Slashdot Mirror
Just One Page a Day
Charles Franks writes "Two years ago I started building an online proofreading system as a way to help Project Gutenberg (PG) get more books online: Distributed Proofreaders (DP). The concept is simple, we scan books and load the image and OCR output for each page into the online system. Next, proofreaders compare the OCR text to the image making any corrections as necessary, each page gets looked at twice. Finally the output from the site is massaged into a PG e-text and submitted to PG for posting to the archive. Now, nearly 600 books and a lot of PHP code later, we have snuggled into our new home which is graciously provided by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. Now that we have 'real' resources available to us (the original site ran on a Pentium 200 over my 128kbps upstream cablemodem) I would like to invite the online community at large to help us put even more books online. To this end I would like to ask everyone to do 'Just One Page a Day'. Thank you, Charles Franks"
Seriously? Just make a distributed system, put in PHP code, and make it all open source and free?
What's the criteria?
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
And start reading a page!
After that come back and you may continue();
... which is renowned for it's spelling prowess? ;)
A)bort, R)etry or S)elf-destruct?
After some consideration, I propose that this system should be applied to Slashdot stories! Each Slashdot story, after being submitted by an editor, should be reviewed by at least two readers before being posted in order to correct inadvertent spelling mistakes and story duplicity. Thank you sir, for inspiration!
Dr. Joseph Hairston
Superintendent, CCBC
Sounds like Gary Condit's plan for extramarital affairs.
A. Rightmann
Is there any worth-while open source OCR software? How about reasonably priced closed source OCR software for *BSD or Linux?
So are the books they are digitizing all in the public domain? It doesn't seem like there would be that many books in the public domain that haven't already been made available on the net. Of course I could be wrong.
I feel this project makes a lot of sense, but it'd be interresting to know who decides which books get converted into electronic form.
I'm sure interrest could be affected if people could, say, vote on what would be converted. Or do I make any sense?
.: Max Romantschuk
I dunno, sign me up! One page a day can really add up if you (and others) stick to it. I see the distributed part, except our computers aren't doing the processes in the background, we're doing it in the foreground. But I'm definitly willing to give up a few minutes of my day for a good cause. (Note, this is a good cause).
"A good compromise leaves everyone mad." -Calvin
I'm shure that buy askin teh Salshdot crowd (esp. the editturs) to help, yule improove jamatically teh kwality off you're output.
:-)
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
I can't decide if this is a joke or not.
You do know about Project Gutenberg, right?
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
The only works that go into PG are works in the public domain. While publishers sell dead-tree copies still, they have no copyright over the original text contained within. (Which is why these works are typically available through multiple publishers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Project Gutenberg only publishes books that are out of copyright. That means Dickens is okay but you wont find the latest Stephen King
Project Gutenberg specifically deals with texts that are not copyrighted. So it is all legit. :)
Jeremy
Not when the authors have been dead for 300 years.
It helps if you read the FAQ list.
Due to copyright laws, it is only legal to do this with older books (copyrighted 75 or more years ago). As a result, Project Gutenberg is mostly comprised of the "Classics."
So are most mp3s and oggs. How many do you have?
Just because its illegal doesn't mean they'll try to keep it alive and people will find ways to keep it alive.
Imagine the kids 200 years from now reading |-|uc||_3b3rry F1|\||\|.
(That hurts my brain just trying to type it in...)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
"The Road Ahead" will not be included, at least in this round of distributed OCRing.
Read Errant Story.
AFAIK project Gutenberg deals with texts where copyright has expired - like Victorian age novels and such :)
Looking at the books listed on their site, it seems to me that most of these books are probably public domain books or books that have an expired copyright. I wonder if they'll ever get around to transcribing copyrighted works? I know for a fact that there are a lot of digital copies of copyrighted works such as Frank Herbert's Dune series and The Lord of the Rings floating around the Net and I think the newsgroups as well.
I think a better use of time would be to have all these programmers here develop a better OCR. Then you wouldn't need the proofreading and could just feed books into the scanner. I mean there are lots of things wrong with OCR and reasons why it can't be absolutely perfect, but it CAN bet better. If we just write one line of code a day each we'll have better OCR in no time.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Y wood any 1 nede sum one too prufereed there buk. Eye du fyne bye myselph.
