Slashdot Mirror

I'll make it easier and say you can search Project Gutenberg and find.

-uso.

Yes, I'm sure that for you, in your current circumstances and with current equipment, they're a no-go. But must you assume that it applies equally to everyone, in all circumstances, and for the foreseeable future too?

I'm a case in point: over the last couple of years, I've read far more onscreen than off. (And that's not due to having nothing else to read.) Why? I find it more convenient, for a number of reasons:

• It's there. I carry my pocket computer (a Psion 5mx) around with me anyway; I don't have to remember to pick up my latest reading material, and make extra space for it.
• Backlight. I can read in bed, or elsewhere at night, without needing a light.
• Bookmarks and other conveniences. I always lose physical bookmarks; when I don't use them, it sometimes takes a while to remember where I got up to. My reader app keeps track for me.
• Formatting and anglicisation. With physical books, I'm stuck with the spellings and mistakes that they're printed with; but I can edit ebooks and convert them to British English spelling, etc.
• Cut'n'paste. I don't have to retype quotes &c if I want to refer to them.
• Font size. Depending on the conditions, I can adjust the font size &c to match. For dead-tree books, the only `zoom mode' you have is to move your head closer to the object...
• Library size. I currently carry nearly a thousand books and stories with me, so I'm never stuck for anything. I really wouldn't want to try that with dead-tree editions.
• Cheapness. I read some stuff that's out of copyright and available for free (e.g. via Gutenberg). I also have many files purchased from Fictionwise, which is substantially cheaper than buying in dead-tree form. (I'm not admitting to having files of more dubious origin, too...)
• Searching. If I have vague memories of having read something, or want to check back, I can do a straight text search.

(BTW, I've never read anything on my Psion in the bath, but you might be interested to know that Douglas Adams actually wrote in the bath! Incidentally, on an older Psion model.)

Now, I'm specifically not saying that these advantages apply to everyone. I'm sure they don't. But that's exactly the point: neither do your disadvantages. Isn't it enough that some people like ebooks?

I never really understood the eBook business model, or how it was expected to work.

I have a good friend -- Rie Sheridan -- who has found some success as an independent author by selling short stories for a $1 a pop through Echelon Press. But an entire novel? Even with a Palm, I have trouble reading eBooks I've downloaded from Gutenberg.

I think that the way the internet will help change writing is the way that it has changed Comics. The successful webcomics provide regular content for free, and are basically funded through sales of related merchandise -- T-shirts and the like. I think writers will start writing stories as serials... distributing the content regularly for free, and making money off of merchandise.

I'm not just mouthing off, either. I'm going to do that. I'm working on converting my web site, Rimbosity (please be gentle, she's just a P-233 running Linux!), so that I'll be able to provide new music each month and a regular part of a serial each week. It should be up in about a month (conservative estimate; ought to be sooner).

The content will be free; the merchandise will be pay. Meanwhile, I have a day job.

This way, people can use AvantGo or Plucker to download the stories off of the web and keep up with them each week, or just check in once a week when they need a break from work. And I think it will work, for the same reasons it works for webcomics.

So I may be wrong, but I'm putting my money where my mouth is here, and we all will learn soon enough if I'm right!

Ehrm... that is... provided I still remember how to write... ;)

eBooks is one of those technologies looking for a purpose that does not exist.

Remember Edgar Rice Burrough's Mars books?

Some of them are available at Project Gutenberg

#1 - A Princess of Mars
#2 - Gods Of Mars
#2 - Warlord of Mars

I think there were about 12 books, but only a few are available at PG. ERB's work was some of the first titles there. Pretty cool (and very imaginative) old-school Sci-Fi. You may have heard of his other work -- Tarzan.

And in this future of drm and loss of privacy, if only there was a system to allow the distrobution of content anonymously. So that you may state your opinion to the world(1st ammendment right), and not be punished for it.
Freenet

With books, the price isn't so high - really. The price of printing out a whole book for convenient consumption would be high for most individuals already. And no one wants to show up anywhere with a huge pile of large black-and-white pages binded together, complete with scanning artifacts and no cover. The effort and time to wait for the book to print would be prohibitive also. And books still have the advantage of being easier to use than an handheld electronic device while sitting in, um, random places. The only advantages to an electronic device is searcheability, backlight, and weight - most of the time, those aren't needed.

