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You need to visit Project Gutenberg, which was obviously dreamed up by someone with a serious proofreading jones.

I wonder if it's possible to live in a IP-free environment.

Basically, no. It's not possible. Especially not if you want to have a computer. That free/open source software you would run on your homebrew computer? It's covered by copyright. All free/open software licenses are based on the right of the copyright holder to determine how their work can be redistributed. This holds true for the GPL, even - when GPL'ing a bit of code, you have to put your name, the date, and claim copyright over the code before you can move on to the actual license bit.

Oh, and I don't know why you pick 1954 as the cut-off date for your books; check out the Gutenberg Project's Copyright HowTo, which discusses how to determine whether a book is public domain or not. The rule of thumb is that anything printed before January first 1923 is safe, and only a few very specific cases after that (eg, a work created before 1964 whose copyright was not renewed and did not qualify for automatic re-qualification under the GATT copyright agreement of 1991). In general, nothing printed from January 1st 1923 onward is in the public domain, and won't be until 2019 (barring further copyright extensions, heaven forbid).

The best places to get sheet music for free are The Choral Public Domain Library, the Mutopia Project, Gutenberg Music, the Sheet Music Archive, and the Werner Icking Music Archive. And while we're at it, the best way to engrave (typeset) music is with Lilypond.

I was thinking about digging up old National Geographics, scanning the text and photos, and posting that online. It would make for a great distributed project.

If you're willing to scan them, Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) is willing to correct the OCR and even have people assemble them into HTML, provided you're willing to let Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) post them.

• Reading books I downloaded from Gutenberg. This helps pass the time on my daily one-hour commute.
• As a Palm replacement. My excellent Palm died 5 months ago.
• Occasional web surfing. I used it only Sunday night to decide the winner of a bet I had in a pub. (I lost).
• Practising my French. I have about 20 mins of French audio on it that I listen to while reading the transcript (amazing how good for the soul that one hour commute is...)

Project Gutenberg uses a standard set of rules to determine if the works they publish are under copyright. You can review these criteria here if you like. If you feel these rules are somehow being incorrectly applied to specific works, you can of course contact them. For works which are published after 1923, they are supposed to maintain records about how they determined the work was not under copyright. You could merely ask them to provide their reasoning.

I also seriously question whether they are eliminating any ability for a publisher to make a profit. Widespread electronic distribution of texts does not seem to decrease the saleability of dead tree versions of works. Of course even if it were true, copyright does not work to protect the publishing industry, but rather just to promote creation of new works. The two are rather distinct.

Peter Pan is currently copyright in the US

Then please explain this. If you're right, PG will have another reason to say "Oh my GOSH".

"Vathek" by William Beckford is a classic example of a book written "kamikaze style" in 1786 (or thereabouts).

It is a dark gothic novel about a caleph who sells his soul to the devil, and it is one of my favourite stories - but most amazing of all is that Beckford wrote it in a single sitting of 3 days and 2 nights.

The e-text is available over at Project Gutenberg.

From Project Gutenberg

GHOSTIES AT THE WEDDING.

Turn down a glass afore his place; Draw up the dog-eared chair; For though we shall not see his face, I think he will be here Our wedding day to share.

Turn up the glass where she would be And put a red rose there. Her quick, grey eyes we cannot see, But weren't they everywhere, And shall not they be here?

Though them old blids are in the grave And their good light's gone out, We'd sooner their kind ghosties have Than all the living rout As will be there no doubt.

For some are dead as cannot die. Some flown as cannot flee. You still do fancy 'em near by. 'Tis so with him and she, At any rate to we.

t's a shame that people still have to resort to the Google cache when there is a great caching service, FreeCache provided by the Internet Archive. Just make your link like http://freecache.org/http://whatever..