The 'Project Gutenberg' is about making old books that have (finally) fallen into public domain available to whoever wants it. Those are the books I'm sure that they want to have proofed.
Looking for any old 8-bit Heathkit/Zenith software/hardware - http://heathkit.garlanger.com
Instead of proofreading the books, I think this guy is asking for his new server setup to be tested!
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
Copyrights aren't perpetual. The Gutenberg project aims to publish books that are no longer, or have never been under copyright.
Have each client do the OCR (if you can find GPL software). Or maybe there's a company willing to donate it. That way you could farm out most of the processing too.
While publishers sell dead-tree copies still, they have no copyright over the original text contained within.
What? You mean to suggest that you have an actual example of a publisher making money without tyranny over the content?
Gasp!
Very good idea.
Will there be any support for proofing in other languages (french, spanish, arabic, etc...)?
What about books published in other countries. Would we be able to post those books if they're not copyrighted in the US but copyrighted in other countries? or vice versa.
Isn't this illegal? Aren't there copyright laws to putting books online without permission?
What if they kept track of every time the human reader finds an OCR-error. Couldn't you then build a profile of what words/phrases/letters the OCR software has the most problems with?
Then, couldn't you just selectively have the humans review the highest probably error prone sections of a book, instead of every single word of every single page?
What do you think?
Looks like for the first time in years project Gutenberg has been /.ed.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Nuff said.
It's surprising that so many people are either trolling or are unaware of the concept of "public domain." I personally fear the latter more because it shows the ideological degradation of America. The Slashdot community is much more likely to be aware of copyright issues than most Americans. If so many of us are so naive then I genuinely fear for the survival of our country as a free nation. Perhaps that is the reason why the media corporations can encroach upon our rights by pushing inferior products and getting unanimous approval of the DMCA in the senate.
Copyrights aren't perpetual In Theory. But isn't disney and microsoft (MS wrt printed works esp) working hard to insure they're perpetual In Practice?
>But the publishers still have copyright on their specific printing.
Nope. Copyright holders (not necessarily the publisher) would have copyright on editorial corrections and (for music: a weird case) some on appearance, but not on the original text.
Publishers often claim copyright on the entire contents of 300 year old works, but they have no legal basis for this.
Don't you mean run a compare tool in the background using CPU idle time right?
You don't actually want us to read a
page of literature do you?
You'll find that on Project GNUtenberg.
"And like that
sooooooooooooo true
:-P
i tried to install Debian linux on my computer.. and the linux dork helping me install didn't even know how to install the soundcard.. goooooo lunix
In order to make the proofing faster, maybe you could OCR a document 2 or 3 times, and then have only the disagreements proofread.
We use omnipro here at work, and I'm surprised at how well it works, even recreating page formats.
Of course, it doesn't work 100%, but it sure does get about 95%. If you were to OCR a document 2-3 or more times, and most of it was identical, it would save a lot of time if you had humans going over only the parts that the different OCRs didn't agree on.
Steve Lefevre
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
The new congress might extend copyright protection to Shakespeare's great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandson's nephew's out of wedlock kid's son whose paternity is in question.
---
When you come to a fork in the road, take it! --Yogi Berra--
You mean a more communal approach than an oligarchy of "editros" that can't spot day-old duplicates? Great idea!
Bollocks.
Technology is a human endeavour and as with all human work it is subject to ethical and moral considerations.
It's a disgrace that moral philosophy is not a required course in most tech. degree programs.
I have a little problem with the logistics here. I can understand why every page is being sent to 2 people for proof reading in an effort to eliminate errors, but the problem arises that these arent 2 computers doing simple computations, if both of these people have different versions of a corrected page, as im sure they will. what happenes then? who does the final proof reading, and if there is someone doing the final proof reading that kinda eliminates the need for the distributed part. I could almost guarentee that any 2 people checking the same full page of data in their free time will find/create different errors. I hope I'm missing some large concept here, becouse i do love PG, they keep my palm stacked with good reading for free.
But it looks like this is a more automated system, so that should help.
I wish i was compensated for distributed omptuing. It wold be very profitable then, and I would to it.
I've just proofed four pages, a mix of modern English, quoted Cockney and religious babble (Jonah 4:13, 9 etc.)
