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Not directly computer related, but you can download free books from the Project Gutenberg. Also, if you have a scanner and lots of free time, you can contribute to their online library...

Duh. Get the book.

--Hikari

This is something that is going to be more of a concern for those of us who conduct a significant portion of our lives online already. Ask yourselves, have you ever had a moment of unusual brilliance in which you posted something to Slashdot or Usenet which was truly worth saving? Can you find it now?

Personally, I encountered the issue of software obsolescence well over a decade ago. I migrated my resume to TeX because it had already been through four other formats and I no longer had access to the tools to read them. I picked TeX because I firmly believed that a tool that I had the source for was likely to continue to be useful to me for a longer period. And the source for the document is ASCII text, which I was able to convert to HTML a couple of years ago with little trouble. I will not rely on the future availability of any tool that I have no control over.

This is one of the reasons that The Unix Philosophy, a fine book, recommends text formats for data. You can manipulate it with a wide variety of tools including text editors. It is unlikely that we will abandon those completely in our lifetimes. It also suggests, if memory serves, keeping notes online in text form. They are more portable and more accessible that way.

One worthwhile source of literature preserved as plain text files is Project Gutenburg. It is probably also the oldest such project around. It is to text in some senses what Free Software is to code. Although they aren't doing collaborative authoring projects, they are collaborating on getting old books whose copyrights have expired into electronic form. If you haven't ever visited their site, take a look.

I find it hard to believe that a discussion such as this is occurring without any reference at all to Project Gutenberg. Right now, there are about 3000 public domain works in the PG library. You can find everything from the Bible to the complete works of Mark Twain.

Because of the explosion of poublishing over the past century, 99% of all works available to the public are currently under copyright! It was never the intention of the founders of the U.S. to have a copyright that was perpetual. The idea was that it provides inducements to the creators of works if they will have a limited time under which they might profit exclusively if they so desired. The very concept of someone's great grandson holding copyright over a work that was written over 60 years previously makes a mockery of the purpose for which the copyright was included in the constitution.

For those of you unaware of the wording of the relevant portion of the constitution, I offer the following from Article 1 Section 8 of same:

Section 8. The Congress shall have power...

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;

I fail to see how withholding a work from the public domain for 90 years could "promote the progress of science and useful arts. Perhaps someone could enlighten me as to the logic?

I further fail to see how one could stretch the phrase "for limited times" to one that could encompass almost a century.

Z

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• Around the World in 80 Days
• From the Earth to the Moon
• In Search of the Castaways
• Michael Strogoff
• Mysterious Island, The
• Off on a Comet! A journey through planetary space
• Survivors of the Chancellor, The
• Underground City, or, The child of the cavern, The

Just a hint about older SF Texts: Some texts can be downloaded from project Gutenberg for free. Have a look at http://promo.net/pg/query.html and do a search for Subject: "science fiction".

You'll find some of the Jules Vernes texts, Bradbury's martian chronicles, H.G Wells "The time machine" and others.

Project Gutenberg is a great Idea and well worth looking at.

Here's a list of links to online books:

Books On-line, Listed by Title

Free Books from Samizdat Press

Free Online Books At The Free Well

Hard Sci-Fi Stories

ITLibrary

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

PROJECT GUTENBERG - ETEXT LISTINGS

The On-Line Books Page

The page with these links is:
http://members.axion.net/~enrique/book.html
and if anyone would like to add links to that list, please email me at:
perez_enrique@yahoo.com

Let's face it, if we coordinated the worlds resources so there weren't thousands of children dying every day, in a couple of decades we'd reach the point that there were thousands of children dying every day again. And the world would be a lot more crowded.

Nobody likes pain, misery, and death, but they are always going to be there. You can shift them around to someone else, or save them up for the next generation, but you can never really reduce them. Everyone must die, and most will go kicking and screaming.

**Clearing Throat**

At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,'said the gentleman, taking up a pen, `it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.'

`Are there no prisons?' asked Scrooge.

`Plenty of prisons,' said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

`And the Union workhouses?' demanded Scrooge.

`Are they still in operation?'