There's a reason people don't link to freecache for articles. The minimum sized file freecache will cache is 5 MB. Great for videos, some audio files, and huge uncompressed images, but lousy for text smaller than The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

• Multimedia standards - This is one of the areas that due to the emergence of the World Wide Web and other generally open applications has pushed this forward quite a bit. MPEG, PNG (MNG), and other standardized formats have really made a difference over the zoo of incompatable formats that there were even 10 years ago. There is still need to do more work in this area, and there are some items that really need review. Multimedia game design and the entertainment industry, unfortunately, are the major drivers of this sort of activity.
• Accessable Multimedia Materials - Due to the "eternal" copyright of many multimedia types (photos, audio clips, cinema in all its flavors) are copyrighted and impossible to use as "fair-use" for educational purposes except on a very limited basis. Court ruling on this strongly favor the media companies and make it almost impossible to use anything that is available. The Google image search is essentially worthless if you want to use it in any instructional software that would be used for more than a single section of a single course taught at only one university. I would love to see a Multi-media variant of Project Gutenberg where you could get central repository of multimedia items (a clip art library, music clips, video, etc.) that would be guarenteed to be totally public domain or released in some copyleft arrangement. There is quite a bit on the internet, but it is scattered around and really needs to be put together. There are some collections (I happen to have some content I'd like to donate) that simply needs to be put together, scanned, and released. If I had infinite resources and time I'd like to do this, and if it isn't going by the time I get close to retirement, I may get this going myself anyway. I just need to feed my family for now.
• Authoring System Support - There needs to be a standardizing the "glue" format that holds all of this multimedia information together with Unicode-based text that is appropriate in a computer-based learning environment needs to be worked out. HTML and its variants are pretty good, and there some fairly decent "authoring" tools available such as Authorware or Director, but these all have some hard limitations. The High Schools that I've seen are typically either using HTML or Power Point (I am not kidding here either) for routine stuff that is developed. University-level instruction is totally non-standard and often includes custom software written for the one project, which eats up almost all the time and resources of the project. Ideally I'd love to see an open-source project that would help put this sort of instruction together. It needs to be easy to use, but powerful enough that if you are willing to learn (with a shallow learning curve) you can get progressively more features to the point that you can write the entire authoring environment in itself (aka be Turing complete). Nothing I know of has this capability at th

Weasel is awesome, I don't understand why one would use anything else.

Any non-picture book can be represented as a textfile. Copy and paste from a PDF or a web page, or use Clit to remove Microsoft's drm if you are so unlucky. Of course Project Gutenberg is king of books.

Just run the txt file through makeztxt and off you go.

After email, my web browser, and vim, Weasel is probably the program I spend the most time with - and it is reading so what good times they are...

Happy reading!

"More interestingly, the story mentions that despite increases in funding for libraries, spending on books has sharply declined"

And the libraries probably don't know about Project Gutenberg, Baen WikiBooks or the Wikipedia. They're just using it to check their hotmail accounts.

Put a decent printer like in the Internet Bookmobile, and they could have a pretty big collection of books available. But no, it's 10p per sheet on an inket.

Libraries in the UK are even selling shareware, probably not even realising the quality of software that they could give away for free if they wished.

What I've found is that it's no substitute for sitting down with a real book, but it's great when waiting around at the post office, eating lunch, or any time I have some time I'd like to read but may not have planned for and brought a book.

The article and Sony seemed to be concerned with content, with the focus on this product that you can get a cheaper eBook than a real book. That, to me, is not a compelling reason to buy the thing. The collection at the Gutenberg Project would make it compelling for me, and I'm surprised that the eBook world has not embraced that in their marketing. Perhaps it's because consumer technology traditionally enables the sale of "content" (records, DVD's, etc.), and pointing to free content might be a no-no to publishers of current works. But if they wanted to sell the hardware, it would be a pretty gutsy move to advertise "thousands of free classic titles".

Now, if someone is the first to OCR a book with this system, and forgetting about all the copyright violation crap, wouldn't it make sense to make the OCR'd digital version available somehow?

It seems ridiculous to me that copyright laws should prevent someone -- especially if they are Visually Impaired -- from having access to a book someone already has digitized once. Will they be forced to set it up for scanning, turn the pages, spend more energy (human and machine) re-doing something that could be close to instantaneous if it means just downloading a file?

Maybe some sort of authentication that only allows access to the file if you prove to the machine you are holding the physical book.

