute so that I could read more books in less time. the books at Project Gutenberg call to me. I wish to read them all in my lifetime.

the reason there is a fee is because many copyright holders won't like the fact that there is a fee, not because the government wants to make money. if the fee was higher, there would be almost no way the bill would pass. as already said, a fee that increases with time would be a pretty good idea. since the bill proposes that they would have to pay after the first 50 years and then again every 5 years after that, what should happen is the fee should increase each of those 5 years. and the longer you own the copyright, the more it costs to keep it. it would generate more revenue, but still a negligible amount, and it would slowly coax the owners into releasing their material into the public domain. the increase could be as low as $0.25 every 5 years. and depending on how many copyrights the person or company or organization has the rights to, this fee could add up to be hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. think about every song, every cd, produced each year (there are thousands and thousands more than you will ever hear or even have a chance to hear). that's a lot of money 50 years from the time of release if they choose to pay for an extension. but even though it is revenue for the federal government, i think it's worth more if the works were put in the public domain. sure, no one could claim that it's theirs to do what they want with, and there would have to be regulations as to what the public can do with these works (like not make a profit off of them, so books can be re-published, but can't be sold by the publishers for profit). this would help project gutenberg greatly, and some other similar internet projects (i think there's one for music too).

Yeah sure, the articles is why people buy these magazines. But really, this would be cool for Project Gutenberg, or more specifically those scanning books for the Distributed Proofreaders.

They even use puffs of compressed air to separate sticky pages

Finally! Project Gutenberg will be able to archive every issue of the Playboy magazines I donated!

I don't think the end of open content is coming, in fact I think that it future is just beginning. Why pay for access to an encyclopaedia when you can get if free? Why pay for books when you can get them for nothing? Why pay for news when you can get it for free? (ok Slashdot isn't the best example)

Ok, so there are problems with both of these sites, the Wikipedia isn't peer reviewed and Project Gutenberg can only use books that are out of copyright (and that varies by country). But, even so, they both remain free.

So, I predict that as large companies try harder to be the only people who can provide information more projects like this will spring up. And when information is provided by only a very few companies/individuals then projects run by large groups of volunteers will become even more important.

We even have tools such as Google news that can gather information from multiple sources at once.

Read... Write. Scram.

I've played MUDs and I've talked on BBSes and I've collaborated on all sorts of projects with AIM and cellphones (anyone catch the reference to "smart mobs" in the linked BBC article?). But I can't see how this could be fun, since the individual's efforts are always subjugated to solving someone else's computer-aided puzzle. The BBC article compares this online fake problem-solving effort to EverCrack, perhaps unfairly:

Already multiplayer games such as EverQuest struggle to cope with the groups that play and the creative communal tactics used to tackle each challenge.

But really, this isn't special. It's just people seeking an outlet for their otherwise desperate life-empty frustrations; they'd be far better off contributing talent somewhere worthwhile rather than playing with someone else's hacked-together Flash animation. It's nothing to write home about--just Internet puzzles that take away your individual exploration and innovation and replace it with someone else's idea of a good time.

No offense, of course, intended to anyone who does in fact derive a good time from this kind of thing; but please remember if you're that desperate to express your smartness, there are much more productive and creative things you could be doing. Read... Write. Scram.

There's a kinky story accessible through this site about two underage kids who fall in love, have sex, and later die. I've read it myself. It's called, "Romeo and Juliet."

• Projecting back to 1971, Project Gutenberg has tracked Moore's Law quite precisely. January 2003 will be our most productive month ever, and we are looking forward to continuing to double our rate of new eBooks every 18 months.
• Project Gutenberg has received some big donations, and we're working on grants and other funding. However, when you do the math you realize that there's essentially no hope for paying for content -- it takes thousands and thousands of people. The hope for "someone" to do it is naive -- the only answer is to figure out ways for "everyone" to work on digitization.
• While the author makes 6200 books sound like small potatoes, in fact it represents about 1/3 of all eBooks listed in places like the Internet Public Library. Not bad, and it certainly explains why some random book the author wants isn't part of the collection -- there just aren't that many projects working on digitizing literature.
• Where did the author figure on $750million, and for what? Over 30 million printed books were registered for copyright in the last 100 years (this doesn't count magazines, recordings, etc.). The notion that $25/book could pay for digitization is not unreasonable. But where do you get the books, and what about copyright? If there's a plan, I'd like to hear it.
• One more point, to keep this short: We have just under 7000 eBooks (up about 800 from whenever the author did his research!). We have over 1000 active volunteers. The books are in over 20 languages, dozens of formats and, if printed, would fill a small library. We're on track to reach #10,000 in 2003. Via Distributed Proofreading, as mentioned here and in a previous /. story, we can and frequently do complete digitizing a 300 page book in just a few hours. Mr. DeLong, I don't feel apologetic about these numbers at all.

That's all for now. Thanks to all the supportive comments in this thread, and to all the constructive criticism. And remember, a page a day is all it takes to contribute!

Greg Newby, Director and CEO
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
www.gutenberg.net

Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead fame has had a big part in this effort.

Isn't Mickey Hart the technical director of Project Gutenberg? Or, as I suspect, is this another Mickey Hart?

Aww, crap. I posted a mirror. The official site is http://gutenberg.net/ . Damn Google. :-)

Does anyone else find it humorous that you have to pay $25 for a book about free software, by the man who's whole life has been dedicated to free software? Shouldn't this book be available for a free download? Maybe Stallman will submit this as an e-text to Project Gutenberg.... Now that would be a total commitment!

Of course, as most likely already mentioned, you can get most of the "great" books at the Project Gutenberg website (http://gutenberg.net/).

But with that, maybe this is another great legal thing that P2P can come to the rescue of? Firing up KaZaA Lite, I was able to find PDFs of many of the same books that Gutenberg only has in ASCII form (PDF, in my mind, would be a lot nicer to read and could also retain graphics, styles and fonts). Maybe eDonkey has them too? You can always check for them at Share Reactor or Share Live...

Project Gutenberg may well have a lot of the books you want.

...will want them. Wouldn't that be sweet!

Support free online books!

Funny that no one has mentionned Project Gutenberg so far. If you don't know what they do, check it out here.

Funny that no one has mentionned Project Gutenberg so far. If you don't know what they do, check it out here.

Project Gutenberg has a fairly good FAQ on scanning and OCR. You may also be able to get in contact with some people who know this stuff extremely well. BTW: for those of you who haven't seen Project Gutenberg before; it's well worth checking out.

Project Gutenberg has a fairly good FAQ on scanning and OCR. You may also be able to get in contact with some people who know this stuff extremely well. BTW: for those of you who haven't seen Project Gutenberg before; it's well worth checking out.

Project Gutenberg has a fairly good FAQ on scanning and OCR. You may also be able to get in contact with some people who know this stuff extremely well. BTW: for those of you who haven't seen Project Gutenberg before; it's well worth checking out.

University staff were stunned by the size of the donation: upwards of 35,000 volumes dating back to the 19th century [...] It ranges from 19th century Jules Verne [...]

Kyzia said some of it should get to ibiblio, and since some of it is from the 19th century, that's eminently reasonable. That "very little science fiction" includes authors like Jules Verne, whose stuff is already available online, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. And while we're visiting the 19th century, though the article doesn't mention him, also freely available are the works of H.G. Wells.

Most of the books I've read I can remeber most of it (or at least the general plot/themes/ideas of the book). I've almost gotten to the point where I could go into a library and just ask for the books that came out in the past week. Or what I do is download new books (legally even at Project Gutenberg, run it through some text-to-speech program, grab the audio and burn it onto CD to listen to while I drive.