OK it's only four pages, but the errors I've corrected so far have been when the scan has been poor and the OCR software has had to make a guess.
... way to busy scanning in all the wizards of the coast materials for a simular project.
... this thing rocks. Flawless sheet feeder, awesome quality, scans right to the network into pdf format, sends me a instant message when its done.
I suggest getting a hp network scanner
i should have sprung for the duplexer.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Wait, wait...
I thought all LUnix enthusiasts were super-mega-ultra C coders and could whip up drivers in seconds! That's what I've gleaned from listening to their pompous, elitist posts here and elsewhere!
FUCK! You mean that's not true?
P.s. Michael is a trolling, flamebaiting cunt.
Are these copyrighted? damn I've read tons of paper about them and never actually read their original papers.
Though the web page was last updated in July, I find several happy references (and some less happy) to "Clara," a GPL'd OCR program.
Here's the web page: http://www.claraocr.org/index.html
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well, copyrights weren't perpetual. Whether they will be or not remains to be seen.
Liberty uber alles.
This is a great project, I always try to correct texts on my Palm but it's much better to have them correctly proofed in the first place.
I just did a couple of pages - fun & easy!
Distributed Computing.
Harnessing the proofreading computing power of human minds on the internet. very cool...
I wonder what other problems can be successfully tackled this way.
I think he was just watching all his volunteers working on one page a day and thought:
"Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!"
Well, yeah - it's easy to make money publishing a book if you don't have to pay the author anything and all the marketing has already been done. For new books, the copyright system is the best way to ensure a publisher can recoup these costs.
How about this.... use an open source speech synthesis tool/API that can play these text books (especially as more get added) over a PDA, laptop, etc while cruising in on the way to work and home. Something like:
o plug, just did a quick freshmeat search)
http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/
(n
would be pretty cool to get some good novels read to you w/o buying the tapes.
Or duplication, maybe?
Illegitimi non carborundum
Sure, it starts as just one a day. But, before you know it, you're doing two, then five, then ten.
You stop going out with friends or even returning their calls, personal hygiene takes a back seat and even Counter Strike and Warcraft III become unappealling. And, finally, after countless chapters and hundreds of pages you realise that you're friends were right: you're an addict.
Just one page a day, huh? Yeah, right.
Opium. Pot. Cocaine. Now pages.
It might not be your older brother's drug, or your Daddy's or your grandfathers, but, trust me, this stuff can be dangerous.
Do what I do. Just say no.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
If we just write one line of code a day each we'll have better OCR in no time.
#include
Ok, there is my line of code, everybody else, finish it up.
I can't wait to see this great new OCR.
Is there a list of books that are out of copyright and perhaps the status of those books on the Gutenberg Project website or anywhere else?
On the archive.org Gutenberg page they list the most popular downloads.
Number 2 is something called "New Hacker's Dictionary, The"
Every time I refresh the page the download count has increased.
A variation on the slashdot effect ?
Gutenberg page at archive.org
This a great project... But after doing my first page I found a couple of possible enhancements.
r oof_ / 1000))
Add a "Quality" stat for each person. Base it on the number of things that were missed(another words, the number of things that the second-string proofer finds).
Use more than just two proofers. Have one "First String" proofer, who could be anybody, but have two second string proofers (who both get the output of the first string proofer). If the second string proofers have any differences in their output(with the exception of white space), then another second string proofer should be used. Only proofers with a certain quality rating(slightly higher than what a newbie's would be) should be able to do the second string proofing.
The "User rating" should be a combination of the number of pages done and the quality rating of those pages. Note that quality rating would only be increased by doing first string proofing. Page count would go up for any proofing.
Quality could be a float, starting at 1.0 for newbies. Every page that is completed and has a second-string person check would then go into a calculation like:
_new_quality_ = _old_quality_ + (0.01 - (_num_differences_between_their_proof_and_final_p
Thus, for every page proofed that requires NO corrections by the second string the user's quality would go up by 0.01. ( 0.01 - 0/1000 = 0.01 )
if there were more than ten errors in the proofing, their quality would go down ( 0.01 - 10/1000 = 0.00 ), (0.01 - 20/1000 = -0.01)
Have a threshold of 1.10 or some such for second string proofers... That way it would require the user to do at least 10 perfect pages, or 20 pages with 5 errors, etc, before they could do the second string proofing.