So instead of turning the pages they could just hold the book, which would have, for example, an RFID tag.

BTW, how can a VIP find a specific page in a printed book without counting pages? Can you imagine this for large books? With a pre-scanned complete file in, it would be easy to instruct the reader software to go there.

Moreover companies like Amazon could lease this content to pay for the technology while they use it. Or Project Gutenberg could use it to add to their public books.

Now, if someone is the first to OCR a book with this system, and forgetting about all the copyright violation crap, wouldn't it make sense to make the OCR'd digital version available somehow?

It seems ridiculous to me that copyright laws should prevent someone -- especially if they are Visually Impaired -- from having access to a book someone already has digitized once. Will they be forced to set it up for scanning, turn the pages, spend more energy (human and machine) re-doing something that could be close to instantaneous if it means just downloading a file?

Maybe some sort of authentication that only allows access to the file if you prove to the machine you are holding the physical book.

So instead of turning the pages they could just hold the book, which would have, for example, an RFID tag.

BTW, how can a VIP find a specific page in a printed book without counting pages? Can you imagine this for large books? With a pre-scanned complete file in, it would be easy to instruct the reader software to go there.

Moreover companies like Amazon could lease this content to pay for the technology while they use it. Or Project Gutenberg could use it to add to their public books.

That would be Little-Endian. Endian-ness specifies which end you start with,. Intel X86s are little-endian, while Motorola (680X0) is Big-Endian (as is english, other than in the teens).

The naming convention is taken from "Gulliver's Travels", where one of the societies was suffering a schism between those who chose to break their eggs starting at the little end (little-endian) and those who started at the big end (big-endian).
(bit of trivia: Issac Asimov did an 'Annotated Gulliver's Travels'. He considered it to be one of the earliest examples of English science fiction).

But their ASCII is a giant pain-in-the-ass if you want to change it to anything using mark-up. Their ASCII lacks *any* information on how the page is organized. Want to read it in anything more sophisticated than vi? Forget it.

Yes, free-formatted ASCII is the least-common-denominator. The emphasis goes on LEAST. As in the format with the LEAST usable information.

Consider As You Like It. The lines are entered with hard returns at 80 columns. There is no easy way to get a machine to recognize the Scene and Act boundaries, no easy way to get a machine to distinguish between stage directions and dialog and even the character's names. The only navigation is the page-up and page-down key.

Doing anything useful (where "useful" even includes tolerable navigation through the document !) requires going through these texts all by hand.

They punted because the electronic formats are volatile, but there is a huge cost to it, in the extreme loss of essential information.

...about the Earth's Core (fantasy):

At The Earth's Core, by by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Project Gutenberg is completely legit. It electronically publishes works that are out of copyright.

Our eventual goal is to provide Public Domain Etext editions a short time after they enter the Public Domain.

What you are proposing is outright copyright infringement.

I have to wonder who will pay for this 'fat pipe' you speak of, and how long the upstream will last.

You can certainly see many of the elements of an interative interface in these "leaked" screenshots. Just look at the installer for example, it's like navigating Moby Dick.

MS is taking a lot of chances here, the installer starts with "What do you want to do?" and not the proverbial Install button. There really is only one option here; "Install"; the other options are obfuscated behind "Perform additional tasks". If this is truly meant to be task-based, the nesting of tasks like this is bound to confuse the user.

The "Windows Security" screen is even more iterative, and menu selections are extremely verbose. I can't wait to see how they handle voice navigation for all of this, it's going to make the Windows interface almost unusable for people with disabilities.

"Here, Professor, I ought to give you some explanations. Will you be kind enough to listen to me?"

He was silent for a few moments, then he said:

"There is a powerful agent, obedient, rapid, easy, which conforms to every use, and reigns supreme on board my vessel. Everything is done by means of it. It lights, warms it, and is the soul of my mechanical apparatus. This agent is electricity."

"Electricity?" I cried in surprise.

"Yes, sir."

