Slashdot Mirror
Project Gutenberg Publishes 10,000th Free eBook
AndrewRUK writes "Earlier today, Project Gutenberg's founder, Micheal Hart, announced that the project has passed the milestone of 10,000 free eBooks available, with the publication of the Magna Carta.Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, with the aim of "[making] information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search." In the 32 years since the project started, over 10,000 books, ranging from the Bible to school textbooks, and from the complete works of Shakespeare to the USA's declaration of independence, have been made freely available to the public by Project Gutenberg."
it is time to read up eh?
I still kind of have issues with ebooks.. I mean, reading is pretty much a tactile thing for me.. I.e. I like the smell of books, I like turning pages..
In other words, it is nice to get away from the computer sometimes and just read..
Though, I congratulate their efforts, it is cool
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Obligatory SCO joke.
Are there any decent e-readers for this? I have looked around and all of them want to use some crazy proprietary format or just plain suck. I think those things could take off if there was a good one, I'm game.
Hammer of Truth
Based on someone's post earlier, I gave Distributed Proofreaders a try. It's very straightforward to get started on a couple of pages done at your leisure (especially easy for those knowing basic HTML--like Slashdot posters--think standard bold and italic tags; the only mild ramp up is footnotes), and I found their scanned book choices interesting to be reading through in the process of proofing (well-done proofing interface as well).
If you're in the mood for browsing books, give it a try... you can find something interesting to read and do a little service for humanity at the same time.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
That's almost half the Hardy Boys series!
Come join the proofreaders that make Project Gutenberg possible!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
You fail it, assbag. Go slit your wrists in shame. You are an embarassment to all AC.
Now why was my story on this rejected earlier today? Oh well...
Go to Distributed Proofreaders if you'd like to help out!
Energy: time to change the picture.
You can help us with the next 10,000. Join the Distributed Proofreaders Project @
http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php
That's odd. What with all the extensions on copyright expirations, I didn't realize that the Bible was in the public domain.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
"Down the road" or "across the street"? Which one is quicker? Thanks.
I still think his best work was in Short Circuit.
You can modify them to read as you see fit, as long as you don't distribute them afterwards.
I thought a place with thousands of free books was called a "library". My bad.
Amazon has these books chea-- oh, wait. No it doesn't. Carry on.
I have just started one (damm, I didn't make the first 10K). I have 150/191 pages scanned and initial formatting done. Another week, and it just might be submitted.
The site is slashdotted, could someone post the books here, please? ;-)
The last line of chapter 4 of Scaramouche is a fragment from the next chapter. It's been festering there for four years. Spoiler: Scaramouche has the same dumb plot element as Star Wars, and signals it just as far in advance. The lead is more 'with it' than hapless Luke, but the leadette is much less so than Princess CrullerHead. Is the spoiler a) He's your father, b) She's your sister, c)=a+b, or d) She's your father's sister.
See also:
www.literature.org/
www.online-literature.com
These folks also publish public domain stuff on the web.
It's sad though, there could be more, but because of the Sony Bono law, stuff that should be in the public domain by nowis still owned by the author's off-spring or estate.
There is no spoon or sig.
What happens when Project Gutenberg has finally digitally republished all known literary works in the English language that were first published on or before 1922? Where does PG go once it hits the wall, which thanks to pgdp.net might even come within my lifetime?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Have they made any progress on their other goal? They wanted to collect a $1 donation for each book from each of the 100 million people they expected to read it, so when they reached the 10,000 book milestone, they'd have raised $1 trillion.
Jason
ProfQuotes
I constantly find errors in Gutenberg's books. It scares me what errors I might be missing. Is there any effort to get scanned versions of these public domain books online, in say a pdf format, so that more people could do proof reading?
It is an electronic library. It's name is Project Gutenberg. Libraries do have names, you know. Carnegie comes to mind, you probably have one funded by him in your town.
It is also a project in that it seeks people to transcribe and proof the texts into acceptable electronic versions.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Hello, I'm trying to setup the Sun ONE Directory Server, v5.2, on a Solaris 9 server. The server appears to be running just fine, but when I try to initialize one of our Solaris 8 (or 9) boxen via either ldapconfig or sys-unconfig, I'm given an error that essentially says that I'm using an invalid profile. How is a profile supposed to be setup? I specified the profile name "default" in the idsconfig script, but haven't found any other UI for exporting/importing/creating LDAP profiles. Is there some widget I'm missing? Any help is _greatly_ appreciated. Yours truly, TEH ULTIMATE FROSTY PISS! FP ALL OVER YOUR BITCH-ASS!
