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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)."
What about the cost of the books? Unless the only books you have in this "universal library" are old enough to be without copyrights, won't there be a problem in finding funding to buy current day books?
Umm, Project Guttenberg can only legally use public domain works. If you know of any 100+ year old novels typeset in Tex lets hear about it. Even if a modern reprint was done recently, do you think the publisher would really want to give away all that hard work so that everyone can get it for free instead of buying their spiffy new edition?
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All digital versions of books that publishers have should be requested and maintained in a safe place till their respective patents expire so that they can be easily integrated into the public domain.... especially if OCR or speech recognition doesn't get any better any time soon.
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As someone pointed out, the real problem is the copyright issue. Most works are copyrighted and copyrights last for way too long. The consitution states that copyright should be limited, but when it's lifetime plus 90 years, it may as well be unlimited since we'll all be dead before they expire. There needs to be a grassroots movement to inspire a repeal of some seriously damaging legislation. I feel confident that most slashdot readers agree about what needs to be done, but we seem too apathetic to actually do something about it. Sometimes I wish someone would post a link that says 'click here to vote for freedom'. If only it were that easy.
I think an interesting project would be public domain textbooks. Textbooks are grossly overpriced and contain information that is largely available for free. If a community of developers can create an OS like linux then the educational community should be able to come up with open textbooks.
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Get manuscript from author.
This could be either handwritten or typed. If typed, it's likely to be in either plain text or Word format, but with a lot of errors.
If the manuscript's handwritten, farm it out to a typist.
We used to pay 0.5 yen a letter for English, 1 yen a character for Japanese.
Once it's data, edit.
I used to do my editing on a Mac with BBEdit, but this varies a lot between editors - some do it on (shudder) Word, where all the formatting gets in the way.
Reformat it to pass it to the DTP firm.
When I say 'reformat', I don't mean making things bold or italic - I mean cleaning it up so it's easy to do the next step, which is...
Print out and insert format directions.
The manuscript is printed out, and you go through it one line at a time adding things like "Line break here" and "Use larger font for this".
Proofs arrive from the DTP firm.
You go through the proofs, making corrections by hand (i.e., "Move this down one line", etc.)
The DTP firm passes you back the formatted data.
QuarkXPress is king here. You get the data in a finished form and pass it to the printers.
The printer produces the final proofs.
You can still make corrections, but these have to be done by the DTP firm, who then give you the updated data.
Last-minute corrections are made.
This depends on the printer, but quite often these are done by pasting the changes over the top of the printer film (i.e., they're not reflected in the data).
The book is printed.
Corrections after printing are usually done as described above (pasting changes over the film).
The problem with this is that the text data held by the editor is now out-of-date in all sorts of ways:
- It doesn't have the corrections made by the DTP firm.
- It doesn't have the corrections made by the printer.
- It doesn't have any formatting.
QuarkXPress can output the data in other forms, but it's still missing the last-minute changes and after-printing changes, and quite frankly once it's on the market, most publishing companies aren't interested in reworking the data to keep it as text for the next 90 years, so it can be released into the public domain.
Mickey Mouse will never be public domain because MICKEY MOUSE IS A TRADEMARK/LOGO. That would be like forcing IBM to give up their IBM logo/colors/design.
However, *Copyrighted* works should eventually go into public domain. The point is that after you are dead, anything - be it a movie, song, cartoon, book, poem --- whatever --- serves a greater good to mankind than it could to its dead creator. I think that a decade or two is too short of a limit for copyright. If I write a book when I'm 20 years old, I should still be allowed to make money off the sale of that book when I'm 40. But when I'm in the grave, it servs me no use.
Now, it could be said that a person who works hard to create pieces of work like movies or books or songs should be allowed to bestow the revenue from use of that material after the original author is dead. If I write a book that still sells well 20 years after my death, my son and daughter should be allowed to benefit from this copyrighted item in my 'estate'.
But I think that indefinite extensions are rediculous. I would say that 100 years is bordering on ridiculous. I think that 75 years is reasonable. If I create something when I'm 25, the copyright will outlive me by as much as 25 years.
