Slashdot Mirror

Since this product gets free placement here at /., I figure it is okay to put in a word for the good folks at Distributed Proofreaders.

Books are scanned and [sometimes roughly] OCR'd.
Each and every word, period, hyphen, and ellipsis on each and every page is scrutinized by at least three proofreaders.
Each bold, italic, underline and indent is evaluated by at least two formatters.
The work is finalized in HTML, proofread as a whole, and published to Project Gutenberg in various formats, txt, pdf, html and epub.

The resulting publication typically has far fewer publishing errors than the original book. This is especially true of books from the 17th century where drinking was part of a typesetter's expectation.
Be a part of it.
Sign up at http://www.pgdp.net/c/

For all your non-DRM, out of copyright (mostly, some creative commons material as well) ebook needs: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Also check out the proof reading project where material for Project Gutenberg is produced, http://www.pgdp.net/

Unfortunately this is no longer a growing domain. The length of copyright extends before anything can become "out of copyright".

For all your non-DRM, out of copyright (mostly, some creative commons material as well) ebook needs: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Also check out the proof reading project where material for Project Gutenberg is produced, http://www.pgdp.net/

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://www.pgdp.net/c/

With the upside of you now having a back up, ever tried backing up a dead tree edition? It's not easy to back up or restore.

YES, I've tried: http://www.pgdp.net/c/ It's not easy but it's not that hard, either. Just make sure the author has been dead for 70 years first.

there is http://www.gutenberg.org/

and its excellent feeder http://pgdp.net/

What I will often do when I have some downtime is proofread some pages at http://www.pgdp.net/. It's essentially a project to take OCR'd out-of-copyright books and proofread and format them for Project Gutenberg. You only have to do one page at a time, so (depending on the type of book you choose to work on), it can take anywhere from just a minute or two on up, and the result is something useful.

And while I've been doing it, every once in a while something will catch my interest that I would normally have never read.

Why not head over to Distributed Proofreaders and do a few pages in his memory: http://www.pgdp.net/

... has written a heartfelt and thoughtful obituary:

http://www.gutenberg.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_S._Hart

If you want to honour Michael, go and proof a page at http://www.pgdp.net/ - the literary equivalent of pouring one out for this internet giant.

Use your brain a little more.

Ok!
Earth has a land surface of 148,940,000 km^2. That's 1.5 * 10^14 m^2.
Let's say we can fit 8 people on a surface a meter squared, if they are not too fat (obviously I'm ignoring buildings of more than 1 floor here).
That gives us a carrying capacity of 1.2 * 10^15 people on all the land surface on Earth. I'm ignoring for now that those people are composed of CHON + Calcium, Phosphorus, Iron, Sulphur etc. and if we have enough resources.
That number divided by the 7,000,000,000 we have now is approx 172000. Earth is full if we have 172000 times as many people as now (unless they can swim really well).
If the annual population growth rate were large such as 3%, we would stand belly-to-belly in 2419.
(That's exponentials for you)
If the annual population growth rate were 2%, like in the 1960s, we would have until 2620.
If the annual population growth rate stays at 1%, like now, we would have more than a thousand years until 3223.
There's a saying: if something can't go on forever, it won't.
I still have to see if I can buy John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" one day, no doubt I've made mistakes in my calculation.
I invite you fellow Slashdotters to do the calculation for yourself:
To calculate the number of years do the following: growth factor = (1 + growth rate % / 100 %) ^ number of years
where number of years is the unknown so rewrite it by taking the logarithm: log(growth factor) = number of yeasr * log (1 + growth rate % / 100 %) <=> number of years = log(growth factor) / log (1 + growth rate % / 100 %)
fill in for 2%: log (172000) / log (1 + 0.02) = 609 years (add 2011 to that)
It doesn't matter what you take as the base of your logarithm, 10 or e or whatever.
And how did you guess that I considered becoming a Roman catholic monk when I was a boy? The mind boggles...
For other fun catholic-monk-like activities aside from autoflagellation, visit http://www.pgdp.net/c/ (safe for work most of the time). Crowdsourcing projects benefit from increased population too!

For Slashdotters that are also PGDP'ers and can read Swedish: Värdarnas Utveckling - Svante Arrhenius (1906) (PGDP membership required to view the URL).

Of course part of the problem here is that they really don't use the "wiki" in Wikileaks. At least in theory they were going to be using wiki or wiki-like tools that would let newcommers and ordinary people help with the processing of the information, but apparently that has been thrown out the window. Yes, it started that way, but it isn't any more.

