Slashdot Mirror

here's a site with the explanation I couldn't make clear
http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/C-16

As a few others have mentioned, jump in to Distributed Proofreaders. We take the raw images (either scanned specifically for DP or taken from scanning projects like this) and produce checked, corrected text, which then goes to Project Gutenberg. A few hours a week can help a lot.

Since they are nonprofit, why don't they join forces with a quite similar project: Project Gutenberg

I use all of these: (the disabled ones are not compatible with 1.5rc1) Enabled Extensions: [20] - ChatZilla 0.9.68.5.1: http://www.hacksrus.com/~ginda/chatzilla/ - ColorZilla 0.8.3.1: http://www.iosart.com/firefox/colorzilla/ - Console 0.2.5: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=3181 02 - CuteMenus - Crystal SVG 0.9.9.20051027: http://www.extensionsmirror.nl/index.php?showtopic =4360 - DOM Inspector 1.8: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/inspector/ - Download Manager Tweak 0.7: http://dmextension.mozdev.org/ - eReader 0.3: http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Forecastfox 0.8.2.4: http://forecastfox.mozdev.org/ - FoxyTunes 1.1.5.3: http://www.foxytunes.org/firefox/ - FoxyTunes Skin - OnyxOrbs 1.14: http://www.foxytunes.org/firefox/skins/index.php?s kin=9 - GooglePreview 1.1.2: http://ackroyd.de/googlepreview/ - MR Tech Local Install 4.0: http://www.mrtech.com/extensions/ - Right Encoding 0.2.1: http://heygom.com/extensions/ - ShowIP 0.7.11: http://l4x.org/showip - Tabbrowser Preferences 1.2.8.7: http://216.55.161.203/theonekea/tabprefs/ - Talkback 1.5: http://talkback.mozilla.org/ - Translate 0.6.0.8: http://ctomer.com/ - x 0.6.3: http://cdn.mozdev.org/ - x.xpi : http://www.google.com/search?q=x.xpi - About Firefox: Soviet Edition 2005.0606.1555: http://mithgol.ru/Mozilla/Firefox/ Disabled Extensions: [9] - Bandwidth Tester 0.5.5: http://www.roundtwo.com/product/bandwidthtester - Customizable Toolbar Buttons 0.1.5: http://www.google.com/search?q=Customizable%20Tool bar%20Buttons - fireFTP 0.88.3: http://fireftp.mozdev.org/ - Launchy 4.0.0: http://gemal.dk/mozilla/launchy.html - Leet Key 0.4.4: http://leetkey.mozdev.org/ - PONG! 2.16: http://www.captaincaveman.nl/ - ReloadEvery 0.6.1: http://reloadevery.mozdev.org/ - Tab Mix 0.2.2.3: http://tabmix.blogspot.com/ - Tab X 0.9.1: http://clav.mozdev.org/

"Relativity : the Special and General Theory" by Albert Einstein

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk _files=12465&pageno=12

Here is why Projet Gutenberh sucks: no good search engine, no publishing house participation, no standards or accuracy (see http://www.gutenberg.org/about/faq0). Don't compare one guy's hobby to a serious effort to make content available AND searchable.

Google searches text and gives you relevant quotes. The page itself might be available if it looked like the thing was related to what you were interested in to begin with. This service is mostly useful for finding books that might help your research, like a very good card catalog. If the book's copyright is expired, Google will save you the trip to the library, but not always yet. In my last search, I found a 2004 reprint of a book originally published in 1918. Gutenberg had the text.

The only other case I can think of is that someone might reference a book or a passage of a recent book. That might make me want to look at the book. Hopefully, the author would simply quote enough of the book to get their point across. If I really wanted more I'd go to the library.

Oh wait, these same greed heads have already assaulted the libraries. See here. It's always amazing how greedy and stupid people can be. RMS was right again. How else can you get people deep into debt over school books besides charging per word?

It was the cutting edge of science when the book was first published in 1898 (the discovery of viruses and the common cold being relatively new).

It's public domain now and you can read the original book here, along with HG Wells complete works (which I highly recommend - he's the grandaddy of science fiction).

If you want to get a taste of the original version, check out the BOOK, here - http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/36

Unless, of course, you are American, in which case you will require the story to be transfered to the USA, as was done for the radio show.

There is WikiBooks, but that doesn't seem to have gotten that far yet. I guess they could be made into PDF's or the like, and distributed along with the laptops. Of course, there's also Project Gutenberg, but that would really only be useful for courses like English, or mebbe History (in English still, though; language will likely be a problem).