"Nevertheless, Captain, you possess an extreme rapidity of movement, which does not agree well with the power of electricity. Until now, its dynamic force has remained under restraint, and has only been able to produce a small amount of power."

"Professor," said Captain Nemo, "my electricity is not everybody's. You know what sea-water is composed of. In a thousand grammes are found 96 1/2 per cent. of water, and about 2 2/3 per cent of chloride of sodium; then, in a smaller quantity, chlorides of magnesium and of potassium, bromide of magnesium, sulphate of magnesia, sulphate and carbonate of lime. You see, then, that chloride of sodium forms a large part of it. So it is this sodium that I extract from the sea-water, and of which I compose my ingredients. I owe all to the ocean; it produces electricity, and electricity gives heat, light, motion, and, in a word, life to the Nautilus."

There are a couple of problems here.

First, there are organizations like the ECMA that publish freely their specification. I can also think of several others, including Microsoft, that publish information without charging royalties for internet distribution. In the case of ISO, I think they see this as a revenue source.

Personally, I think that standards can and ought to be in the public domain. By trying to limit or restrict a standard, you are encouraging other competing "standards" to be developed. Image if you had to pay a royalty for using a gram, meter, or liter? I think pounds, feet, and gallons would become very popular if that occured, even in Europe.

On the other hand, it appears as though ISO is trying to charge royalties on their copyrighted works. This is fair in and of itself, because they wrote the original document and it is in fact copyrighted. That means that people who publish these ISO standards on alternate or mirrored web sites are violating copyright law. As a private organization that can copyright anything they produce, they have every right to prevent or control how that text can be copied. This is the very definition of copyright.

That doesn't stop me from thinking they should never have been copyrighted in the first place. Standards need to be available for everybody to access and learn about, and the companies that sponsor and develop those standards also gain by having the standards availble for their products. Indeed, it is financially in the interest for any for-profit company to get involved, and involved early in the development of a standard. If you are the first company to successfully implement a standard you can often turn that into a near monopoly of the market that has been standarized, or at least get a major portion of that market. Also, competing companies that want to stay compatable with your products (following the standard) must not only comply with the written standard, but must also test against your products, which also help to define the standard. Since you wrote the standard, you don't have that cost.

Any other justification to charge for standards publications is just legal BS beyond the mere cost to support the servers. ISO gets plenty of money from its membership dues, and that should cover the cost of its support staff. I don't object to some donations to cover the server, or even charge for the documents to be given to you, but ISO has nothing in terms of document volume compared to the Gutenberg Project And that is donated server space.

"It depends on the format, but they could be searchable. Ever have a book where you want to find the exact wording of a quote, or want to look up something in a book that has a crummy index? Just search. Also convienience; if I had a good reader (very clear screen) I'd much rather carry that around than a couple 1000-page textbooks."

Project Gutenberg provides a lot of out-of-copyright texts for free, and is a great resource for the student doing the kind of research that you are talking about. If I was doing a term paper on Hamlet, having the etext available would be very valuable. However, if I'm reading Hamlet for the first time (or simply for enjoyment's sake) I'd rather have a paper copy, and that's not likely to change anytime soon. For many of us, reading is one of the ways that we unhook.

Noone really wants to download a PDF and page through it at their desk and I don't know too many people taking laptops to the toilet, bathtub, or park in order to read. The problem isn't really with eBooks per-say, its that there really isn't a convenient way to view the content.

many consumers (myself included) just don't see the point in buying a device to read a book as opposed to just buying the paper book and not having to worry about charging it up before making a coast-to-coast flight

A: Sweden doesn't have the plurality of races, creeds, SES, regional interests, etc. that the USA does.

B: The USA has Single-Member-Districts to populate its representative bodies in almost every jurisdiction at almost every level of government. It mathematically over-represents the majority, and at times entrenches a minority against a majority. The effect is that a "simple majority" vote de jure is more like a two-thirds majority requirement de facto.

C: What people don't get is that the US system is DESIGNED to hand every close political contest over to the status-quo. Once in a while, or in places where the system is odd, there are upsets, but it is the exception and not the rule.