The only real role I could see for "piracy" for literature is:

1. Books on audio - those things are EXPENSIVE. And because they are mostly just a golden voice over a work you can get for much cheaper, the price seems a bit silly to most people. The most appropriate way to semi-legally "pirate" such a work would be to have individuals form an online community to make their own recordings, as a media transfer mechanism. After all, if reading a book to a group of friends is legal, and reading a book over a phone to a friend would be legal, why would not reading a book over a network to many friends be legal?

2. College textbooks - also very expensive. Here, searcheability and weight would be the key issue. If it were available, expecially at a cheaper cost than real textbooks, I'd definetly prefer to have my textbooks on laptop. I definetly wouldn't be surprised to see a community of textbook scanners spring up eventually if online books are not made available.

3. Archiving. Already being done. See Project Gutenburg and other sites.

4. Translating works not available in other nations/languages. Also known more popularly as "scanlating". See ToriyamaWorld, and many, many others to find sites that generally respect the copyright of authors, but want to share works that have not been licenced in the U.S..

Ryan Fenton

In the 16th and 17th century actors and stenographers would conspire to rush off unlicenced copies of popular plays. The most famous example of this is the 'Bad Quarto' of Hamlet. This appeared in print several years before the authorised edition, and was based on the memory of two or three of the principal actors, with much filling from other popular works.

In the 19th century the USA was the piracy centre of the English speaking world -- bootleg editions of every popular British work would be printed, with no money getting back to the original British writers. You can read many complaints from English authors of the time about this situation.

Even if we restrict ourselves to illegal distribution through the internet, this is not a new phenomenon. The alt.binaries.ebook newsgroup has been around for many years -- the only thing which has changed is the mass availabilty of scanners which would have cost thousands only ten years ago. So, instead of having to manually type a book to copy it, we can now scan and OCR.

Just as with music distribution, we need to emphasise that there is an incredible amount of *legal* book distribution on the internet. The standard bearer is Project Gutenberg -- creating free electronic copies of out of copyright texts since 1971.

Then they, (or whomever is left) will setup legitimate, non-price fixing channels that "consumers" will actually want to use (ala I-Tunes).

I would like to remind you that "they" (the "cartel") profits from iTune sales as well. Unless you plan to artificially keep iTunes unpopular in order to get the cartel to "crumble", which probably won't be so popular without the long list of copyrighted songs that the cartel holds. Your argument is all very contradicting...

Besides, the idea of unlimited music subscription is already here with services like eMusic. However, I don't see the landslide success coming out of such a business model as you guys are talking about.

btw Most of Project Gutenberg is mirrored on Kazaa, I think that's a pretty good "fair-use" to start with.

No one is doubting that there is legitimate content on Kazaa. However, we all know Project Gutenberg is FAR from being one of the major activities of Kazaa users. (especially when reliable static sources can be easily found)

You can get a copy from Project Gutenberg which is Public Domain.

Now think about it: if you start sharing copies of the Bible (and there's no reason why you should only share English Bibles), then you get the right-wing fundamentalist Christians on your side! Once people try to shut down your Bible-sharing network, you scream "RELIGIOUS REPRESSION!!". You can also write Bible study notes yourself and share them.

See if you can find copies of the Bible in Chinese, and other languages used in countries where Christianity is repressed. Which US Congressman is going to vote to shut down a Bible-sharing network?

Sure SOME people are using the Bible-sharing network to copy mp3s, but isn't the RIAA already getting income to cover that from the tax on CDR's and other recording stuff? They can't have it both ways!

No, because Project Gutenberg intentionally gave you a public domain release. They were careful to insert no changes to the PD text they started from. If they had changed it at all, the new material would be copyright to them. (And most likely, if they do make a change, they'll willingly place the result under PD. But they're not obligated to)

Good of you to bring them up, though. Visit their Copyright page and read towards the bottom of it. Notice that when someone wants to digitize a work for them, they tell you not only to select a book from before 1923, but also to make sure that the physical edition you have is prior to 1923 as well!

They say "Remember: new editions or translations can get new copyrights, though the protection of the original edition is not extended."

That's because if a new publication isn't 100% identical to the previous, it gets a new copyright.

Too bad you are wrong, wrong wrong.

Too bad that I'm right, right right. I wish I were wrong- it would be nice if PD works were easier to access- but a cursory glance at the law shows otherwise. Copyright law is excessively broad- it covers all sorts of things that can't reasonably be described as artistic or literary.