OMG! Wau!
I haven't met anyone who has used the service. For being a fairly large database of reading material, is it only capable of archiving things so old that they have expired copyrights, or specifically released material? If so, you can hardly expect it to become a cultural phenomenon, what with copyrights extending to a million years after all progeny of the author are dead... Which is a shame, because on the merits of recording things for the public domain alone, it's worthwhile, but if people don't use it, what's the true value?
Anyone here regularly read from Project G? What did you read?
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Has anyone yet mentioned that you can help out by joining the distributed proofreaders project out help out? What's the link?
Project Gluttenburger was founded in 1955 by an underweight clown, with the aim of "[making] fatty, high cholesterol foods and other greasy materials available to the general public in quantities that will make a vast majority of the people obese, rotund and super-sized."
For teh love of Mike, PLEASE don't be sending slashbots over there to be voluntear proofreeders!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
eLibrary is Windows Freeware, a Project Gutenberg "client" with built-in FTP, search engine, reader and HTML export.
Just think how much money could have been made if it weren't for Project gutenburg? Do any of the artists (or their heirs) get any money from this? NO! This is a travesty. People are on the street, sucking in welfare all because of these commie bastards!
He was good in Cocoon too.
Another free/open online library is the Marxists Internet Archive, which publishes material across the spectrum of the left. It contains around 30,000 files (books, documents, letters, etc), and is published in 30 different languages, the latter of which beats Project Gutenberg by quite alot. They have everything from Adam Smith to Lao Tzu to Karl Marx. A very impressvie collection!
Darl charging $666 for a copy of the Bible is too sweet :-)
Go to Distributed Proofreaders to help out! The are a distributed effort to scan, OCR, proof, and post books to Project Gutenberg.
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
Notably absent from this site is "The Black Book of Communism; Crimes, Terror, Repression" by Courtois, Werth, et. al. Probably because the marxists are so eager to overlook the 100 million people killed by attempts to establish a communist utopia.
Oh! My family is from the rainforest... If you cut it down they'll have to come live with me! Yikes!
Da Blog
The backlog must be clearing out now...
1215-10-15 dawneth Magna Carta Published (yro, news) (accepted)
CmdrTaco must be pleased to get this one out of the queue.
Consultancy: If you're not part of the solution, there's money to be made in prolonging the problem
So print/bind your own using the etext and then donate the money it would have cost in the local book store !
Take a look here:
http://ebible.org/
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
You mean, the U.S. Constitution has been freely available on the Internet all this time, and still Ashcroft hasn't bothered to read it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
correction to incorrect first post
...get a spell checker.
This file contains a number of versions of the Magna Carta, some of which were a little mangled in transit. I am sure our volunteers will find and correct errors I didn't catch, and that version 0.2 - 1.0 will have significant improvments, as well as at least one more version in Latin.
To catch stuff like spelling "improvements" correctly.
I mean, "Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" - an thoroughly discredited[1,2,3] bit of anti-Catholic propoganda - is included on the "gold" list.
Why not just include ""The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion"[4] as well?
Have _some_ sense, people!
[1] www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/hughes.html
[2] www.museumofhoaxes.com/mariamonk.html
[3] www.angelfire.com/ms/seanie/mariamonk.html
[4] www.us-israel.org/jsource/anti-semitism/hoax.html
Weasel Reader formerly known as Gutenpalm uses its own format based off zlib called ztxt. This compresses the files more than palmdoc does so you can fit more text on the palm pilot on less space.
... [Ztxt] "results in much smaller files than with the PalmDoc method. For example, the Project Gutenberg e-text of "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" is approximately 600K in size. Compressed as a zTXT, it is only 261K in size, while with PalmDoc it is about 330K. Since the Palm Pilots do not have very much memory, this is a big savings." ...
From their about page:
10,000 eBooks! That, my friends, returns us to the original meaning of a Beowulf cluster*!
* - Yes, yes - I know. Terrible joke. We all wish we could filter out all comments that had "Beowulf", "In other news", and "In Soviet Russia" in the text, but alas...
For one thing, we don't just do literary works.