`They are. Still,' returned the gentleman, `I wish I could say they were not.'

`The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?' said Scrooge.

`Both very busy, sir.'

`Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,' said Scrooge. `I'm very glad to hear it.'

**Moving On**

`If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, `they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.

**I think you can see where I'm going with this...**

-Quote taken from Project Gutenberg

the Lord knows his words are open source...

but seriously, do they count as an open source charity? I have downloaded many works off the site, so they at least do what they claim to do.

With no formal training, Dr. Mills has developed an amazing new theory of Theoretical Funding. The Grand Unified Monetary theory or GUM which unifies the four forces of nature Avarice, Gullibility, Ignorance and Humor.

Infomercial hosts everywhere will write sonnets in his honor. I stand in awe.

The great thing about the palm for me, is the ability to have all the information you could want with you at all times. For class, I have

• a copy of the book that we're reading in class
• AvantGo for reading the news when class gets insomniating
• the todo list for writing down homework assignments
• the memopad for taking notes (well, classes other than math and physics)
• date book for keeping track of meetings with teachers or consultant work after school

A note on graffiti: it's great for what it was intended for, quick jots while holding the device in your hand without having to unfold or setup anything. Meeting someone and taking down their number/setting up an appointment is really what the system was geared for. It doesn't scale up very well, though, for something like taking extended notes in class or working on a paper. So, I now am anxiously awaiting This really cool folding keyboard.

I have gotten to play with a WinCE (I refuse to call them by their new name) device (my dad's HP Journada). Save the battery life (s'posedly 10 hours) and possibly the price (~$900) I see no reason to buy one of those things. True, it can do all the things that most people want from a laptop (ms office stuff, web access, email) but in that case, why not just get a laptop? As for using them as a PDA-type function. They are a bit smaller than a laptop, but not small enough. One of the major things I enjoy with my Visor, is that I always have it on hand. During class, at work, at a consulting job, and at home. You just can't just stuff a jornada in your front pocket (well, I probably can [mmm, big pockets. plenty of room for visor, RJ-45 crimper, penguins, etc..] ;-) but it's still not very practical).

So, I always have my Visor, and am thusly never really bored (games, books, news, work). The next step is to go for total integration: wire the visual output directly to my brain and have the unit tickle my visual cortex so that the screen overlays whatever I see. After that, thought recognition and after that make it have some sort of temporal shifting capabilities so it knows what I want it to do, even before I tell it (hrm... reminds me of some certain elevators ;-)).

I couldn't agree with Stallman more. Something has got to be done about these tribes of female barbarians and their sexist man-hating ways. I heard they only let men into the village on one night each year, and nine months later send all of the male children back to their fathers. If we don't do something soon, Xena and her warriors will kill us and---Oh, wait, it's not that kind of Amazon boycott?


support Project Gutenberg--READ A BOOK!

The main web page needs to be simple and powerful. Put the search engine front & center! Don't make me click a link to get to a search engine. Put the A-B-C-D-E-... links for Author and Title lookups right there on the main page, and don't make me have to scroll down to reach it. The least important thing is the gigantic text file of every book you have available, yet you put that on the main page, occupying over half the visual space on my browser. Another huge chunk of visual space is dedicated to FTP sites containing the texts, and even HOW TO USE ftp sites (!) -- the instructions for GETTING THE INSTRUCTIONS takes up an entire paragraph.

The fundamental aspect of good web pages for the next century is: MINIMAL WORDS

For example, the bottom of the PG web page says:

If you try to download a book and you get an error, try to find a solution in our Help page

HELP with downloading

The third paragraph talking about FTP also has combined within it discussion of subscribing to a mailing list/newsletter. Different concepts should be visually separated.

And lastly, there's way way way too much text at the top of every Etext that has nothing to do with what the user is attempting to read. Learn from the GNU project - one simple paragraph with the basic facts, and a pointer to a web page where they can read more. This solves another problem for you - if you have to change that text, you only have to change 1 web page, not the tops of 10,000 documents.

SUMMARY
Make the user's life quicker & easier, and you will get returning visitors. The way your web page looks today, I don't want to come back.