In fact, I would propose that copyright should be extended to the life of the creator plus 20 years **OR** 50 years. Whichever is less (so if you die two years after the copyright, the copyright is still in effect for another 20 years).
I prefer to phrase it, "Thus Project Gutenberg has raced ahead at an amazing rate. In its 32nd year in existence, the collection has 6,267 etexts, averaging almost 200 etexts per year. That works out to about one book every other day. This is more impressive given that in the first twenty years of the projects existance the Internet didn't exist anywhere near the form we take it for granted today. The popularization of the Internet has just accelerated the rate the Project Gutenberg grows. With the help of Distributed Proofreaders, a project that allows average people to donate small amounts of time to proofread just one page at a time, Project Gutenberg can expect to add over 400 etexts per year. Clearly Project Gutenberg is thriving."
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full grown, like Athena springing from the head of Zeus, this criticism is largely valid.
Patience, however, is a virtue. Libraries of public domain works *grow.* Every work added remains. Although it may take many years, even generations, as did the construction of the Giza plaza, over time The pyramid grows toward its apex, another pyramid joins it, a temple is added to the side, and so on.
That's part of the point of Project Gutenburg. Not just to provide an online library but to do so in an immutable manner that only grows over time.
Adding only *one page* to the project is valuable, and that addition remains and is added to by others.
Even brick and mortar libraries can take generations to build. A two hundred year plan only requires patience to complete.
That said, I'm going to take an even more contrarian point of view to the Wired article. The amazing thing I find about Project Gutenburg is how much is already in there. It's already at the point that I think few people could manage to read one half of the texts available in their lifetime, and finding a project to donate is complicated by the fact that the hardest part may not be performing the labor, but simply finding a project that interests you that *hasn't already been done.*
It's already a remarkable collection, and I've had to, on occasion, resort to it because my local library didn't have a lending copy of the work I wanted, but Project Gutenburg could give me free ownership of it.
KFG
Sure, for the best scanning speed you have to cut the binding off and use a sheet feeder. But even scanning 2 pages at a time will be far faster than reading the whole thing out loud.
So what is your point?
I and probably many others here, like to read Project Gutenberg books on my Palm/Pocket PC. Whenever I have a little down time I can get that out and choose from a dozen "classic" books to read. Can't do that when the "book" is a 800x600 image, and your screen can only do 320x320 (Sony Clies, Palm Tungsten), 320x240 (PocketPCs, Handera), or 160x160 (almost all Palm and Handspring PDAs).
Plain text, HTML, or XML are much more portable than compressed images. Which is at least partly why Gutenberg uses plain ASCII text; it's readable on literally anything with an alphanumeric display, and by all signs will be for decades, if not centuries or millenia. Good luck finding a GIF or BMP in 100 years, let alone formats nobody's even heard of. I have plenty of pictures I made only a few years ago on an Apple II that can't be read by anything, even when I get it off the 5.25" floppies. Yet I've read code and other things written on computers from the 70s and 80s. ASCII Just Doesn't Die.
Floppy disks get magnetized, hard drives crash, optical disks get scratched...A book can take a beating, man. All the OCR and voice rec in the world won't change this until we can get widespread, cheap cartridged optical media.
One small book also takes up the space of a hard drive, and can't be redownloaded, or backed up. If my roof leaks, or I have a fire, it will cost me thousands of dollars to replace my books, and some will be hard to impossible to replace. If my hard drive crashes, I redownload the files from Gutenberg, and/or restore them from my backups.
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Some posthumous works may come out under a life-plus-X term that might have been cast aside under a life-plus-zero term. Life plus 50 is probably more than enough.
Life plus 70 is absurd and our so-called elected officials should be ashamed of going along with it. And may Sonny Bono *not* rest in peace.
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That's all for now. Thanks to all the supportive comments in this thread, and to all the constructive criticism. And remember, a page a day is all it takes to contribute!
Greg Newby, Director and CEO
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
www.gutenberg.net