D: To win against an encumbent in the USA, you need to achieve an overwhelming level of support almost under the radar, to prevent the status-quo from calling in favors from political connections to tip the scales. They only need to get things back to a close race in order to achieve the upper hand.

E: If you are an American "underdog" (BTW: I have that in a T68i ringtone if anyone wants it), you should work harder outside (I don't mean against) the system, until you have sufficient momentum to outmaneuver your encumbent. Then you must maneuver your advantages against your opponents' political weaknesses.

F: Go read The Prince , and then get yourself into a quiet place with the dead-tree version of Discourses .

G: "You seek followers? Seek ZEROES!!!"
-- F. Nietzsche [the emphasis is mine, and I have another one about translations if you like to nitpick]
Truly: votes are for losers. Real political power comes from the consensus--civil agreement-- that voting only pretends to express. Vote-getting is for losers. Winners know what will happen with or without the polls. Connect with and coalesce the the support of real people and the rest will come as a natural consequence.

H: Beware the ides....

So there's a lot you can do with that spiffy Gameboy Player. If you have a GameCube, it's a no-brainer, you have to get one. If you're getting a new GameCube you can get a GBA Player for free. So worth it!

Have you ever read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, how about ? How about any of the good weblogs? Or KSR Mars trilogy, Jules Verne

People don't care about science, they don't understand science for the most part. People understand people, they like to read stories about normal people in extraordinary circumstances, that's why `reality tv' is so popular.

The first (hu)man on Mars landing on Mars would be hugely important for human curiosity, the journey to Mars would be even more important, imagine doing a part `reality tv' show and part science/education show from the Mars-bound shuttle. Do it right and everybody would watch.

The probes would still do the science, people haven't done any scientific measurements for a while now, since the invention of computers, people don't measure accuratly enough for our level of understanding anymore.

When your probe says gravity 0.4G, pressure 15mbar, T=259K, F=22.5W/m2, your scientists could tell you the probe was broken, very few places on mars would get those conditions anyway

...but you'd likely get images of astronauts jumps about with suits weighing twice their body weight with silvered visors and planting flags, that's the money shot, as long as it's not a Nike flag (unless they pay for the whole damn thing) nobody would really care which flag it was, it was manmade

One of the most important things to come out of the Moon landings didn't involve landing on the moon, it was Frank Borman's photograph of earthrise. The probe wouldn't think of doing that.

For the scientists, who do care about the science. The people who land on Mars would do so in the knowledge that they are there for about a year until the planets align again, keeping 6 people alive without any external help for 24 months isn't easy (or possible yet). The biosphere project wasn't completely succesful because of the leaky window seals and the double glazing which blocked too much sunlight.

On Mars, we won't have the luxury of pumping more oxygen in, it'll will likely need to be extracted from the ferrous soil or grown in inflatible greenhouses. The technology to maintain this human habitat in an environmentall neutral way would have huge impact on the way we live on Earth...sustainable farming and production, recycling waste products, space ice cream (well I like it :)

BB

Have you ever read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, how about ? How about any of the good weblogs? Or KSR Mars trilogy, Jules Verne

People don't care about science, they don't understand science for the most part. People understand people, they like to read stories about normal people in extraordinary circumstances, that's why `reality tv' is so popular.

The first (hu)man on Mars landing on Mars would be hugely important for human curiosity, the journey to Mars would be even more important, imagine doing a part `reality tv' show and part science/education show from the Mars-bound shuttle. Do it right and everybody would watch.

The probes would still do the science, people haven't done any scientific measurements for a while now, since the invention of computers, people don't measure accuratly enough for our level of understanding anymore.

When your probe says gravity 0.4G, pressure 15mbar, T=259K, F=22.5W/m2, your scientists could tell you the probe was broken, very few places on mars would get those conditions anyway

...but you'd likely get images of astronauts jumps about with suits weighing twice their body weight with silvered visors and planting flags, that's the money shot, as long as it's not a Nike flag (unless they pay for the whole damn thing) nobody would really care which flag it was, it was manmade

One of the most important things to come out of the Moon landings didn't involve landing on the moon, it was Frank Borman's photograph of earthrise. The probe wouldn't think of doing that.