By the Berne convention of international copyright law, any original work is protected. Even "works" as trivia as a picture of paint splotches or a recording of white noise. If you can "fix in some material form", it's automatically copyrighted. And of course, when someone converts a video from analog to digital, some amount of noise is added by your equipment.

That random variation could itself be a protected "work". Unless the end-consumer (who wants to upload Metropolis to Kazaa, say) can verify that all of that conversion noise is removed from his encoding, then he can't distribute it without violating Macday's copyrights.

currency converter - findsounds.com

how stuff works - infoplease

about.com - librarian's index

rebecca's reference - tom mayo's links
-words:

acronym/abbr -lookup -finder -bm

trans -babelfish -worldlingo -google bm

bartleby

phrontistery

pseudodictionary

jargon file
--music

epitonic - pitchfork

sonomu - electraum

gnod - audioquarium --books:

amazon - abebooks - bookfinder

gutenberg & onlinebooks

loc.gov - lambiek comiclopedia - rebecca's books

Plain Vanilla ASCII!

Is Project Gutenberg and a Palm Pilot.

Someone else already mentioned the MobiPocket Reader, which includes some phenomenal high-res fonts for the Clié. Baen Books has much of their catalogue available for download in the MobiPocket format, including their Baen Free Library. The Free Library contains dozens of books, many by established authors. That includes the first couple of books in the Honor Harrington series.

Beyond that, I like the Weasel Reader, an ebook reader dedicated to reading Project Gutenberg etexts.

Both MobiPocket Reader and Weasel Reader support the jogwheel, Memory Stick, and hi-res fonts on the Clié. Highly recommended.

This has nothing to do with corporate copyrights or the Mickey Mouse problem. That's a completely separate issue.

The reform is aimed at non-corporate copyrights, the stuff that no one will bother to renew. Say some author wrote a scholarly book in 1924, which is now considered to be important. Because it's still under copyright, people like Project Gutenberg cannot use, reprint, or archive it without the author's permission.

After 80 years it'd be very difficult to legally acquire permission, even from the author's estate. He may have multiple generations of descendants, or no descendants at all, so it's nontrivial to figure out which party has legal authority over the work. For most purposes, getting permission to use the work is simply not feasible.

This change to the law would fix that problem. After 50 years, if the author's heirs have stopped caring (or have just died out), the $1 will go unpaid and the book will become public domain. Scholars and archivers can do with it as they will. On the other hand, if the work is important enough that someone does bother to pay the $1, we'll know that the payor is the person with legal authority. Scholars and archivers will know exactly whom to ask for permission. Either way, we no longer have the problem of unused works gathering dust under unnecessary copyright.

My apologies, to make up for my error here are some links about subjects pertinent to my previous post...

John Sundmans Yahoo group: *

Project Gutenburg: *
WetMachine

And some information about creative commons act: *


I hope this makes up for my transgression ;)

Nit

we need your help

About a month ago, I started sounding optimistic about getting a bill introduced into Congress to help right the wrong of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. I was optimistic because we had found a congressperson who was willing to introduce the bill. But after pressure from lobbyists, that is no longer clear. And so we need help to counter that pressure, and to find a sponsor.

The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.

The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford's library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.

Stanford is not alone. This has long been a passion of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive, as well as many others. Yet because of current copyright regulation, these projects -- that would lower the cost of libraries dramatically, and spread knowledge broadly -- cannot go forward. The costs of clearing the rights to makes these works available is extraordinarily high.

Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them. They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world remains silent, they will win.

We need to your help to resist this now. At this stage, all that we need is one congressperson to introduce the proposal. Whether you call it the Copyright Term Deregulation Act, or the Public Domain Enhancement Act, doesn't matter. What matters is finding a sponsor, so we can begin to show the world just how extreme this debate has become: They have already gotten a 20 year extension of all copyrights just so 2% can benefit; and now they object to paying just $1 for that benefit, so that no one else might compete with them.

If you believe this is wrong, here are two things you can do: (1) Write your Representative and Senator, and ask them to be the first to introduce this statute; point them to the website http://eldred.cc, and ask them to respond. And even more importantly, (2) blog this request, so that others who think about these issues can get involved in the conversation.

I have given this movement as much as I can over the past four years, and I will not stop until we have reclaimed the public domain. Stay tuned for more litigation, and more ideas from Creative Commons. But please take these two steps now.

I just wish Larry would mention Gutenberg more...

Moby Dick is available at Project Gutenberg. Herman Melville died in 1891; it was release in 1991.