...looked at the service in question? It's up in beta now, at http://print.google.com/

When you search for a phrase, you see, at the most, something like three pages. Oh, and theres also the table of contents. It's like flipping though a book at Borders. Helpful for deciding if you need to look into getting a copy, not helpful if you want to sit there and read the whole thing. Plus, you need to sign in with an account, so they can track how many pages you've seen.

Also, I think Google needs to look at what stuff is *out* of copyright. Try looking up Oliver Twist.(http://print.google.com/print?q=oliver+twis t&btnG=Search+Print&hl=en)
Even though the book is out of copyright and you can read the whole thing on Project Gutenburg, they have a "Penguin Classics" version up. In this edition, you can only browse though the table of contents, even though the full thing is out of copyright. Hello? Google needs to stop with this nonsense and put up the PG version (http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/730) instead.

In regard to your point about the material not beeing freely available. These machines have wireless if the school can afford to create an access point then there are wonderful resources like project gutenburg http://www.gutenberg.org/ and wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page that will provide an imense amount of information just for the getting.

Providing a library of information, except in contrast to libraries every student can have a copy and in the instance of wikibooks, they can even contribute to the overall wealth of knowledge if they desire.

"I like reading books free on the web but it doesn't mean that it is right and legal."

ummm... Baen Free Library, Project Gutenberg?

Title : US Constitution with the Declaration of Independence
Size: 123Ko
Price

3,86 / 4,65 $

Caution : this ebook is copy protected with Microsoft DRM 5 system ("owner exclusive ebook(s)"). This means that it will be possible to read it only on the devices activated with the same Microsoft Passport account. Reading requires the last version of Microsoft Reader, which runs only on PC computers equipped with Windows 95 or later and on Pocket PC PDA's equipped with Pocket PC 2002 or later. This ebook cannot be lent, nor printed. Text-to-Speech add-on is not available.

Title : US Constitution with the Declaration of Independence
Size: 123Ko
Price

3,86 / 4,65 $

Caution : this ebook is copy protected with Microsoft DRM 5 system ("owner exclusive ebook(s)"). This means that it will be possible to read it only on the devices activated with the same Microsoft Passport account. Reading requires the last version of Microsoft Reader, which runs only on PC computers equipped with Windows 95 or later and on Pocket PC PDA's equipped with Pocket PC 2002 or later. This ebook cannot be lent, nor printed. Text-to-Speech add-on is not available.

I guess Google, with all its pHDs, has never heard of: "Free eBooks - Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/" Geez, just give them a wad of donation dollars and index their collection. It's 16,000 public-domain works that have already been scanned and proofed by volunteers.

What do you mean? When I was a kid, fiber cable was just a novelty you read about in Popular Science. They claimed that it had the potential capacity to transmit things like War and Peace in just a few seconds.

Well, guess what: Today, in the comfort of your own home, you can download War and Peace in just a few seconds.

This is an excellent point. There are already several places online to get free books, but how many people take advantage of them? Without some exceptional change in the technology, people, it seems, will continue to read books in their current form rather than electronically.

"Microsoft said it would initially focus on works already in the public domain. This opens up a whole new innovation from Microsoft that will allow all users access to otherwise restricted works - if they have a Hotmail account and use MSN messenger on XP sp2"

I just got an email notification that Plague Ship , copyright 1956 or thereabouts, has been released to Project Gutenberg. The above link should work within the day. Enjoy!

At least in Canada, they have Life+50 copyright, so that they celebrate Public Domain Day every January 1. (This year: Albert Einstein! Next year: A. A. Milne! And so forth.) There's talk of setting up a Project Gutenberg in Canada, so at least old works from that era will be preserved, if not made legally available in most places. (Australia also has Life+50, but I think that's changing, alas.)

In any case, the set of books copyrighted by January 1, 1923 (not 1922) is indeed finite, but you might be interested to know (see Free Culture, p. 147) that the average copyright term in 1973 in the US was 32.2 years, because most (more than 85% of) works were not renewed. Due to retroactive extensions and associated bullshit, after 1978, works created 1964 or later were automatically renewed. But Project Gutenberg has a Rule 6 to deal with that. Consider (I think you may have to sign in to see this) Plague Ship , by Andre Norton, published in 1956, currently being post-processed.

'Course, the fact that folks are working hard to drag works into the public domain where they would be in a sane legal system at this point doesn't invalidate your original point. But Project Gutenberg isn't about to run out of material, not when they have a big chunk of the 20th century to deal with. (They just don't have anything particularly popular from that period.)