For the scientists, who do care about the science. The people who land on Mars would do so in the knowledge that they are there for about a year until the planets align again, keeping 6 people alive without any external help for 24 months isn't easy (or possible yet). The biosphere project wasn't completely succesful because of the leaky window seals and the double glazing which blocked too much sunlight.

On Mars, we won't have the luxury of pumping more oxygen in, it'll will likely need to be extracted from the ferrous soil or grown in inflatible greenhouses. The technology to maintain this human habitat in an environmentall neutral way would have huge impact on the way we live on Earth...sustainable farming and production, recycling waste products, space ice cream (well I like it :)

BB

Just because some one is a major source of mp3s and other files doesn't mean they're intrinsically breaking the law. I get the feeling the RIAA will simply look at the top 1000 file sharers (based on download numbers) and systematically sue them for alleged copyright infringement. Wouldn't it be funny if they sued Project Gutenberg by accident!

I've just finished reading Walden, by H D Thoreau, from the Gutenberg e-text. Its basically a story of a man who goes and lives in a shack in the woods for a few years. The irony of reading this on a digital computing device did hit me...

the Bible's individual books were largely the works of single authors, with little or no collaboration between authors across different books.

There may not have been collaboration, but each author was adding on to the writings of his predecessors.

I would bet that either: (1) The separate portions of the Kalevala are as disconnected as the books of the Bible (i.e., not a single narrative), or (2) Lönnrot changed the source texts significantly during his re-telling. In the first case you've again cheated by taping books together, while in the second case case the Kalevala is effectively the work of a single author.

I understand your point that multiple authors often spoil the book, and agree for a large part, but I feel you're begging the question here. There are three ways to make a printable multiple author work: intensive collaboration (used for one of the Wild Cards books, though I haven't read it and it'll never be required reading in English), and two ways you mentioned: making the seperate sections independent enough to not need extensive collaboration, or having one editor go back through with a heavy pen. The Old Testament does have one narrative: the story of the Jews from Creation to a fairly random cutoff before the exile. The Kalevala may have strong editing, but there's still the distinct work of many authors.

Project Gutenberg links:

The Whole Family, a novel by twelve authors. Never read it, but on topic.

The Kalevala in English translation. PG also has it in Finnish, but it was probably required reading in school if you speak Finnish.

the Bible's individual books were largely the works of single authors, with little or no collaboration between authors across different books.

There may not have been collaboration, but each author was adding on to the writings of his predecessors.

I would bet that either: (1) The separate portions of the Kalevala are as disconnected as the books of the Bible (i.e., not a single narrative), or (2) Lönnrot changed the source texts significantly during his re-telling. In the first case you've again cheated by taping books together, while in the second case case the Kalevala is effectively the work of a single author.

I understand your point that multiple authors often spoil the book, and agree for a large part, but I feel you're begging the question here. There are three ways to make a printable multiple author work: intensive collaboration (used for one of the Wild Cards books, though I haven't read it and it'll never be required reading in English), and two ways you mentioned: making the seperate sections independent enough to not need extensive collaboration, or having one editor go back through with a heavy pen. The Old Testament does have one narrative: the story of the Jews from Creation to a fairly random cutoff before the exile. The Kalevala may have strong editing, but there's still the distinct work of many authors.

Project Gutenberg links:

The Whole Family, a novel by twelve authors. Never read it, but on topic.

The Kalevala in English translation. PG also has it in Finnish, but it was probably required reading in school if you speak Finnish.

How about "until hell freezes over"? :)

It already has.

• 
  Inventors are solitary geniuses who toil in garage laboratories to create helpful new machines. They can eventually sell these and make a well-deserved fortune, but only if no large company can sneak a look at the idea first. Large companies have a pre-existing advtange in capacity for production, distribution, and marketing. They could glut the market far quicker than the original owner ever could, so he needs legal protection against them.
  

I think that's http://www.blogs4god.com. That said. Yes, there are quiet a few journals out there that portend historical diaries and journals.

