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given that (at least) 95% of the printed (yes, hardcopy) material produced since 1850-ish is printed on paper with a high acid content, and will inevitably become unreadable as it disintegrates (I hate to think of the number of books I have, even from the mid-eighties that are falling apart)...

I think that in 100 years or so - I'm not planning on sticking around for long enough to find out:-) we will find ourselves in another dark age - unless, of course, Project Gutenberg can cope...

The big problem here, which a few other people touched on, is that it costs from $1250-$4000 to petition for a domain name dispute. (The different providers set their own fees.)

This is ridiculously expensive for not-for-profits and individuals, but chump change for big companies. What would make much more sense is a pay scale depending on who you are and who you're going up against...obviously, we don't wnat to make it trivial for every yahoo to claim they have a stake in coke.com for something like $19.95, but it's hardly logical that a broke organization should need to cough up $1250 to fight a porn operation.

This is near and dear to my heart right now, because there's an anti-muslim hate site at projectgutenberg.com (I'm the CEO of Project Gutenberg (the real site), and we really don't have the dough to go through the domain dispute process.

• Greg

Yes, this means that "new" books won't be distributed that way. So what? We'll have some paper books, some e-books, all will be happy - except the Adobes of the world, who will waste $millions on a technology that will turn out to be useless.

I consider myself someone who reads lots of books, and I completely disagree with this statement. I think the people who say they like the feel of a book in there hand have never tried any type of e-reader. They weight of enough books to last me for a two week trip is not pleasant. I would much rather put a few books on my Palmpilot, which I have with anyways, than carry around an extra few pounds of paper.

I have been reading books on my Palmpilot for several years now, and I am completely addicted to it. I even have a Palm III with the old low contrast screen, so I would probably like it more if I moved to a V or 500 with a proper display.

I think people who don't like reading e-books have never tried it. (This is making the assumption that the books these people want to read are available in an usable format. I can completely understand people not wanting to read e-books because they have no interest in 100+ year old stuff from the Gutenberg project or whatever annoying thing the publishers have decided to make available.)

With 64 MB of RAM festival could be ported to the thing.

Then any book on project Gutenberg could be read aloud.

You can find my reply at: my ISP's customer web site, or (my home machine. (exactly as I was going to submit it)
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according to the introduction, the text of the book was also donated to project gutenberg. this is extremely cool. i hope it opens the doors for more authors to do the same thing.

there is a conflict, though. the free version i downloaded has quite a few restrictions, and is basically only for personal use; it even forbids using it as teaching material. and the author retains the copyright.

this is a change from the standard texts PG distributes. and their boilerplate says: "...this means that no one owns a United States copyright on or for this work..". interesting.

i still hope that the frequency of this type of donation increases.

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you can get books in text format for free from Project Gutenberg. Atlas Shrugged doesn't seem to be one of them though. http://www.gutenberg.net/

Hitler mainly liked Wagner because his music was so nationalist, and he (like nearly everyone else in the German-speaking world of the 19th century) failed miserably to rise above the prevailing antisemitism of his day.

Wagner is a very complicated character; he wrote some terribly obscene essays (i.e. "Das Judentum in Musik", which was actually a criticism of Meyerbeer and French Ope'ra), but he actively opposed fascism and religious persecution. The central influence in Wagner's philosophy was not antisemitism, as many are wont to claim, but rather an amalgam of Schopenhauer, early Nietzsche (don't even get started about _Will to Power_, which was written by Nietzsche's sister and which most scholars agree is antithetical to Nietzsche's philosophy), Buddhism and medieval mysticism.


~wog
(Yeah, I'm a CS grad, but I had music history and philosophy majors as an undergrad.)

Project Gutenberg is one of my favorite things on the web. I've downloaded numerous books and read them on my laptop, or Visor.

This shows better than anything how shady Adobe really is. To take a free, and classic, work and then smother it in some gnarly rights-restriction shrinkwrap ... have they no shame?

There is already a quite lively trade going on in "open source" books. The Gutenburg Project (http://www.gutenberg.net) has a long history of archiving expired copyright texts in ascii. I built a simple XML tag set for these and some macros in my favorite editor and created an XML document and a couple of stylesheets that I use to transform those into html or PDF using formatting objects.