Obviously, make sure that the second string proofer can't see who the first string proofer is.
The "User Rating" (mentioned above) could just be a multiplication of the Quality and Page Counts...
Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but copyright will always protect me.
Reading the blurb at the page-a-day site, it says ASCII only where bold is converted to ALL CAPS, the English pound symbol is rendered as "L," etc. No preservation of figures, drawings, or photos.
This seems very short sighted to me. Devices that can only display ASCII are becoming rarer and rarer. Why not, instead, store docs in some sort of SGML format to handle the special markup (which must be rare) and then down convert to ASCII when needed.
I've tried reading these things on my Palm. Very difficult. But if I could get a nice typeset PDF version, that would be a whole different story (no pun intended).
How long before someone writes a script to hit "Save and get another Page" and they shoot to the top of the ladder claiming to have proofread 13,450,213 pages per day...
I've used both clara and gOCR. Both are not yet working well enough to actually use to scan books..
One page a day shouldn't be a problem.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
OCR Engines are not email programs. You can't just add a line of code and all of a sudden it works better. Usually you have to spend time developing a complicated algorithm. Usually this is more than a line of code. Then you have to test it against known text (ground truth) to make sure it's a benefit, rather than a problem over a broad selection of pages. It's quite often the case that something that improves one page makes another worse.
Actually, having people make verifications against the OCR results establishes the ground truth which someone could use to improve the OCR engine so by doing a Page a Day, you are helping to make future Open Source OCR engines better.
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
How many books are we talking about? Those out of copyright and not in PG.
If the trend of copyright extentison doesn't end soon that number may reach zero, but how soon is that?.
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
You seem to have skipped the second sentence of the post you replied to, even though the editorial corrections you refer to would undoubtedly appear on the scanned pages. One way around it might be that each page is covered under fair use, and they are not served to the proofreader in order, so you never are given more than a one-page exerpt.
__
Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Something I posted on 10/24...
Go here. Now. It's the most complete listing of distributed computing I've ever found. Has the usual, like folding and SETI, but also neat things like Distributed Proofreading and finding as-of-yet unknown comets.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -Douglas Adams, THHGTTG
It helps the community and adds books to my shelf, at the same time. Amazing, I'm in.
OK, here's mine:
#include stdio.h
next...
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I just put in a few pages (15 if you care :), and while some were very conform in quality, at least one book had some smears and spots. There's no way an OCR of any quality would be able to reverse engineer the half-printed letters and words back to readable english without a *good* dictionary/grammar machine, and even then it would be more dangerous to have it do a half-assed guess than to have a human there that will at once tell that this is a trouble spot and that the OCR dropped the ball. God, that last was an ugly sentence, guess I should stick to proofreading and don't start writing myself...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sorry, but this isn't strictly true. See my earlier post. Publishers tweak the text ("corrections" mostly) which give them copyright over their particular publication.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
De man wit de gun sez we be spellin an readin good.now you just sit there wich yo hans where i can see em an READ!you gunna be uh literate poofreader when we git through.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I have a few books that are old enough to be well out of copyright (and obscure enough not to be found online already), and for a while I have been considering typing them in. OCR would be a lot easier, but getting a good image from a flatbed scanner would seriously damage most of these books. Even a handheld scanner would be impractical in some cases, and a digital camera seems even less likely to work. Is there any reasonable way to scan in pages from something like a 100+ year old 1.5" thick wire-bound paperback book that only opens about 60 degrees before putting up a fight?
What the fuck are you talking about? Are you responding to some other story? Why would the FBI care about you copying a public domain book? And since when do libraries copy or scan books? Last time I went (two days ago) I got a real book not some photocopy.
hehe, pr0n...
The response from the slashdot community is impressive. Already they have hit their mark for the day as far as 'pages processed'. They have over 1400 (at 10:13am CST) pages processed. When I visited their site at 8:45am CST they had only 615 pages. I predict that the project will hit the 3000 mark fairly quickly for today.
I am pretty sure that PG takes care to only use old copies of books that are in fact no longer copyrighted if that is in fact necessary. They seem very picky in making sure that they follow the rules.