I also agree this would be a good teaching tool. I think it might also be a great extension to the Project Gutenberg.

Back in the day, and I mean way back like in the day of Mozart, music was taught by having students copy scores of the great masters. It might be a good practice to do the same by web logging historical figures of the past. The question is, will the DCMA stick its ugly head into the mix and put the kibosh this good teaching tool?

> Too bad, as is my frequent lament, the fiction section at my uni's multi-floor library could be stacked on the space left over on my desk RIGHT NOW.

Of course it could. The good parts of it, at least. It's the Internet terminal, that allows you to surf to the Gutenberg Project site and get hold of some rousing good fiction. Give it a shot. You can even download most of the works and carry them around to read off your palmtop (you do have a palmtop, right?!?).

Virg

Fine. I'll call Project Gutenberg and get them to purge the archives.

One of my favorite e-libraries is The Gutenberg Project which houses thousands of pieces of classic literature.

And if I can make a shameless plug, the following is the address of a mailing list based bookclub that aims to read one Gutenberg text a month:
iBookclub

What constitutional right?

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

That's a quote from from the Declaration of Independence.

Yours truly,
Jeffrey Boulier

Before you try too hard, it is worth spending a few seconds considering if the text might already be electronically available, for free.

Many classics novels can be found at: Project Gutenberg

Most scientific journals are also available electronically these days, and libraries typically have paid access.

Tor

There is an incredibly rich public domain.

For evidence of this, visit the following website:

http://www.sacred-texts.com

Or go to:
Project Gutenberg.

The fact that you can't download any and everything you want for free isn't evidence of lack of a ricn public domain.

Observations of squid 10 times bigger have been cited:

Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs [1/8 of a mile!] in length and breadth, lay floating on the water. Innumerable long arms radiated from its centre, curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas [strangling snakes], as if blindly to catch any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; but it undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.

"With a low sucking sound it slowly disappeared again. Starbuck with a wild voice exclaimed, 'Almost rather had I seen Moby Dick and fought him, than to have seen thee, thou white ghost!'

"'What was it, Sir?' said Flask.

"'The great live squid, which -- they say -- few whaleships ever beheld and returned to their ports to tell of it.'"

The way copyright law is right now, it sounds unconstitutional to me. The constitution grants to Congress the power to give to authors the exclusive rights to their writings for a limited time.

Well, searching the Project Gutenberg site, I found the following bit of "legislation": Works first created on or after January 1, 1978 enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the author is a natural person.

If the work only enters public domain 70 years after the authors death, this means the author has an effectively unlimited right to the creation. To any "natural" person, a right that extends to the end of life is "unlimited".

Since the whole current copyright law seems to be unconstitutional and void in the U.S.A., that complicated acronym proposal must be unconstitutional as well.

I read Harry Potter 1,2,3 and 4 on *my* 2MB palm. Admittedly HP4 did take up 1MB, but it's not too bad - books take a while to finish anyway. The palm V's screen is quite adequate for reading, and it's easier to read than a book when you're walking up a largeish hill.

Project Gutenburg put up free ASCII versions of out-of-copyright books. You can download and convert as you want to - 2mb is enough for one or two books, and there's enough reading material for between hotsyncs, even if you read exceedingly quickly.

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
• Common Lisp HyperSpec
• Common Lisp the Language, 2. ed
• Common Lisp - A gentle Introduction to symbolic computation
• The Scheme Programming language, 2. ed
• Reflections on trusting trust
• Lisp: Good News, Bad News. How to Win Big
• John McCarthy's homepage
• Dennis Ritchie's homepage
• Various classic papers it's a shame ACM never bothered to continue adding to
• Another list of classic papers (this time related mostly to programming language design)
• GTK-Gnome Application Development (not a classic, though, as the field is too young)
• KDE 2.0 Development (not a classic though, as the field is too young)
• Eric Weissteins Mathworld
• Compilers and compiler generators - an introduction with C++ (although I'm not too sure if it deserves being called a classic...)
• Parsing techniques - A practical guide
• Art of assembly language programming (never was a dead tree, but good anyway)
• Paul Carters 386 assembly book (same comment as above)
• An Introduction to Scheme and its Implementation (see comment above)
• How to design programs - An introduction to programming and computing (not a classic, yet!)
• The Gutenberg archives contains much non-copyrighted classic fiction in ASCII format
• Sacred texts has copies of or links to many religious text for various major (or minor) religions