United States copyright law lists the categories of copyrighted works in 17 USC 102. OK, I forgot dramatic works; I'll give you that. But has PG begun to preserve "musical works []; pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works; motion pictures and other audiovisual works; sound recordings; and architectural works"? I thought PG etexts were plain ASCII text.
We haven't even scratched the surface on mathematical and scientific works.
Those are "literary works" under 17 USC 101.
We also haven't started on the books that weren't renewed
This is a finite set as well.
I'd like to think that we'll reverse the last copyright extension in some way or at least hold back the next one.
Wishful thinking has its purposes, but does PG have a plan B?
Will I retire or break 10K?
It's the only eBook reader I use. Slightly confusing itterface to get used to, but very clean and simple. Reads many unencrypted text formats including ( pdb, prc, txt, rtf, html ) and can read into .zip archives and display covers/inline images.
Runs on windows and the pocketPC platform and is FREEWARE.
uBook download
Is that so? How about documenting it? Which famine was caused by free markets? Which billions are dying at the hands of capitalism? Which capitalist thinker has defended mass murder with "to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs"? Which thinker justified mass murder with "you shall not enter the palace of socialism wearing velvet slippers"?
thats a good acomplishment from a good group
-Tim Louden
get back on track :
/a curacy / conditions under which it was created which ALL
If it is possible to use a large voleme of corrected and classified documenst as a soure
fof information it greately extend the possible ueses of the data - spell checkers / syntax - bla bla.
Given acurate context and bibl. information the
possibilities for historical research expand greatly. The information can be processed and used given information about the era / lingo
contribute to the value of the information provided. Ever tried to read danty with out looking at the footnotes - = junk with the footnote it's f**king amazing
As a former English major who used Project Gutenberg in college, I just have to say, "Great work!"
The ability to download literary classics and quickly do a text search really cut down on research time.
Don't kid yourself about the position of Jews in European society of that time -- they were seen as a necessary, expendable evil. Xenophobia in general was rampant when Venice, following on from its seclusion of Germans under house arrest in apartment blocks, figured out it could move all its Jews into a single area, the Ghetto, where they could be controlled and, if necessary, eliminated more easily.
And as for the "why" of usury prohibiton, I am definitely viewing it from a structuralist viewpoint. What end did it serve? Why did it persist? Who gained advantage from it, and how was this advantage leveraged?
People have on occasion engaged in wholescale social engineering efforts through legislating morality. The Roman Church's redefiniton of 13 degrees of consanguinity as "incest" in the 1200s comes to mind, as do more recent and unsuccessful attempts at social engineering in the US, such as the failed Alchohol Prohibition and the failing Drugs Prohibition. Anyway, the link between post-medieval non-conformity, Protestantism, and Capitalsm is well-established and pervasive. I note that the massively expanded incest prohibition was originally designed to limit the growing power of self-sufficient kinship collectives within medium-sized towns. But by scattering marriageable brides far and wide, it had the unintended consequence of creating a more dynamic capital market and, by lessening the self-sufficiency, it made it possible for the merchant classes to profitably exchange more goods and services over greater distances. It was a key enabler for the rebirth of urbanism.
Da Blog
The way it reads, it's sometimes hard to believe it was written in the early 1900's.
