Project Gutenberg's 32nd Birthday

David Moynihan writes "July 4th marks the 32nd anniversary of that day in 1971 when Michael Hart first sped an all-caps version of the Declaration of Independence to anyone and everyone then on what later became the web, thus founding Project Gutenberg. Thanks to an army of volunteers and the Distributed Proofreaders, this is the last year PG will have fewer than 10,000 titles. Strangely, Microsoft picked this dual anniversary of literacy and freedom to re-launch their Reader product, with three free bestsellers a week, if you activate the new version with Passport, sign a EULA, etc. Real reason for the upgrade might be that the DRM on MS's old Reader was cracked. If you're not into giving away data, or are running a system other than Windows, maybe you could take the time to tell a friend about free books online, or even help out by visiting the Distributed Proofers and editing one page per day."

Comments

More free books

[Cruciform]

The Baen Free library has a number of titles available in several formats.

It's a great way to introduce readers to a series or a talented new author.

Re:XML please

[starseeker]

I think they discuss this somewhere. The whole point of ASCII is that it can be accessed simply, by almost any machine. It is as stable a format as you will find for data storage, anywhere. They are commited to these books being widely readable, and ASCII is the best way to assure this.

However, I agree that some books (most actually) lose something in ASCII. What I would like to see is a project which works off the basic Gutenberg texts and formats them in a readable way, preserves illustrations, etc. But it should be an add on to the project, not the main project. Also, remember that that level of preservation is much harder than just typing in and proofreading - you have to consider formatting and scanning images as well.

As a temporary measure, it would be nice to see someone do an XML markup that can be easily translated into LaTeX, so people can have pdfs with nice fonts, table of contents, title page, etc. That would be a step up. But to do it properly would take a separate effort, and a very large scale one even by Gutenberg standards. Worthwhile, yes. But involved.

Re:XML please

[Teancum]

Michael Hart has repeatedly made mention that he does not want to get caught up into the fad of the moment with text formatting issues, and that plain old ASCII is one constant that hasn't needed changing. Indeed, you can open up the original Declaration of Independence document with your standard web browser, and you can still read it just fine. I dare you to try and find any other data format that was commonly used 32 years ago that you can still read with current equipment.

With that said, I believe that XML is perhaps going to have the staying power that ASCII text has had for the past many years. And there are many volunteer projects that you can get involved with that do this including:

The HTML Writers Guild - Originally they were trying to convert all of the gutenberg texts to HTML, which has been admittedly a resonable standard for a good number of years. Currently they are now going to a version of XML with some standard headings for titles, copyright info (or lack thereof), chapter headings and so forth. More is on this website.

Project Gutenberg XMLThis is a group more dedicated to the XML, but has a very similar purpose.

The point here is that once the data is put into ASCII text format, projects like this can and are being done. If you really feel that you want to help with the effort, please join one of these. Also, at any time you can also take the Project Gutenberg files yourself and do this, but at least this gives you a forum to share your work once you are done.

Thanks for support, plans for future

[gbnewby]

Thanks to everyone who has helped contribute eBooks and other support to Project Gutenberg! If you haven't already, please visit Distributed Proofreaders and proof a page today!

Lots of plans for the future:

• Post-#10000 formatting changes. We'll be rearranging our directories to make it easier to find things. Likely we'll go with something OAI (OpenArchives.org) compliant
  
• Conversion on the fly to many formats. We'll putting eBooks into XML format (mostly using teixlite.dtd, we think) for conversion on the fly to many other formats.
  
• New ways to donate. "Sponsor a book"
  
• More contemporary content. We receive donations nearly every week from currently published authors who want to make their stuff available to a wider audience (i.e., our Doctorow's Down and Out)
  
• Your ideas! Visit gutenberg.net to sign up for newsletters, find out how to get started producing an eBook, and find eBooks
  

Thanks especially to our main and backup distribution sites, iBiblio and The Internet Archive. And thanks to the THOUSANDS of volunteers who have brought us nearly to our 10,000th eBook.

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@pglaf.org