Oh, and PG doesn't really have 16,000 books. Some works were released in little bitty pieces. Consider an example. But there are still, I think I've seen estimated, around 10,000 real, individual titles in there. (Of course, any measure that counts the encyclopedia-sized "Modern Machine-Shop Practice" and the Declaration of Independence equally can't really be that accurate, now can it?)

Well that leaves the Bible and Tekwar

You're kidding, right? Have you never heard of the amazing work done by Project Gutenberg? They have something like 16,000 books and counting. All digital and all in the public domain. In many ways, it's the F/OSS equivalent of Google's project.

From their site:

We cannot publish any texts still in copyright without permission. This generally means that our texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as our Copyright FAQ explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)

So, I guess you've never heard of Project Gutenberg?
http://www.gutenberg.org/

What you're talking about isn't very different than the army of proopfreaders that volunteer their time.

~D

Also, a computer screen may have 96 dpi[,] but it "fools" my eyes into having more than that by antialiasing text with subpixel rendering

This is true, but only to a certain extent. Sub-pixel rendering improves readability, but that doesn't prevent readable fonts from being produced. For example, a Palm Pilot may only have 72 DPI, but it can still produce highly readble text on a 4 shade greyscale screen. Also, I would remind you that PostScript was designed around the 72 DPI printers that were common when it was invented.

(17 inch LCD, thanks for asking)

You're welcome.

I doubt that would happen with a 4-shades-of-gray epaper, and THAT is why a printed fax looks so awful.

A printed fax can look just fine with the right equipment. The fax equipment I use at our office produces very crisp results. The reason for the poor faxes have more to do with earlier models of Fax Machines that could only distinguish white and black, with nothing in between. This made any sort of color variation come across as if it were "smudged". More modern fax machines attempt to produce a better greyscale result.

Ever heard of eye strain or Computer Vision Syndrome?

Sure, I have the issue myself. There's no denying that computers use a piss poor resolution. However, it *is* highly readable, which is in direct opposition to your point.

everybody reads books and newspapers in a computer screen.

I can't speak for "everybody", but I do. I read quite a few books on my Palm Pilot, thank you very much. Feel free to visit the Baen Free Library some time for some modern books that may suit your fancy. And, of course, there's alway Gutenberg.

PG has been around since 1971, actually---though they (or Michael Hart himself, more accurately) only released one etext that year, and an average of I think one every other year until the 1980s.

The pace has quickened somewhat since then, of course. (Those are the additions in the last day.)

PG has been around since 1971, actually---though they (or Michael Hart himself, more accurately) only released one etext that year, and an average of I think one every other year until the 1980s.

The pace has quickened somewhat since then, of course. (Those are the additions in the last day.)

They have collections of both human read mp3 audio books and computer read mp3 audio books (kind of weird).

They have collections of both human read mp3 audio books and computer read mp3 audio books (kind of weird).

They have collections of both human read mp3 audio books and computer read mp3 audio books (kind of weird).

They have collections of both human read mp3 audio books and computer read mp3 audio books (kind of weird).

The complete notebooks have been available from project gutenberg for a year and a half (without the pictures) at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/5000 It's also been on the top 100 list for a long time.

I remember seeing some of Dudeney's puzzles referred to before, but I couldn't remember where. Then the book popped up on my RSS feed (it was released within the last month, I think), and indeed, it was full of fun math puzzles. Man, that was nice.

But they don't just have HTML; see various examples of files released with filetype "TEI", including PDF (through LaTeX), TXT (in a variety of encodings, i.e. Latin-1, US-ASCII and UTF-8) and HTML.

Indeed. It's bothered me for some time now that it takes a good deal of doing to make a nice LaTeX edition of the book, so that it's nontrivial to go from the eBook to a really high-quality printed page.

Luckily, someone's decided to do something about it. See PGTEI, a very verbose and flexible method for marking up literary works. The full TEI spec is gargantuan, so PGTEI is actually a dialect of a subset called TEI Lite. It's an XML markup scheme which has output filters (it uses XSLT, it seems) for plain vanilla TXT (for longetivity, and on general principle), HTML and PDF. (Probably some others as well.)

You can try it out yourself. Grab some examples, and run them through the online tools.

Post-processors are very set in their ways, but as I've recently joined their ranks, I hope to use PGTEI for my first post-production job. It certainly seems more elegant than generating and tweaking multiple formats by hand.

Indeed. It's bothered me for some time now that it takes a good deal of doing to make a nice LaTeX edition of the book, so that it's nontrivial to go from the eBook to a really high-quality printed page.