Certainly something like Distributed Proofreaders could help in processing the information, to show what a "crowdsourcing" model or at least community development effort could look like without the wiki itself.

Yeah, there is political infighting, but a great deal of that is self-inflicted. There is a need for something like WIkileaks and I'm glad that they are doing what they are doing, but they also need to get their act together if they are going to pull through this as well. That Julian Assange couldn't keep his pants zipped up has also hurt a whole bunch too.

Actually that's a good suggestion, but the problem for me and most people is that each book is hugely time consuming to process, especially the mass of data in old technical books. Try working on a Distributed Proofreading project (even a simple text volume) for a while and you'll see what I mean.

http://www.pgdp.net/

I count myself amongst the freeloaders, shamefully

Why should you or anyone be ashamed of making free use of a public domain resource? That freedom is your right, and Project Gutenberg facilitates the process. Good for both of you!

I agree the donating poster should be lauded, as should the Project itself, but you needn't throw on the sackcloth and ashes in response. :)

By the way, if others are cash poor yet want to help out, another way of donating to the Project is with your time. Why not help them digitize old books or record audio books? I've done the former (it's actually rather fun, but I'm an editing geek), and the latter seems like an intriguing idea.

Have you considered giving something else to Project Gutenberg instead of money?
Consider (also) giving them your time:
http://www.pgdp.net/c/, or PGDP Europe (much smaller; mostly Serbian poetry), or if you're Canadian http://www.pgdpcanada.net/c/default.php or the Scandinavian Project Runeberg; or if you like the Fraktur font join Project GaGa.

You'd think that would be the case, but there are several reasons why humans are a better solution to this than a computer program:

1. Recognition like this requires complex interpretation. Computers might be able to interpret them, but you have no way of validating that interpretation, and computers are pretty literal about it anyway. Multiple humans with cross-checked results are going to give you (by and large) more accurate results. If we can't manage it with OCR of clearly-written and cleanly-scanned written words (hence projects like "distributed proofreaders" - http://www.pgdp.net/c/ - to put OCR scans of books through multiple human validations to make sure the OCR worked), we're surely not going to do terribly well scanning imperfect photographs of novel landscapes for hard-to-recognize features.

2. Programming such recognition costs time and money. Showing volunteers pictures costs a lot less time and money.

3. Having people volunteer and become actively involved in any aspect of science is good for the popularity of the science. Look at SETI @ Home.

Yes, they probably could get the recognition to acceptable levels. But why bother when there are hordes of free labor willing to do a better job?

Like this?

More like this is what I had in mind. ;)

If you do download books from Gutenberg or ManyBooks you might like to consider giving a little back. This doesn't have to be financial - head over to Distributed Proofreaders and sign up.

In fact, the proofread is done by the Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net/c/

BTW, I'd like to know what is done from all the human OCR from the Recaptcha project: http://recaptcha.net/

Any link to the digitized books ?

I'm currently reading Confucious' works (thank you, Project Gutenberg)

Feel free to pay them back any time you fancy.

Well it was obviously a piece of a biography of Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (sheesh!). You mean you couldn't read it? :-)
Probably this page would benefit from being re-scanned. Such a thing could be found out and corrected, if all those scanned books would be processed in some kind of Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders-like fashion. OCR is still a bit of an artform at the moment, as far as I'm aware.
I'm looking forward to PGDP (or anyone else really) coming up with a plan for social website which would compel people to correct the scanno's from digitizing their own cultural heritage. Seeing as PGDP has something like 26000 more or less active volunteers as of today, that seems to me a very successful application already of "scaling up". Maybe we can't do any better than this.

Several of the PGDP projects of maths books are meant to be marked up with LaTeX, e.g. this one in round F1:
Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (1838) (ed. Joseph Liouville) (warning, PGDP membership required)
Now this is probably not a really suitable example for school use, but e.g. a book like Elementary Algebra for Schools, by H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight (1885) (warning, PGDP membership required) sounds about right.
That book has already been checked and formatted but needs to be checked again and post-processed, afterwards it's public domain for anyone (including California schools) to download. In a few years time at most.
This page (public) might be helpful if you want to help out making (old) public domain maths texts available as LaTeX e-books: PGDP LaTeX resources, especially Distributed Proofreaders LaTeX formatting manual