As far as 28 years for computer texts go, if you're talking about something like Using Java 1.2, then yes most of the information within it would be dated. However, if you're talking about books along the line of 'Solving Real World Problems with Logical Representations', then the concepts would still be useful, even if the examples require modernization. (And there's no such exact book that I know of, though there are probably similar ones that approximate it.)

Most of my entertainment does come in the "real" world though, and does cost money.

If you head over to the main Gutenberg Library site and search for "Time Machine" the audio book appears to come up. It would seem that ibiblio has the book on its FTP (and available for download) for at least "Time Machine". If you're looking to get started here's a direct link to the zip.

Next thing you know we'll be expected to pay for food, gas, and books

Pay for books??!?? What are you crazy??!?!

Note: Just so you know, the true Gutenberg texts have several pages at the beginning of each document as something of both a status on the project and a license, it is fairly long, but worth it.

Everyone who reads memepool would probably think the same. :)

In the case of public domain books, having a link to the appropriate files on Project Gutenberg would be nice

These links have been thrown around a lot on Slashdot already, but I think they deserve to be posted at least once in every story about books...

If you would like to read more free scifi e-books, the Baen Free Library is the place to start looking. I especially recommend David Weber's Harrington novels (the first two are available, and they weren't boring back then).

Then of course there is Project Gutenberg, which has most stuff worth reading up to circa 1920. Even more books are available on their distributed proofreading site, featured on Slashdot a while back.

Are there other, similar places where one can - legally! - find quality reading material?

Yeah, true -- but few people can type at the speed a trained typist can. I consider myself reasonably lucky that -- on a good day -- I can type fast enough to transcribe the spoken word.

That having been said, I agree that OCR seems to be the best (general) case for mass transcription. There is, BTW, a Gutenberg-associated project that allows people to help correct the mistakes that an OCR makes (and remove the extra bits like page numbers, etc.).

My wife heard about Project Gutenberg a couple of years ago and thought of OCRing and editing an English translation of Machiavelli's 1518 Italian play La Mandragola. She briefly corresponded with PG Executive Director Michael Hart, who was extremely kind and helpful. Had that been all there was to getting involved, she certainly would have put in the weekend or less of work the project required. But to avoid copyright issues with a translation that might not be public domain, Hart asked my wife to snail-mail a photocopy of the title page or copyright page of her chosen translation, so that PG could legally verify the work's availability.

Fair enough. But we were flakes, the library was waaay downtown, her work deadlines loomed.... She let the idea fade. I wonder how many other volunteers lose interest in the same way? By the way, Gutenberg still doesn't show a text of Mandragola.

Well, here you go. Knock yourself out.

In addition to the fossil record, one can look to living species to look for evidence. In the US, the Red Tailed Hawk shows several coloration morphs. Black ducks and Mallards can interbreed.

People seem to have problems with the idea that natural selection can ever find new solutions to problems through mutation/selection. IMO, the features that make it possible include: the power that genetics has for searching for solutions to complex problems, the length of time represented by millions of years, the multiplicative factor of having millions of individuals and the adaptability that individuals display to changes. This last allows a mutation that, by itself might be a disadvantage, to have a better chance of combining with other changes to become an advantage.

Most of evolution has to do with adaptations to new environmental conditions. The genome addresses this problem by retaining old discarded solutions to past problems. This allows relativly rapid changes.

At this point, the human animal is at risk from only one macroscopic species - other humans. That does not mean that humans will stop evolving. However, immortalitiy could change that.

It is one thing to give the Disney spin to something that is as fun to read as Treasure Island" (even if they give it a poor treatment). I have a problem with the fact that they will probably turn around and try to sell the fact that they put so much technical merit into the film that they should recieve some kind of recognition. That is just wrong. (Recognition they will then use as, "Print Spin" on their DVD marketing.) This is why we are behind the TIMES!!! I cannot wait until they give Beyond Good and EviltheDisney spin.

well in the us, the constitution gives authors control over their works for a "limited time". the reasoning being that people will make money off of these works for a "limited time" and contribute more art to society. eventually copyrights would expire and the work would go into the public domain. by removing this "limited time" (artists life + 70 year effectivly does this), this removes the incentive for the corporation and socitey doesnt benifit.

think of what life would be like if works would have never gone into the public domain: there would be no free access to the works like shakespeare, poe, bible, bach, beethoven, puccini. as a consequence disney wouldnt have been able to make things like snow white, the jungle book, peter pan, etc. people take these things for granted, but a world where nothing enters the public domain would be a very depressing one.

another issue has nothing to do with mickey. many works are essentially abandoned. they are sitting on bookshelves not being read and will disappear. eldred wants to take many old works, transcribe them into digitial form, and make them available to a new generation of readers. these works are making no money for the copyright holders, and in many cases the copyright holders are unknown. under the current copyright laws, these will never enter the public domain -- all this to protect mickey.

i'm sorry but a corporations desire to earn money does not trump the constitution in my opinion. it's sad the justices dont think in the same manner.