Luckily, someone's decided to do something about it. See PGTEI, a very verbose and flexible method for marking up literary works. The full TEI spec is gargantuan, so PGTEI is actually a dialect of a subset called TEI Lite. It's an XML markup scheme which has output filters (it uses XSLT, it seems) for plain vanilla TXT (for longetivity, and on general principle), HTML and PDF. (Probably some others as well.)

You can try it out yourself. Grab some examples, and run them through the online tools.

Post-processors are very set in their ways, but as I've recently joined their ranks, I hope to use PGTEI for my first post-production job. It certainly seems more elegant than generating and tweaking multiple formats by hand.

Indeed. It's bothered me for some time now that it takes a good deal of doing to make a nice LaTeX edition of the book, so that it's nontrivial to go from the eBook to a really high-quality printed page.

Luckily, someone's decided to do something about it. See PGTEI, a very verbose and flexible method for marking up literary works. The full TEI spec is gargantuan, so PGTEI is actually a dialect of a subset called TEI Lite. It's an XML markup scheme which has output filters (it uses XSLT, it seems) for plain vanilla TXT (for longetivity, and on general principle), HTML and PDF. (Probably some others as well.)

You can try it out yourself. Grab some examples, and run them through the online tools.

Post-processors are very set in their ways, but as I've recently joined their ranks, I hope to use PGTEI for my first post-production job. It certainly seems more elegant than generating and tweaking multiple formats by hand.

Hey, wow, that is completely original. Nobody else could have possibly thought of this idea before.

Looked at PG lately? Half or more of the books being added include HTML versions these days. Examples: An 1881 issue of Scientific American, An issue of Punch from 1892, a book about hand shadows, Beatrix Potter, and even some occasional PDF books to preserve the original's layout, and more....

Looked at PG lately? Half or more of the books being added include HTML versions these days. Examples: An 1881 issue of Scientific American, An issue of Punch from 1892, a book about hand shadows, Beatrix Potter, and even some occasional PDF books to preserve the original's layout, and more....

Looked at PG lately? Half or more of the books being added include HTML versions these days. Examples: An 1881 issue of Scientific American, An issue of Punch from 1892, a book about hand shadows, Beatrix Potter, and even some occasional PDF books to preserve the original's layout, and more....

Looked at PG lately? Half or more of the books being added include HTML versions these days. Examples: An 1881 issue of Scientific American, An issue of Punch from 1892, a book about hand shadows, Beatrix Potter, and even some occasional PDF books to preserve the original's layout, and more....

Looked at PG lately? Half or more of the books being added include HTML versions these days. Examples: An 1881 issue of Scientific American, An issue of Punch from 1892, a book about hand shadows, Beatrix Potter, and even some occasional PDF books to preserve the original's layout, and more....

It depends, some book do carry graphics, for instance the Slashdot friendly "Amusements in Mathematics" by Henry Ernest Dudeney, 1917
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16713 the Html zipped version do carry all the original drawings.

I hate to see a University pander to commercial interests, while at the same time, welcome commercial interests such as Yahoo. Money talks, and I'm sure UC is being paid a lot, but libraries are supposed to be public resources too, not exclusive profit-centers :-(.

couple of minutes (on dsl) from project gutenberg. it's text instead of pdf though.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600

16k ebooks to choose from today, more to come, no Google, no Yahoo.
http://www.gutenberg.org/

• Plato
• Hume
• Kant
• Mill
• Nietzsche

No, those are not the kinds of references you are probably thinking of, but studying ethics is not like studying Calculus. There is no definitive resource that proves or refutes any given belief.

• Plato
• Hume
• Kant
• Mill
• Nietzsche

No, those are not the kinds of references you are probably thinking of, but studying ethics is not like studying Calculus. There is no definitive resource that proves or refutes any given belief.

• Plato
• Hume
• Kant
• Mill
• Nietzsche

No, those are not the kinds of references you are probably thinking of, but studying ethics is not like studying Calculus. There is no definitive resource that proves or refutes any given belief.

• Plato
• Hume
• Kant
• Mill
• Nietzsche

No, those are not the kinds of references you are probably thinking of, but studying ethics is not like studying Calculus. There is no definitive resource that proves or refutes any given belief.

• Plato
• Hume
• Kant
• Mill
• Nietzsche

No, those are not the kinds of references you are probably thinking of, but studying ethics is not like studying Calculus. There is no definitive resource that proves or refutes any given belief.