I later found that the Oxford Text Archive (http://ota.ahds.ac.uk/) has done something similar but much more extensive with a large markup language and XLST files for converting to html. It wouldn't take too much mork to create the FO to generate PDF.

I read the html texts on my Pilot with one of the freeware transformer/browsers. I am one of those types who holds an almost sacred relationship with books. I have found while reading on my Pilot is not quite as aesthetically pleasing an experience as reading a paper and cloth text, it has one of the most essential aspects of it, portability. I can read it in bed.

I have also started to author simple texts in the same manner. Writing poetry seems to fit better the hierarchical structure of XML and flows better than prose. Nonfiction outline type material (most academic style writing) works flows pretty naturally as well. Telling the story in writing with XML markup is disastrous. It really interrupts my thought process.

In my experience the motivating experience for most authoring is to "share" with the notable exception of "how-to" books of all genres including those saints of the Open Source movement, O'Reilly & Assoc.. If the point is to share a story, an explanation of research or an idea or a thought or image, it seems we have overcome the impediment economic motivation. It is a gift economy type of thing.

Most academic journals in my experience are fantastically expensive for a subscription but make no money for their sponsors. It is the intermediary activities, not the authoring or editing (those are largely volunteer activities), that add this expense. I also think that most fiction authors write out the love the "telling" of the story in the authoring event rather than the recognition and fame. Who knows what possesses poets to write but it isn't for money.

Academic, scholarly writing has been essentially open source for centuries. There are well known rules for citation and formal and informal sanctions against improper appropriation prior work.

So an Open Book movement is already well underway and not that differnet a paradigm from what has proceeded it. It seems, then, that all that is required is the standardization of an authoring and reading infrastructure with tools that are already in hand. Let those who seek to publish from economic motivations worry about the economics of printing and or distribution. For an interesting take on this see the goReader (http://www.goreader.com) electronic text book.

Most of the current Ebooks rely on broken structure models designed to exclude unwanted users.

Yes, most of the stuff on Gutenberg is certainly not bestseller material, but they are the trailblazer when it comes to making texts truly open and available.

It's been said before, but in the great tradition of slashdot, I will say it again. This is stupid! I will never pay for a book that is tied to my hardware configuration, OS version, or a single player of any type! If I buy a paperback, I can take it anywhere, period. It goes wherever the heck I want it to, can be sold to someone else when I'm done, or loaned to a friend for a while. I can give it as a gift, quote bits of it, or make a huge pile of xerox copies of it and keep them in my closet. An ebook that removes a substantial portion of these rights without a drastically reduced cost will never fly. People may purchase these at first, but just imagine for a second how confused a non-computer-expert would be if they tried to read their book at work, or had a new harddrive installed at Best Buy (complete with data transfer...)-- and their book quit working? After the first round of public acceptance, there will be public outrage at the ridiculous restrictions.

In the meantime, thank god for Project Gutenberg, a source of free, unrestricted ebooks.

Dramatic contrast was provided by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who lashed at Napster as ''defeating the purpose of copyright protection.'' The company's ''saving grace,'' she observed dryly, was its utter lack of business model -- a lack that Barry cheerfully confirmed. ''Why are you not liable'' for massive copyright infringement? she demanded. ''Why do you preserve the anonymity of your users?'' If Napster-like services sprung up across the content industry, she argued, copyright would become ''null and void.''
Why not start a rogue Project Gutenberg that exercised realistic copyright time limits. The original US limit of 14 years would work well. Currently they expire 50 years after the author is dead. These books could be distributed through the various anonymous file sharing programs until the laws were changed.

No, you couldn't. Because the government wouldn't let you.

Soon after Gutenberg pressed the first book (it was the Bible), governments sought a firm control on the written word. Where a monarchy didn't exist to firmly control printing presses, guilds sprang up to limit the ability to publish to a chosen few. They knew how much power freedom of information had. In a few decades, protestants -- who now had bibles they could read -- rebelled against catholic power and new nations were created. All because the common man now had the ability to print books.