It seems like every few years I turn around and notice that some massive archive collection gets sued, goes out of business, has funding pulled, gets tangled in legal action, has a university board go into panic mode, etc. and suddenly it disappears without warning or notice to the frustration of many. I'm certain you also can name a number of services, collections, and resources that spontaneously vanished when hosted at friendly sites. History has proven that despite best intentions, nothing lasts forever unless we go out of our way to protect it.
So that work isn't lost or destroyed, are any of the mega-sized projects replicated elsewhere in the event that a "it'll never happen" situation crops up to this unsuspecting resource?
after finding Thea von Harbou's Metropolis at www.blackmask.com, I go there first when looking for an ebook, especially since they have them in e-silo format (Palm). IF they dont have what Im looking for I go by Project Gutenberg...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Advertising projects like this on slashdot when you only have a 128kb uplink server ;)
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
Yeah, really.. why the hell should anyone be expected to read something? It's not like it's a useful skill or anything.
Tell you what, you can just stay the hell away from this project and not contribute all you want. Go sit somewhere and vegetate while your computers do all your thinking for you. The rest of us will be getting exposure to some books we might not have known existed.
Thank goodness people like you don't run reality. We'd have to throw 'book' out of the language.
MY GOD! A story where nitpicking grammar and spelling is *ON* topic.
This'll be a fun one to read through.
Do you Gentoo!?
I just proofread 2 pages of some greek philosophy book. the system works really nice! quick database, not too large pages to read. except i would like to have source and text next to each other, and not above each other.
I signed up for an account, and did a bit of proofing. One page was a bibliography with lots of numbers -- the OCR software made a few errors here and there, sometimes confusing "1" with "!". Another page was in old German. Since many old German characters look so different than their modern-day counterparts, I was quite impressed when it translated them flawlessly into their proper ASCII counterparts. The OCR software even got the umlauts right. Only problem was it sometimes mistook an end of line "-" for a "=". One problem I did have was that most of the scans seemed to be pretty low resolution. This causes problems when comparing the scanned text to the original image, as it can create difficulties for the proofreader. The software also had trouble translating the low-res blocks.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
You could use spelling and grammar checking to improve the ocr.
The quick brwn fox jumped over lazy dog.
It would be easy to figure out that brwn should be brown. The ocr should see something between lazy and dog, using grammar rules it could possibly figure out what the most likey word should be.
I'll help out.
One question - is Playboy public domain yet?
(en tea)
Site administrators will notice and kill that account.
But more importantly, the site is there for a good cause and random acts of vandalism are just annoying.
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 // 919-962-8064
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
...Not many, but there are some Project Gutenberg books that are copyrighted and distributed with the author's permission.
Also, Project Gutenberg of Australia publishes a number of works that are out of copyright in Australia, but still under copyright in the U.S. It is a copyright infringement for readers in the U. S. to download these works, which include, among others, Hervey Allen's _Anthony Adverse_(1933), F. Scott Fitzgerald's _The Great Gadsby_ (1944), Khalil Gibran's _The Prophet_ (1923), D. H. Lawrence's _Lady Chatterley's Lover_ (1928), all of George Orwell's novels, most of Virginia Woolf's, etc. etc.
Not exactly "the latest Stephen King" but a lot newer than Dickens.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Damn, work is getting in the way of my proof reading! Why can't I make my boss understand that Project Gutenberg is much more important than what I'm normally doing?
From the website:
Pages completed today: 2633 as of 9:01 Pacific Time today
The average pages / day so far this month (before today) is less than 1100!
Do they want me to manually scan through a page of text compare it with an image and fix errors created by OCR? It goes against my very nature to do such a task. There has to be a better way, a programming way, to get this done without having to look at all of the files with human eyes.
I haven't finished my first cup of coffee yet so I am at a loss for a solution, but it sounds like something Perl would be good at.
The motto of the open source community should be or is, "Progress not perfection."
LoRider
Looks like slashdot has caused the pages per day to go way up! Last couple of days had only accomplished between 1000 and 1100 pages per day. As of 12:30PM, the pages for today are already above 2600!
Wonder how long the increased rate will last?
-Dubya
I wish I could get my webpage to showup on the main /. page!