Several of the PGDP projects of maths books are meant to be marked up with LaTeX, e.g. this one in round F1:
Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (1838) (ed. Joseph Liouville) (warning, PGDP membership required)
Now this is probably not a really suitable example for school use, but e.g. a book like Elementary Algebra for Schools, by H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight (1885) (warning, PGDP membership required) sounds about right.
That book has already been checked and formatted but needs to be checked again and post-processed, afterwards it's public domain for anyone (including California schools) to download. In a few years time at most.
This page (public) might be helpful if you want to help out making (old) public domain maths texts available as LaTeX e-books: PGDP LaTeX resources, especially Distributed Proofreaders LaTeX formatting manual

Several of the PGDP projects of maths books are meant to be marked up with LaTeX, e.g. this one in round F1:
Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (1838) (ed. Joseph Liouville) (warning, PGDP membership required)
Now this is probably not a really suitable example for school use, but e.g. a book like Elementary Algebra for Schools, by H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight (1885) (warning, PGDP membership required) sounds about right.
That book has already been checked and formatted but needs to be checked again and post-processed, afterwards it's public domain for anyone (including California schools) to download. In a few years time at most.
This page (public) might be helpful if you want to help out making (old) public domain maths texts available as LaTeX e-books: PGDP LaTeX resources, especially Distributed Proofreaders LaTeX formatting manual

Several of the PGDP projects of maths books are meant to be marked up with LaTeX, e.g. this one in round F1:
Journal de Mathématiques Pures et Appliquées (1838) (ed. Joseph Liouville) (warning, PGDP membership required)
Now this is probably not a really suitable example for school use, but e.g. a book like Elementary Algebra for Schools, by H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight (1885) (warning, PGDP membership required) sounds about right.
That book has already been checked and formatted but needs to be checked again and post-processed, afterwards it's public domain for anyone (including California schools) to download. In a few years time at most.
This page (public) might be helpful if you want to help out making (old) public domain maths texts available as LaTeX e-books: PGDP LaTeX resources, especially Distributed Proofreaders LaTeX formatting manual

load it into Distributed Proofreaders

Not before they fix their horrid early-90s interface.

Scan it at high resolution, OCR what you can, and load it into Distributed Proofreaders. Or if the material is too technical for the layperson, ask for a copy of the web-based software and set up your own private site. Let bored grad students work on it in exchange for some kind of minor credit on the final digitized work. (I believe that the bored grad students phenomenon produces half of the highly-technical articles on Wikipedia.)

Australia bumped up their copyright term to life+70 in 2005, so there won't be any new PD works in Australia until 2026. However, Canada's still at life+50, so Project Gutenberg Canada http://www.gutenberg.ca/ potentially has works where the author died in 1958. Also, here in the US, works published up through 1963 which did not get their copyright renewed are in the public domain. PG Australia has been around longer than PG Canada so it has about 10 times the titles of PG Canada, but I think PG Canada may be more active in adding new titles, thanks to Distributed Proofreaders Canada http://www.pgdpcanada.net/.

As a contributor to Project Gutenberg by scanning PD works and proofreading them at Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/, I'd just like to point out that this is not new. Long before the days of public domain scans on the internet, many publishers added a short copyrighted introduction or postscript to a public domain work and then included a copyright notice without indicating that the copyright only covered the original material. Furthermore, while I am not fond of Kessenger Publishing and its ilk, especially if they've used Project Gutenberg content as their source material, they are not obligated to provides free scans of their PD catalog, any more than Penguin, Dover, Barnes & Noble, or any other publisher.

Sadly, I did some proof reading for the distributed proof reading crowd a while back, and the assholes are so anal about NOT changing errors, that the resultant text is so bad as to be laughable. I no longer do it because I would rather write my own than promote falsehoods as they do. They prefer you to promulgate transcription errors rather than use your brain about what the sentence actually says. Sorry, no.
Being true to the author is one thing, being true to the fucking OCR is another matter.

I'm unsure of what you're talking about.

The FAQ states that, first and foremost, don't change what the author wrote; if there's some kind of misprint, mark it for the postprocessor to deal with, but don't silently correct it.

Who told you otherwise, and how did you get the impression that this wasn't the sitewide policy?

I'm pretty sure that the writer of TFQ is looking for software to coordinate a human speech to text effort(ie, manage volunteer accounts, serve audio clips for transcription/translation, receive results files from them, and so forth), not speech to text software.

He is, in essence, looking for an audio equivalent of the interface used by the Distributed Proofreaders project. With, perhaps, a side of translation mechanisms similar to the ones used on Ubuntu launchpad or equivalent. Neither are particular exotic technologically.