• For free hosting of free-as-in-speech books, see Andamooka. They also allow you to give annotations and comments.
• For a catalog and reviews, see my site, The Assayer.
• Opencontent.org - licenses, and a directory of open-content works
• Internet Public Library
• Project Gutenberg
• ibiblio - an archive of free information
• On-Line Books Page and Book People mailing list - has an emphasis on old books that have fallen into the public domain
• Samizdat.com hosts a bunch of free books, plus lots of good articles and links
• Association des Bibliophiles Universels - hosts PD texts in French

Read Verne online at Project Gutenberg.

Several months ago I paid for and downloaded the DigitalOwl TitleVision ebook version of "God's Debris". I paid $5 for it.

I also downloaded the reader, installed it, and read the book, which was good. However, I didn't like the reader at all. So, using a screen capture utility, I took screen shots of all 90 pages of the book, saving them as .PGMs. Then I booted into Linux (I'd had to be in Windows to run the reader) and used gOCR and a shell script to do initial OCR conversion of all the images. Finally I spent a while with grep and a spell checker cleaning everything up. Overall, this took me about five hours.

Now I've got a 143KB ASCII text file with the same content as my 195KB encrypted .OWL file. I don't ever plan to give anyone a copy of my plain text version; I like Scott Adams and want him to get paid for his work.

If I assume that a professional "image -> OCR text -> corrected text" conversion specialist gets paid $10/hour, then the five hours it took me incurred about $50 in labor cost, bringing the total price to around $55. Not as cheap as the dead-tree version (<$15), but easier to grab quotes from. And of course I now have some valuable skills which I could use to help out Project Gutenberg.

I'm sure what I did would be considered illegal by Digital Owl (though probably not by Scott Adams). I'm just glad I won't have to try to hunt down a copy of the TitleVision viewer fifteen years from now just to read the book again.

And I'm glad that there's now a paper version so that most other people can obtain a less legally-encumbered version without having to do the grunt work I did.

Given the tendency of some corporations like Disney to keep pushing for extensions to copyright law, I wonder if any of it will be available in 50 years. The only reason for the publishers to keep the works available is to make a buck. If releasing a book isn't projected to meet their desired rate of return, they won't do it. Sure the stuff that's really popular now might be around, but I'm sure that they are vastly outnumbered by the books that were good, but for whatever reason didn't do well enough to go beyond a 2nd printing. These will rot away in the publishers' archives while being protected from 'IP thieves' by copyright law. I've heard about film historians lamenting the fact that scores of early movies have been lost and continue to be lost just because of this reason.

This might not be as bleak if the primary medium for publishing literature remains the old fashioned paper book. They will last for ages if proper care is taken. These stories will live on and will be passed from person to person via ebay, used book stores, gifts, etc. But what if the publishers successfully get the public used to reading e-books and wean them off the dead tree kind? Given that the publishers will want some copy protection scheme, the work will only last as long as the device used to read it and as long as you can keep the original copy. They will certainly try to make sure that you won't be able to make backup copies (even though it's your right) because that will open the door to pirating or sharing of the work. A person won't be able to sell it unless they part with the reading device also and that would still probably violate a EULA. Converting to a new format wouldn't be allowed because that would deny the publisher the profits from doing so, and open the door for the feared IP pirates. All of this will increase the rate at which works of literture will die and be forgotten.

My prediction: People will have the works that are currently in the public domain (ala Project Gutenberg), titles that are available for the standard e-book reader of the time(which will probably be obsolete every 5-10 years), the surviving paper books, and whatever L. Ron Hubbard's Scientologists keep churning out. Everything else will be forgotten by the publishers and will die with the people who loved it. The same will be true for movies and music.

I pray that I'm wrong.