SIGFAULT
I wish it were more fun, like a book club or something. I went to work on John Locke's Essay on Human Understanding and got plunked down in the middle of some heady musings on the concievablity (or not) of the infinite, and I'm like, "Where did that come from?"--cause you know it's a fragment of some quite logical succession of ideas but what exactly he's saying I can't imagine. I will do this for a while, but for how long? It's choppy.
Here's where I cite an authority on meaning mostly because I found it just now and it sounds cool.
What I'm getting at is that the project would fare better were it to become more attuned to the second-order-type hermeneutic issues like the ways meaning is structured in narrative and how meaning is crucial to reading. Some people will see that as too warmfuzzy. I say, as long as the proofreading project requires human input, it should accommodate the quirks of humans.
your the idoit!!!!!1
OK, I'll start at the other end and work my way toward you:
}
..."you're" the idiot!!!!!
Their approach to solving this reminds me of how the Oxford English Dictionary was started -- by compiling submissions and references from thousands of volunteers. A really enjoyable recounting of this (and of one particular person who contributed thousands of words while in an insane asylum) is The Professor and the Madman
YM,
#include <stdio.h>
One line, one bug. Yikes!
Well, yeah - it's easy to make money publishing a book if you don't have to pay the author anything and all the marketing has already been done. For new books, the copyright system is the best way to ensure a publisher can recoup these costs.
I'm confused. Is copyright protection supposed to protect the marketers or the artist?
I do believe you have linked to a copyright circumvention device (the .au domain) in violation of the DMCA. Please standby while you and your belongings are liquidated.
Er, wait...
A while ago I started to write a Linux client for the distributed proofreaders site. I got a fair amount of it done, but there were some messy parts, buggy parts, and parts left undone. If anyone would like to check it out, or even work on it, it is at http://kapheine.hypa.net. I haven't worked on it in a while, unfortunately, and I probably won't.
-- kapheine
If they're looking for proofreaders here, the project is in deep trouble...
This page accidentally left blank
But the publishers still have copyright on their specific printing.
I've heard this in the context of German law, but never in the context of American law. American law requires significant creative effort to be copyrighted, which dumping text to paper rarely counts. (New footnotes and illustartions are a different matter, of course.)
In the case of books this is easily understood: author writes book; ... 30 years later author dies and original book falls into public domain.
That would make an incentive for people to kill you so they can steal your work.
Wait a minute! Isn't PHP like evil or something?
Programming languages may come and go, but good old fashion machine code will last as long as literature, very much like good old fasion ASCII text and good old fashion zip files with no meaningfull names.
It's absurd! :^)
It's inane!
It's Malaprop Man .
Walt Disney wanted to extend the rights to his branded characters and got the lawmakers to do it. In some respects his old stuff is renewed every decade: new generations of kids and new media- film, theme park, video tape, DVD, IMAX ...
Each reissue is a new pile of money.
This is great, but it's even more addictive than the Kill Everyone Project. Though arguably not as worthwhile.
My deviantArt site
set_bugs = 0;
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
2. Do you know how long it has been since I wrote any C code? I was lucky I spelled stdio correctly.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
For the reason why, I suggest you "learn up" on what public domain really means in the US. Public domain simply means that a particular work has no copyright restrictions. It does not mean that you are prohibited from adding further copyright restrictions of your own.
In other words, a work which is public domain is free for all to copy in any way they wish, including copyrighting a copy for themselves. Note that placing your own copyright on the work does not mean that the original work is copyrighted. It just means that your copy is copyrighted. Anyone is still free to access the original copy, which is still in the public domain. But they can't use your copy if your copy has your copyright.
You might ask "are there laws that prohibit you from lying about the authorship of a work?" The answer is yes. It's called fraud. It has nothing to do with copyright. Placing your own copyright on a work, and claiming authorship of a work, are two completely independent actions according to the legal system.