Yikes - they should have a look at Project Gutenberg to see how a Digital Library is built - cheap, effective and very accessible. Now there is a Digital Library worthy of the name.

So, is there a Project Gutenberg for music? I can find sheet music on Mutopia, but where are the public domain recordings? The Recording Academy has a preservation project to preserve all kinds of recorded music, but no word on whether they plan to make the public domain works available. The RA turned over part of its materials to the US Library of Congress, which does maintain a collection of recordings, but again there is no clear provision for obtaining public domain recordings for pleasure. There is a system for obtaining certain recordings online or as a copy, for academic or research purposes. So, where is our our public domain recorded music archive?

Heh - could Jesus write a book so long that nobody could read it? :-)

FYI, here is a link to Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg. Almost 10,000 classics, read them all. :)

Many Edgar Rice Burroughs books are out of copyright, and are available for free download from Project Gutenberg.

Perhaps this is a good counter-example to the DMCA, the "rights" of heirs, and "forever".

IMHO It could also be a life insurance policy. Think about it, although Machiavelli's insights onto how to run a kingdom were not widely availible (The Prince wasn't written until 1513 the same year that Da Vinci died) there was enough backstabbing and evil to go around in DaVinci's day. What's to stop the local prince (or would-be prince) from killing or torturing the man himself and stealing all his books and papers. Only the fact that without him the designs are useless. If you want the weapons then you'll need the man, alive, well, and on your side not in your dungeon.

Hi, I'm the guy who made the Lessig's Challenge website. I'd like to address some of the concerns which have been raised with the idea.

To my doubters: This isn't about a fundraising drive for the EFF (though I think you should join. Did you know the EFF only has 7,000 members? You can make your voice heard in the way the EFF operates if you join). It isn't about me buying cool stuff and writing it off as hurting the MPAA.

It's about supporting a different way to do things than the MPAA and RIAA. They want to lock up content and charge you every time you view it. They want to prevent you from viewing DVDs on Linux. And we help them do it. Every time you buy a CD, every time you go to a movie, you help them take away your freedom.

It's time to fight back. We can fight back not only by giving money to the EFF and the ACLU and the Free Software Foundation and Digital Consumer -- orgainizations which will fight against the media oligarchy -- but also by helping those artists and programmers who are outside the system. If they can make a living without turning to the RIAA or MPAA, the media oligarchy will not survive for long.

I'm not asking you to boycott these orgainizations entirely because it's not really plausable. Everyone likes to go see a movie now and then, everyone likes to listen to the radio or buy a few CDs. What I'm challenging you to do is to keep track of how much you're giving to the oligarchy (to take away your freedom) and counter that with a donation to people who will fight against that.

Here are a few suggestions:

• EFF
• ACLU
• Free Software Foundation
• Project Gutenberg
• Creative Commons
• Local bands in your hometown
• Your favorite online comic strips
• Unsigned musicians online
• Artists you like
• An open source project you appreciate
• A weblog or news site that provides you with fresh, interesting stories daily
• Political canidates who will fight against the MPAA and RIAA

The list goes on and on.

can be described as a small organizer/calculator. I use it as a graphing calculator, to store phone numbers, quick notes to myself, gate codes at friends apartments etc.. I also use it to read books from Project Gutenberg or sometimes to check out the news/weather.

Well then you ask, why is it better than a paper organizer with a book and calculator? Two reasons, size and the ability to back it up! I use the m500 solely based on the fact that it is the smallest palm I can find. Its thinner than any of the other ones (including the m505/m515) and marginally larger (wxh) than some of the newer sony's and tungston's. The thickness is the most important dimension because I have big pockets but I don't like it sticking out. Anyway, it can also be backed up which is good since everyone looses those little pieces of paper they write things down on, the whole organizer, and every couple of years even the nice leather ones look crappy and need to be replaced. So, instead of copying a bunch of crap, I can just pick up a new pda and sync it with my old data.