When the industrial revolution came around, steam and electrical power gave everybody the ability to run a printing press. Small publishers sprang up and started printing inexpensive books for the masses. But the big publishers, out of greed, lobbied the government to pass laws limiting reprints of anything but very old texts. Thus the copyright law we have today.

Now, with the internet, we're at a third plateau of publishing possibilities for the common man. And it's time we decided how much free speech we really want. If we really believe speech should be free, then copyright law has to be changed or erased, and a lot of big businesses are going down. The only other option is to accept less-than-free speech. Will the populace allow that? Time will tell.

But don't tell me that it is natural for information to be considered protected property, because it isn't. IP is an unnatural phenomenon that was created by business owners in the past few hundreds of years. It's a legal construct, and like all legal constructs it is subject to review and change. Hopefully we'll begin to look at what is best for humanity, and not what is best for any one person's pockets.

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This post is a rehash of opinions from people better than I. Particularly one column at 2k journal.
And finally, an example of speech that is truly humanitarian and free: Project Gutenberg.

Or we could just work around the government and do it ourselves. Project Gutenberg has a few thousand books digitized and available for the masses, all done by volunteer labor. We don't need the government to distribute literature for us, nor should we be relying on them to do so.

The text I found at Project Gutenberg

I think it's also appropriate to give a link to Project Gutenberg, which houses a lot of the "classics":

Project Gutenberg

Anyhoo. Just thought maybe people (particularly those ranting about us not having any info available to the public). Hopefully.

While it is nice that Stephen King releases his new book electronically, many classical works have been available at the Gutenberg project for a couple of years now.

A large number of e-texts, which will cost you literally _years_ to read. And they're all free and legal...


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There are a whole whack of books online at Project Gutenberg. They translate books whose copyrights have expired into electronic form. Quite a good project.

So, who's up for reverse-engineering the various eBook file-formats? I'd like it much better if I could print the file out or manipulate it as I please and know that no one is tracking what I'm doing with it.

I wonder... Has the PDF file format been reverse-engineered by anyone? What about any of these "eBook" file formats (GlassBook Reader, Rocket eBook)? I once looked inside a PDF file with a binary file editor, but all I saw was a bunch of numbers and weird stuff. A bit like a PostScript file, but deliberately obfuscated.

I really dislike the idea of only being able to read the "book" on a "licensed" machine. Read the message on SoftLock's website-- "Enter the email address of the computer where you plan to read the story." I'm not sure how they're authenticating, but I don't like it.

Something else to try: get the PDF version, then, for each page, copy and paste the text from the book into a text editor, and save in your format of choice. This may or may not be possible, as Acrobat does have the ability to stop you from copying and pasting.

I realize this could be construed as encourging copyright infringement, but read Richard Stallman's "The Right to Read" at Project Gutenberg before you flame me.

P.S. If the link for SoftLock didn't work, try this one. Sorry, I can't get a direct link to "The Right to Read"; Project Gutenberg seems incredibly slow at the moment.

Project Gutenberg just published Chromosome 22 in ASCII, and they have all 24 (23 + Y)) planned to be published by June 2000. Of course these are available in probably more useful form from the Genome Database. But hey, the source code is out there - the hacking can start!

A shiny penny to everyone who said that the major problem here is on the user end. There's no need to implement expensive, commercial propucts like retinal scanners or iButtons. Using SSL and even something as basic as well-implemented .htaccess (i.e., "well-implemented" meaning not storing your .passwords in a publicly readable directory), the weak link is always the user-selected password. So, either 1) force the user to use a "passphrase" (and really FORCE it-- not just say "hey, use a passphrase." Reject anything less than 7 words, or somesuch thing) or 2) issue each user a passphrase. It'd be elementary to set up a script that would, for example, choose a 4 or 5 word sample from, say, the Guttenberg Project(some 1500 works of english lit.) and issue it to the user as his/her passphrase. Sure, there'd be a set "dictionary" of phrases to be used in a brute-force attack, but if the passphrase was an arbirtrary number of words between, for example, 4 and 9, and case-sensitive, with the possibility that the passphrase-issuing-script might alter captilization, then it would still be an intractable cracking problem.

Again, just my 2-cents.

-"S"HM