I hope the PG team accepts these comments as constructive criticism, because I strongly believe in the purpose and goals of PG. Keep up the good work!

The main web page needs to be simple and powerful. Put the search engine front & center! Don't make me click a link to get to a search engine. Put the A-B-C-D-E-... links for Author and Title lookups right there on the main page, and don't make me have to scroll down to reach it. The least important thing is the gigantic text file of every book you have available, yet you put that on the main page, occupying over half the visual space on my browser. Another huge chunk of visual space is dedicated to FTP sites containing the texts, and even HOW TO USE ftp sites (!) -- the instructions for GETTING THE INSTRUCTIONS takes up an entire paragraph.

The fundamental aspect of good web pages for the next century is: MINIMAL WORDS

For example, the bottom of the PG web page says:

If you try to download a book and you get an error, try to find a solution in our Help page

HELP with downloading

The third paragraph talking about FTP also has combined within it discussion of subscribing to a mailing list/newsletter. Different concepts should be visually separated.

And lastly, there's way way way too much text at the top of every Etext that has nothing to do with what the user is attempting to read. Learn from the GNU project - one simple paragraph with the basic facts, and a pointer to a web page where they can read more. This solves another problem for you - if you have to change that text, you only have to change 1 web page, not the tops of 10,000 documents.

SUMMARY
Make the user's life quicker & easier, and you will get returning visitors. The way your web page looks today, I don't want to come back.

I hope the PG team accepts these comments as constructive criticism, because I strongly believe in the purpose and goals of PG. Keep up the good work!

Who says it has to be this way [mostly meant for stuff like Shakespeare or other important literary works]?

Project Gutenburg.

Who says books have to be this way to be online?

Project Gutenburg.
http://www.promo.net/pg/history. html#beginningphil

Where does it say that this is PG's purpose,

Here: http://www.promo.net/pg/history.h tml#theselection

and who wrote that?

Project Gutenburg.

Wow, you've impressed me with your fine reading skills. Next time, try reading the source material before engaging in combative behavior.

You are doing a hell of a lot of whining about something that is completely free and explicitly tells people to add markup if they so choose. If you can't understand them, it's probably because they are thinking in the long term, and you arent'. Quote from the above referenced page:

Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others will be with us as long as civilization. . .an operating system, a program, a markup system. . .will not.

Quit whining, AC.

Who says it has to be this way [mostly meant for stuff like Shakespeare or other important literary works]?

Project Gutenburg.

Who says books have to be this way to be online?

Project Gutenburg.
http://www.promo.net/pg/history. html#beginningphil

Where does it say that this is PG's purpose,

Here: http://www.promo.net/pg/history.h tml#theselection

and who wrote that?

Project Gutenburg.

Wow, you've impressed me with your fine reading skills. Next time, try reading the source material before engaging in combative behavior.

You are doing a hell of a lot of whining about something that is completely free and explicitly tells people to add markup if they so choose. If you can't understand them, it's probably because they are thinking in the long term, and you arent'. Quote from the above referenced page:

Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others will be with us as long as civilization. . .an operating system, a program, a markup system. . .will not.

Quit whining, AC.

Go to the Gutenberg Search page and search for title dictionary (but turn off match whole words).

After the Project Gutenberg exposure on /. today I was invested with the idea for a needed piece of software (mentioned in a few /. posts). Two things seem needed, both of the same purpose:

• A client program that can suck an etext out of PG (et al) straight (or nearly directly) into a PDA (palm3 here, etc)
• A cgi/script to do nearly the same thing on the server end (that is, mangle the etext into a DOC and then a pdb) (The example given in the slashpost is AvantGo, a nifty web page caching system for Palms and such. When it works, all you do is click on a link in your browser and the helper/etc queue the pdb up in your Installer)

I figure to start in on the client using the best case scenario: a unix system with palm doc tools, pilot-link, pilot-link-perl and pyrite (the palmos module for python). Once I get something running, I will try and exchange palm doc tools code for perl or python code, eventually getting it into one module. (I intend to attempt it first with python, but I am quite open to perl, too) I would like to try and implement the serverside as a perl or python CGI (as I am without a better idea). Someone better than me could probably whip out a java1.1 client for multiplatform if some java code for making DOC files can be found, and the same goes for a servlet. I'll poke around and see if any such codes is in any of the obvious places.