Crashes? I think i've seen two of those, both related to a little application I wrote. I don't stick a lot of software on it, so I guess I've been lucky to use mostly bug free stuff..

Its definitly a tool for the geeks though, most normal people i've seen using them are just using the keyboard mapping. Hopefully at some point palm will do the CE thing and provide a switchable input area. For a while a lot of managment types were using them but they seem to have given up on the whole idea. These people would rather just pick up the phone and call their personal slave to remind them of appointments, phone numbers, etc. So for those people a PDA was basically just a status symbol until they discovered that most PDA's are hard to carry without a bulge.

a copyright law that was drafted a few hundred years ago cannot be relevant today without any change. - chamenos

Why not? Other laws, drafted hundreds of years ago, are just as relevant today as they were then with no changes at all. What makes copyright law so different? - Twirlip

So you won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.

The texts you mention are "illegal" replications/duplications. But please do read about the travesty of copyright laws on their site as well. And vote accordingly in 2004. And don't get discouraged - keep posting.

So you won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.

The texts you mention are "illegal" replications/duplications. But please do read about the travesty of copyright laws on their site as well. And vote accordingly in 2004. And don't get discouraged - keep posting.

It looks like the texts01.archive.org/dp site is holding up fairly well! If you cannot get through today, though, please check back later. Slashdot effect aside, it's usually quite speedy and has a decent 'net connection. If you want to keep informed of current events, get on one of our mailing lists via (when it's not slashdotted) our subscriptions page.

Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation http://gutenberg.net
A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with EIN 64-6221541
gbnewby@ils.unc.edu // 919-962-8064

I can't decide if this is a joke or not.

You do know about Project Gutenberg, right?

But what if only proprietary software vendors have access to A.tgz?

In that case, is A.tgz really in the PD?

Or maybe I misinterpreted what you said - it depends on what the definition of the term "is" is, or what "in the PD" is. To me, PD guarantees reusability but doesn't guarantee availability. GPL guarantees both.

So how's that affecting Dover's business (Dover produces no new titles, apart from original translations of non-copyrighted work)? They're booming.

Heck, with those sort of results, Dover ought to be providing financial support for PG (or at least releasing edited/translated titles into the public domain). Though I guess I'll settle for that nice brief they filed in Eldred's behalf.

Slight disclaimer here, Dover was bought by a big printing company that's really helped them with distribution (just came back from the beach and all the little bookstores there were well-stocked with Dover thrifts), but every other publisher on the planet has seen sales fall, while Dover's sales, since the acquisition, have grown tremendously.

Another reason we haven't gone further in converting the dead trees to bits is because copyright is just so darn long.

99%+ of everything ever published is under copyright now that it has become pretty much perpetual.

Project Gutenberg's site has some information about this. They've also managed to scan thousands of books that existed prior to 1920. I think they are up to about 6 or 7 new books posted per month.

There are also other efforts out there doing essentially the same thing. You might want to check out the Online Books Page for even more titles.

The progress made so far in this effort despite the efforts of corporate interests to destroy the very concept of the Public Domain are really pretty astounding.

I doubt anyone would seriously want to go through the hassle of getting OCR to work right.

I Don't think it's that bad. I haven't tried it myself, but some other Project Gutenberg contributors have reported reasonable success with this. The depth-of-field of most flatbed scanners is very narrow, while the DOF of a digital camera is typically gargantuan. This means that fragile books can be photographed without having to flatten them out (and damage them) and without needing an expensive planetary or prism scanner. The OCR side of things would most likely be taken in stride by (shameless plug) Abbyy Finereader. Basically Finereader will reliably OCR all kinds of wacky stuff, and beats the piss out of all the others, hands down.

they will never take Alice In Wonderland!

Correct. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll has fallen into the public domain in the United States and is available through Project Gutenberg. Even if the Bono Act had been in effect since the time of its publication, the copyright would have expired in 1969 (1898 death of Carroll + 70 + end of the year) under the author rule or 1961 (1865 first publication + 95 + end of the year) under the work-for-hire/pre-1978 rule. But in the USA, copyright term extensions do not re-copyright works whose copyrights have already expired; thus, all works first published on or before December 31, 1922, are in the public domain in the USA.

The EU is a different matter; copyright law was revised to fit the terms in effect in Germany (life plus 70); works that had been in PD for quite some time fell under copyright once again. In addition, some European countries have granted extensions for works published before World War I, for works published before World War II, and for works published by authors who died in World War I or World War II.