You are totally right that the cover text is not enforceable with regard to "fair use" copying of the text, but the parts that say "Copyright 1974 Houghton Mifflin" and "All rights reserved" are definitely valid, enforceable, and meaningful.
i shall say nothing but IRC, Undernet #bookz last count over 10000 titles. Come join us
are actually the preferred way to proof text. A project to create "The Collected Works of Edmund Spenser" is headquartered here, and the English-types were looking for people to work on some software for them. The current most accurate way to create an electronic copy is to hire people without even a passing familiarity with the alphabet you are targeting, train them to identify the letters themselves (using the font you're targetting, which may be very much non-standard, esp. for work as old as Spencer's), and have them enter it in character by character. You then have another illiterate person do the same, and have 1 editor (English graduate student) check both copies. Then any differences have to be handled by another editor (English PhD), and the final copy signed off by yet another editor (PhD).
A very very expensive way to do it.
See, an illiterate person won't introduce any bias into the text. They will faithfully duplicate any spelling mistakes that they find. In the case of an English scholarly collection, the mistakes are amoung the most important part, since they can identify different print runs, and how language shifts over time.
As a side note, the software project is hopeless. The best that cann be managed is to automate the administration of their current systems--no OCR will ever meet the level of accuracy that their current system provides.
next line
#include "ocrLib.h"
The system is missing one very important feature.
It should purposefully introduce a modicum of errors into the presented text so that it can verify that the response back at least corrected most, if not all, of those errors. If it did not, this information needs to be taken into account when guaging the reliability of the reader and/or response.
This is similar to how Airport Screening machines randomly insert guns and knives into the images so that the screeners are kept on their toes as well as generating enough random searches to avert any kind of bad impression caused by seeing someone searched. We don't have the second concern, but the first is always valid in such matters.
I don't want to get squeezed in the middle, so I'll work _downwards_ from you.
#else
Well, I'm assuming you want it to work in both Windoze and lunix. I just got the feeling that what you were writing wouldn't be portable.
THL.
Keeping
It's on Slashdot, so everyone does a few pages, find out it's actually fairly tedious, and only a few will remain of the initial burst. They're at about 7000 for today right now, which is about 1000 more than what they've done so far, this month. Don't build your site based on these estimates.
Check back there in a few weeks to see how the site is doing. Hopefully quite well, since it is a splendid and worthwhile[1] effort.
[1]: And only in the preview did I realize I sounded like that woman in the HHGTTG.
Been using computers for 20+ years,
Love reading,
Computer tech for 10+ years,
Never owned a scanner in my life. *sigh*
Heck... never had me one o' dem dere joystickers neither, Ayup!
The FBI does have the legal authority to monitor ALL activity at public libraries as well as place a gag order on the staff of said libraries. ( I believe it was the patriot act that made it legal, not sure though.) if you don't believe me check these links.
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/2002/0602.html the 6-26 show
http://www.2600.com/offthehook/2002/1102.html the 11-6 show
or right here of farking slashdot
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/11/05/177237.shtml? tid=158
Insert sig here (slashdot) Insert cig here (Lewinsky)
That would make an incentive for people to kill you so they can steal your work.
Do authors burn at 431 F?
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
...but first read the Proofing FAQ on the site and save yourself some confusion:
http://texts01.archive.org/dp/faq/ProoferFAQ.htmlEspecially read section 5 for some of their typesetting-to-ASCII conventions which would be non-obvious otherwise.
The standards for whether a particular addition constitutes significant creative value are remarkably low. The already mentioned spelling modernization, for instance, is an example of a tangible modification to the Shakespeare texts over which Houghton-Mifflin can legitimately claim copyright.
You could, in theory, copy their Shakespeare book, IF you somehow removed all of their spelling and editorial changes, line numberings, page numberings, annotations, commentary, illustrations, etc. from every page of the book. In practice, this is not so easy, because it is not easy to tell what was changed and what was not changed unless you have an original copy to compare it with. And if you have an original copy of Shakespeare, then you don't need the Houghton-Mifflin published version anyway.
You can now see the (benifitial) results of a good old-fashion Slashdotting on the front page, with the graph for pages from Nov. 8 going way off the scale.
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
Here's mine:
return 0;By the time this is working most of what I'd like to read should be public domain anyway....
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
Earl Wiener, 55, a University of Miami professor of management science,
telling the Airline Pilots Association (in jest) about 21st century aircraft:
"The crew will consist of one pilot and a dog. The pilot will
nurture and feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the
pilot if he touches anything.
-- Fortune, Sept. 26, 1988
[the *magazine*, silly!]
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