Anyway, these are my ideas. I would like yours. Feel free to flood my mailbox, etc. Email to adric@adric.com and try and put something like VP in the subject line so I can filter it from the spam :) A copy of this document and anything later will be at my site at: adric.home.mindspring.com under hacks.

Oh yeah, I propose a name for this beast: VacuumPress

My first ever post to SlashDot! What a moment!

I'm impressed by the texts available - from Charles Dickens to Geoffrey Chaucer, and Mark Twain, and even The Hackers' Dictionary of Computer Jargon.

My question is, what portable devices are available these days for reading texts such as these downloaded from the Internet. I would love to able to use one these on the train and tram, on the way to and from work - better than a broadsheet newspaper. I had a look at the Rocketbook and Softbook mentioned by a previous poster, but those devices seem to be very restrictive in terms of availability of books. I guess WinCE machines could be an (expensive) alternative. What about Palms? I don't actually own one myself, so I don't know about how hard they are on the eyes for extended periods.

"Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star? We do, we do."

As you can see from the public ledger, distributed net has donated almost US$20,000 to selected non-profits such as EFF, FSF, and Project Gutenberg.

What money we have retained has gone directly to supporting the network and buying necessary equipment, and not to staff.

Borrowing a vision from Asimov, he pictured a world wide network of computers with access to vast libraries of information. As tools.
I would be thrilled to see more knowledge-centric projects set up on the internet, for example:
Project Gutenburg, it's a great thing, and a start in the right direction.
I think it's in these ventures that the internet will actually become welcomed and accepted as commonplace. Where my grandma or aunt Sue would have an opportunity to learn about places and things they otherwise wouldn't have, and without having to worry about managing the mechanics. In a perfect world I suppose...

I just wanted to point out that there is an on going project to convert books on which the patents have run out (ie. "The origin of a species" and other classics) into digital form. These books are freely distributed in ASCII form and you can always use a doc maker to make them readable on your palm pilot. I'm in no way associated with the gutenburg project, I just wanted to point it out to those who didn't know of it. As for getting new releases I suppose the encrypted documents would be your best choice, or you could just go to the library and pick up the real thing. I always perferred real books because you can drop them, get them wet, burn them, tear their pages and other wise mangle them and the most you'll be out it is 20 bucks(unless you're talking about computer manuals, those things are damn expensive).

From ESR, I would add The Jargon File. The Cathedral And the Bazaar is more about Software than the Internet, but if that's there, than RMS's Why Software Should Be Free should also be there.

Another critically important RMS piece (and one more relevant to the internet) is The Right to Read.

Also there's The Declaration of Independence [of the USA], not as a document in its own right, but as the first entry into Project Gutenberg.

Getting more internetty, you've got RFC Number 1, the description of the tentative IMP protocol to be used between the four systems on the brand spanking new ARPA network.

Going to distant history (in computer terms) there is the 1945 paper by Vandemaar Bush, As We May Think, one of the inspirations for the ARPA project.

There's the 1989 whitepaper from CERN's Tim Berners-Lee, Information Management: A Proposal, the paper that started the WWW.

Well, first point is to your idea about free books... It's already happened, mostly.

Project Gutenburg

And to make a new thread or first post, there's a bar underneath the story segment. You should see a drop box for score:posts, threading or not and order, then buttons "Change" and "Reply". The "Reply" button starts a new thread. Changing the subject does not.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

I'm rather new to Slashdot (in fact, this is my first post), but so far I have enjoyed reading the many comments from everyone who has contributed.

After reading your post, I did a quick search on the Project Gutenburg web site for 'Rand, Ayn'. This returned the title 'Anthem'. I don't know if this is the story you were referring to in your post, but I decided to read it regarless. I just finished reading the story, and I must say it was an enjoyable read.

Cheers,
Sirike

"Backwords saying worth is, saying worth anything."