Such a setup is more or less prosaic in CS terms, no major breakthroughs need to be made; but it would constitute a somewhat specialized flavor of Content Management system. I honestly don't know if anything of the sort exists.

Project Gutenberg clears works under "Rule 6"; some works which appear to be orphaned, published before 1963, are in fact in the public domain, but it takes a significant amount of legwork to prove this.

They've also advocated for reform on orphan works, so they have been active on this.

Distributed Proofreaders harvests a lot of data from Google Book Search, already, as well.

5. Swirl in a basic selection in the language of the region from http://gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org] and http://www.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org] you have a decent pedagogic resource

To your point 5 I'd like to add that a lot of the content from the Gutenberg project is produced by the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders volunteers.

*YOU* can be one.

It's all very old books though, so for sciences that are still young, such as computer science, this wouldn't help much.

These kind people OCR and proofread and format texts of all sorts. Only texts that are out of copyright (i.e. very old). If you're good in correcting text, you can join in the fun :-)

If you know anyone in Uruguay who is good in LaTeX and has F2-level access to PGDP, please point 'em to the following math book which will hopefully enter the F2 phase on PGDP soon: here (subscription probably required)

H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight, Elementary Algebra for Schools, 1885 (in English)

Hm.. sorry.. it seems it's not ready for F2 yet.

Table of contents:

I. DEFINITIONS. SUBSTITUTIONS .... 1 II. NEGATIVE QUANTITIES. ADDITION OF LIKE TERMS . 9 III. SIMPLE BRACKETS. ADDITION .... 13 IV. SUBTRACTION ....... 19 V. MULTIPLICATION....... 23 VI. DIVISION........ 34 VII. REMOVAL AND INSERTION OF BRACKETS ... 42 VIII. SIMPLE EQUATIONS....... 48 IX. SYMBOLICAL EXPRESSION...... 57 X. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMPLE EQUATIONS . . 65 XI. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS .... 70 XII. ELEMENTARY FRACTIONS. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS . 72 XIII. SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . . . . . 77 XIV. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . 87 XV. INVOLUTION........ 92 XVI. EVOLUTION........ 96 XVII. RESOLUTION INTO FACTORS..... 106 XVIII. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR..... 120 XIX. FRACTIONS . ....... 128 XX. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE..... 136 XXI. ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION OF FRACTIONS . . 140 XXII. MISCELLANEOUS FRACTIONS..... 152 XXIII. HARDER EQUATIONS...... 164 XXIV. HARDER PROBLEMS...... 172 XXV. QUADRATIC EQUATIONS...... 178 XXVI. SIMULTANEOUS QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . . 188 XXVII. PROBLEMS LEADING TO QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . 195 XXVIII. HARDER FACTORS....... 201 XXIX. MISCELLANEOUS THEOREMS AND EXAMPLES . . 208 XXX. THE THEORY OF INDICES..... 226 XXXI. ELEMENTARY SURDS...... 239 XXXII. RATIO, PROPORTION, AND VARIATION ... 256 XXXIII. ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION..... 273 XXXIV. GEOMETRICAL PROGRESSION ...... 280 XXXV. HARMONICAL PROGRESSION..... 287 MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES..... 293

At P1 level (for beginners) there's a Appleton's Spanish-English dictionary being done that might be interesting for Uruguayan educators (admittedly doing dictionaries can be boring to tears even if you like PGDP ;-))

These kind people OCR and proofread and format texts of all sorts. Only texts that are out of copyright (i.e. very old). If you're good in correcting text, you can join in the fun :-)

If you know anyone in Uruguay who is good in LaTeX and has F2-level access to PGDP, please point 'em to the following math book which will hopefully enter the F2 phase on PGDP soon: here (subscription probably required)

H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight, Elementary Algebra for Schools, 1885 (in English)

Hm.. sorry.. it seems it's not ready for F2 yet.

