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Why Project Gutenberg Isn't There Yet
option8 writes "This wired article ('Any Text. Anytime. Anywhere. (Any Volunteers?)'), goes into good detail on why Project Gutenberg, and similar efforts, are far from creating a complete, free electronic library. A quote: "The mechanics of a universal library are simple. The tricky part: harnessing the free labor." Though it doesn't go into technology much, I expect there's a lot of potential in mass OCR tech and good speech recognition (faster to read a book aloud than to transcribe it correctly)."
That's pretty much it - most of the books are in the public domain. AFAIK, the rest are all donated by their authors.
From their FAQ:
What books will I find in Project Gutenberg?
We cannot publish any texts still in copyright. This generally means that our texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as our Copyright Page explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)
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.
These books are chosen by our volunteers. Simply, a volunteer decides that a certain book should be in the archives, obtains the book and does the work necessary to turn it into an e-text. If you're interested in volunteering, click here.
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Distributed Proofreaders. Recently discussed on /. as well.
Keep in mind the following copyright rules:
1. Works first published before January 1, 1923 with proper copyright notice entered the public domain no later than 75 years from the date copyright was first secured. Hence, all works whose copyrights were secured before 1923 are now in the public domain.
(This is the rule Project Gutenberg uses most often)
Works published from 1923-1977 retain copyright for 95 years. No such works will enter the public domain until 2019.
2. Works first created on or after January 1, 1978 enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the author is a natural person.
(Nothing will enter the public domain under this rule until at least January 1, 2049.)
3. Works first created on or after January 1, 1978 which are created by a corporate author enter the public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation whichever occurs first.
(Nothing will enter the public domain under this rule until at least January 1, 2074.)
4. Works created before January 1, 1978 but not published before that date are copyrighted under rules 2 and 3 above, except that in no case will the copyright on a work not published prior to January 1, 1978 expire before December 31, 2002. If the work is published before December 31, 2002, its copyright will not expire before December 31, 2047.
(This rule copyrights a lot of manuscripts that we would otherwise think of as public domain because of their age.)
5. If a substantial number of copies were printed and distributed in the U.S. prior to March 1, 1989 without a copyright notice, and the work is of entirely American authorship, or was first published in the United States, the work is in the public domain in the U.S.
6. (This rule is complicated, and is seldom applied). Works published before 1964 needed to have their copyrights renewed in their 28th year, or they'd enter into the public domain. Some books originally published outside of the US by non-Americans are exempt from this requirement, under GATT. Works from before 1964 were automatically renewed if ALL of these apply:
At least one author was a citizen or resident of a foreign country (outside the US) that's a party to the applicable copyright agreements. (Almost all countries are parties to these agreements.)
The work was still under copyright in at least one author's "home country" at the time the GATT copyright agreement went into effect for that country (January 1, 1996 for most countries).
The work was first published abroad, and not published in the United States until at least 30 days after its first publication abroad.
This means that we can't simply take electronic versions of modern texts and put them in the archive, because only out-of-copyright books are in there.
While this comment has been addressed, I'd like to point out that you can get pretty decent output from the Gutenberg texts by importing them into LyX. With just a little bit of work (basically setting up the chapters), LyX will allow you to create good looking PDF, Postscript, HTML, etc, along with the LaTeX source. Combine this with rbmake and you can even read them, complete with hyperlinks, on your eBook (if you have one!)
The article didn't say that OCR was faster than speech, it said that speech was faster than transcibing it.
Come on mod's, read more carefully.
poliglut.org: they're still alive and fighting the man
it is part of the philosophy of Project Gutenburg to publish all of their works in the lowest level stardard format, thus insuring continued cross platform, program independant readability, ad infinitum.
That means *plain* ASCII. Plain ASCII means you could read it in edlin if you really had to.
This is a Good Thing.
This also means that if you wish to format any Project Gutenburg text, in HTML or TeX for publication, you start with a blank slate and can immediately start to work your own will upon the raw text.
This is also a Good Thing.
KFG
Additionally translations might generate practical limitations. If a text was written in ancient Greece and translated to English or some other language in the 20th century, the translation might not be public domain even when the original work is. Of course you are free to read the original text or make a new translation. Anyway even if a piece of literature was public domain, the translation to your native language might not be.
That's basically what Distributed Proofers does. Except they OCR the book first, so the proofreaders just need to fix the OCR errors. Every page goes through two passes. Then the entire book goes into post-processing where a single person puts all the pages together, and checks for problems that the proofers didn't know how to solve (marked with an astrisk). Once Distributed Proofers finishes the book, they pass it on to Project Gutenberg where somebody reviews the whole text again.
Distributed Proofers currently has a problem. After the previous Slashdot announcement, they were overwhelmed with volunteers. The volunteers processed books so fast, they were running out of material to work on. Three or four people scan in most of the books. They have been slaving away trying to keep up with the proofers.
Distributed Proofers is also working on a standard to mark up the books to better preserve tables, illustrations, bold text, math, etc. I suspect that effort is being slowed due to the priority of keeping material on the site.
I just found this site a few days ago. Essentially, volunteers can proofread one page at a time, so that huge time commitments of doing an entire book yourself are not required. Worth checking out.
http://texts01.archive.org/dp/