Table of contents:

I. DEFINITIONS. SUBSTITUTIONS .... 1 II. NEGATIVE QUANTITIES. ADDITION OF LIKE TERMS . 9 III. SIMPLE BRACKETS. ADDITION .... 13 IV. SUBTRACTION ....... 19 V. MULTIPLICATION....... 23 VI. DIVISION........ 34 VII. REMOVAL AND INSERTION OF BRACKETS ... 42 VIII. SIMPLE EQUATIONS....... 48 IX. SYMBOLICAL EXPRESSION...... 57 X. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMPLE EQUATIONS . . 65 XI. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS .... 70 XII. ELEMENTARY FRACTIONS. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS . 72 XIII. SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . . . . . 77 XIV. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . 87 XV. INVOLUTION........ 92 XVI. EVOLUTION........ 96 XVII. RESOLUTION INTO FACTORS..... 106 XVIII. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR..... 120 XIX. FRACTIONS . ....... 128 XX. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE..... 136 XXI. ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION OF FRACTIONS . . 140 XXII. MISCELLANEOUS FRACTIONS..... 152 XXIII. HARDER EQUATIONS...... 164 XXIV. HARDER PROBLEMS...... 172 XXV. QUADRATIC EQUATIONS...... 178 XXVI. SIMULTANEOUS QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . . 188 XXVII. PROBLEMS LEADING TO QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . 195 XXVIII. HARDER FACTORS....... 201 XXIX. MISCELLANEOUS THEOREMS AND EXAMPLES . . 208 XXX. THE THEORY OF INDICES..... 226 XXXI. ELEMENTARY SURDS...... 239 XXXII. RATIO, PROPORTION, AND VARIATION ... 256 XXXIII. ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION..... 273 XXXIV. GEOMETRICAL PROGRESSION ...... 280 XXXV. HARMONICAL PROGRESSION..... 287 MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES..... 293

At P1 level (for beginners) there's a Appleton's Spanish-English dictionary being done that might be interesting for Uruguayan educators (admittedly doing dictionaries can be boring to tears even if you like PGDP ;-))

These kind people OCR and proofread and format texts of all sorts. Only texts that are out of copyright (i.e. very old). If you're good in correcting text, you can join in the fun :-)

If you know anyone in Uruguay who is good in LaTeX and has F2-level access to PGDP, please point 'em to the following math book which will hopefully enter the F2 phase on PGDP soon: here (subscription probably required)

H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight, Elementary Algebra for Schools, 1885 (in English)

Hm.. sorry.. it seems it's not ready for F2 yet.

Table of contents:

I. DEFINITIONS. SUBSTITUTIONS .... 1 II. NEGATIVE QUANTITIES. ADDITION OF LIKE TERMS . 9 III. SIMPLE BRACKETS. ADDITION .... 13 IV. SUBTRACTION ....... 19 V. MULTIPLICATION....... 23 VI. DIVISION........ 34 VII. REMOVAL AND INSERTION OF BRACKETS ... 42 VIII. SIMPLE EQUATIONS....... 48 IX. SYMBOLICAL EXPRESSION...... 57 X. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMPLE EQUATIONS . . 65 XI. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS .... 70 XII. ELEMENTARY FRACTIONS. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS . 72 XIII. SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . . . . . 77 XIV. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . 87 XV. INVOLUTION........ 92 XVI. EVOLUTION........ 96 XVII. RESOLUTION INTO FACTORS..... 106 XVIII. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR..... 120 XIX. FRACTIONS . ....... 128 XX. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE..... 136 XXI. ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION OF FRACTIONS . . 140 XXII. MISCELLANEOUS FRACTIONS..... 152 XXIII. HARDER EQUATIONS...... 164 XXIV. HARDER PROBLEMS...... 172 XXV. QUADRATIC EQUATIONS...... 178 XXVI. SIMULTANEOUS QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . . 188 XXVII. PROBLEMS LEADING TO QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . 195 XXVIII. HARDER FACTORS....... 201 XXIX. MISCELLANEOUS THEOREMS AND EXAMPLES . . 208 XXX. THE THEORY OF INDICES..... 226 XXXI. ELEMENTARY SURDS...... 239 XXXII. RATIO, PROPORTION, AND VARIATION ... 256 XXXIII. ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION..... 273 XXXIV. GEOMETRICAL PROGRESSION ...... 280 XXXV. HARMONICAL PROGRESSION..... 287 MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES..... 293

At P1 level (for beginners) there's a Appleton's Spanish-English dictionary being done that might be interesting for Uruguayan educators (admittedly doing dictionaries can be boring to tears even if you like PGDP ;-))

I use the base Plustek Opticbook 3600 for scanner for Distributed Proofreaders, and I've never had problems with the software. I'd recommend upgrading from the Abbyy Finereader 6 Sprint to the latest FR professional version, though.

The Opticbook costs about $250, compared to several thousand for the cheapest planetary scanner kit with software to correct curvature, and the professional versions of these scanners are in the 10's of thousands. A lot of the people at Distributed Proofreaders (who have supplied half of the texts at Project Gutenberg) either use the Opticbook or remove the spines and use scanners with automated sheet feeders.

I'll put a plug in here for the Distributed Proofreading Project [www.pgdp.net], a volunteer, web-based organization that processes books that have gone into the public domain into e-texts suitable for Project Gutenberg.

It's a great project, and kinda fun (for geeks like us).

"All-volunteer" is not the same thing as "totally amateur." A number of our volunteers work in library science, proofreading, or other directly related fields.

It sound like you last visited DP a long time ago. DP has been standardized on PNG as their page image format almost since the site's inception 7 years ago, though we do allow jpg as an alternative. TIFF has never been an official format there. DP has also been producing HTML, DJVU, and LaTeX editions of projects (including illustrations) for many years. We are not tied to plain text, although we do produce it as a minimum for our target repository, Project Gutenberg.

Markup for bold and italics is the same as HTML, and markups exist for and are used to indicate marginal notes, footnotes, and the like. You are welcome to argue that a more complex markup is necessary, but considering the amount of outdated information in your comments here, you may wish to stop by and update your knowledge of the the state of the site. We'll happily welcome you back if you do.

D. Garcia
SysAdm - Distributed Proofreaders.

http://www.pgdp.net/c/

However, as an entire movement, they've managed to convince me that it isn't primarily greed that's motivating them, rather the genuine ideological conviction that culture and information should be accessible and free to anyone who seeks it out.

You might be interested in this site, Project Gutenberg, or perhaps for helping out the cause, it's companion site, Distributed Proofreaders.

Short background: Project Gutenberg is a "digital printing press" for all works that have fallen into the public domain. (They will "soon" run out of material to digitize, since nothing has hit the public domain since 1923. "Soon" could be decades, but Eldred didn't win in the Supreme Court, so expect more copyright extensions...)

I've read Einstein, Mark Twain, Leonardo DaVinci, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and many others without risking violating copyright while reading on my Palm. Highly recommend them! I now understand the two Theories of Relativity, which is no small feat. :) I recommend Plucker as the reader, it's also open source (GPL).

Another way to donate is to give your personal time, if you're a careful reader with a good eye for mistakes: www.pgdp.net and for the books in less ASCIIfyable scripts the european version, dp.rastko.net (warning, currently down, please don't slashdot it).

PG is now hosting movies(ok, a movie) as well. They just recently decided to host Night of the Living Dead. If you don't have a few bucks to donate to them, but want to help the project you can participate in Distributed Proofreaders, to help move public domain books into PG.

If you want to spend hours, try Distributed Proofreaders.

Heinlein (and his successors) were extraordinarily diligent about renewing every single thing he ever wrote. If they hadn't been, you could read some examples that had fallen through the cracks and into the public domain, such as the works of: Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John W. Campbell, Lester Del Rey, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, E. E. "Doc" Smith and Kurt Vonnegut.

Actually, it appears there may be one or two available shorts, the ones that he really, really hated and prevented from ever being republished. I may hit up my interlibrary loan department for that.

The original policy of Project Gutenberg may have been to only accept text-only versions, but they've been accepting alternate formats from content producers for some time. In the last couple years, it's been the policy of Distributed Proofreaders, the largest provider of new material for PG, to produce an HTML edition if the original edition contains illustrations.

We did an analysis of the "whole penguin" collection found on Amazon a few years ago. Pretty well everything is in Project Gutenberg.

You can help create the next eBook, to your own exacting standards. Try starting at Distributed Proofreaders -- Greg

For those books which are already out of copyright (i.e. usually more than 70 years old), you can already start today, here: http://www.pgdp.net/c or if you want the list of what's going on there now (warning, listing of 900 books, please don't slashdot it) here: http://www.pgdp.net/c/list_etexts.php?x=b&sort=5

For those books which are already out of copyright (i.e. usually more than 70 years old), you can already start today, here: http://www.pgdp.net/c or if you want the list of what's going on there now (warning, listing of 900 books, please don't slashdot it) here: http://www.pgdp.net/c/list_etexts.php?x=b&sort=5

Reminds me of that somewhat bizarre subplot in Vinge's latest novel "Rainbow's End" where there was a big project to digitize all the university libraries, and some guy came up with the fastest way to do it: just throw all the books into a giant shredder, and then gave lots of cameras taking pictures of every last bit from every andle as it comes blowing out the other end...then re-assemble it all in a computer.