I have ascertained that Project Gutenberg has made some verry grave mistakes in their alleged duplicate of the "Constitution of the United States of America." Project Gutenberg's duplicate of the "Unanimous Declaration of Indepenance of July 4, 1776" appears to be correct. Yet, let me get to the truth in their alleged duplicate unamended "Constitution of the United States of America." I searched the Project Gutenberg archive for the the titular commercial charter for these united States of America and discovered a modern, (un?)intentionaly misleading, and incorrect entry. There are some discrepancies that are noticable. Project Gutenberg claims they are providing the "Constitution of the United States of America" as NOT AMMENDED and NOT REVISED, yet this is disputed because not until the alleged "14th Ammendment" was there ever spoken in the alleged "Constitution..." a "United States" in any RECEIVERSHIP for PUBLIC DEBTS. As provided duplicate from Project Gutenberg's archive,
BlockQuote EvidenceOf14thAmendment { "To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, Dockyards, and other needful Buildings;--And" }
The previous quoted text is substance of the alleged "14th Amendment"! It is of nature defining a "United States" limited to jurisdiction of 10 square miles! This was known as the "Act of 1871", to create a "Government for the District of Columbia" of which to emancipate (aka Transfer of Title of Ownership) the "slaves" into ownership by an alleged "United States" as secured property and further provides for the naturalization and granted federal citizenship as well as granted privileges of the alleged "United States" to own property outside its lawful jurisdiction of 10 square miles and expand its "possesions". According to law, if an attempt is to be made to FREE a slave (aka Bondservant) then a process to manumit must ensue. According to Webster's Dictionary and Black's Book of Law, as well as some sources on Dictionary.com, manumit is the "dissolve of Title of Ownership" and emancipation is the "transfer of Title of Ownership". Yet, who is to argue a slave's freedom from an oppressive Master and unto a new Master that is more lenient or kind (aka United States)? In support of my testimony, I will provide evidence in the United States Code, that the United States spoken of in the 14th Amendment is a corporation! According to USC Title 27, Section 3002,
(15)
''United States'' means -
(A)
a Federal corporation;
Continuing my testimony and perusing to Article Six, there is more evidence that Project Gutenberg's claim of providing "Constitution..." as unamended,
BlockQuoth MoreEvidenceOfAmendment { "All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding." }
If anyone wants to read all the true and correct history of the colonies as they re-organized into united States, the beginning of the federal ussurpation, the Continental Congress, and the creation of the alleged "United States" federal corporation withou
Secured Party, Without Prejudice, UCC 1-207: Creditor
Of course I'll now get the expected slew of people telling me that the formatting can all be reconstructed. It cannot. There is no unambiguous way to recover reasonable formatting of these texts to be viewed in any other format other than 80 columns. For a while I tried reading Gutenberg books on my Palm but the spurious line breaks everywhere drove me crazy, even after doing quite a bit of scripting to make a best guess at the correct format.
When authors write it's not just the letters that counts. Some of that writing effort goes into formatting and you can't just discard it. It's depressing thinking how much work has gone into removing crucial information from 10,000 of the world's texts.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I tried checking our PG a couple days ago... but I wasn't about to wade through thousands of books by title or by author. I wish there were some kind of categorical organization going on. You know, like there is at the library.
Also, we continue to work with the EFF and ACLU to challenge copyright extension activities. You can expect a rigorous challenge, if YACTE (Yet Another Copyright Term Extension) is proposed in Congress (there were 14 extensions during the 20th century!).
Project Gutenberg is good and I've read quite a few decent works from them, but their problem is... that they are legal. And as such they just don't have many of the books I could find in a library (or couldn't because they were just borrowed by someone else). I found most of the titles I wanted to read on P2P though. All of Pratchett, whole Zelazny's Amber, some "classics" like LOTR (completely unreachable in library, and bookstores only sell a new hard cover edition that costs a fortune), Neuromancer, all of Stanislaw Lem and many more. And of course quite a few books on computers, programming etc. O'Reilly's mostly,]
Yeah, it's copyrighted. So if I erase the files from my harddrive after I read them, wouldn't this be equal to borrowing them from library?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
How can I listen to them on the go?
My, how many people rushed to provide a link to the Distributed Proofreading site. Next time, could you all try maybe reading the comments first? There must be at least 10 posts cheerfully urging one to try out the site, as if no one else had mentioned it yet. That's great and all, but how about we just mod up whoever was first and mod down the rest. This is truly what the "Redundant" moderation option is for.
A year ago PG saw a huge spike in volunteer proofreaders due to being slashdotted. It greatly increased their productivity, led to wonderful new document guidelines, and was great (altho stressful at first).
Amazon only took, like, a week before they had that many books available! ROTFLMAO!!!! :D
Hey... does anyone know how I get to the "cyber" rooms (wink wink) on this AOL Slashdot thing?
Modern translators resort to what copies of original texts they can find (which do not include the desert finds of recent decades, because they have not been released to the public). They most certainly do not have access to the sources that were used for the Vulgate translation, centuries ago. This is why it is a complicated question which translation track is better.
In your favorite text editor:
1. Find a character not in the text (# generally works)
2. Append # to the end of every line.
3. Replace all [newline]#[newline] with [newline][newline]
4. Replace all #[newline][newline] with [newline][newline]
4.5 (check if -# is a split word--if it is, replace -#[newline] with nothing.)
5. Replace all # with [space]
All paragraphs are now single lines. They fold nicely on a PDA.
First gain the conquest, then reward the toil. Ironically, I was just reading Pope's Iliad translation before popping onto /. Have been wanting to read it for years, but couldn't find it anywhere in print - so I nearly jizzed when I found it on Gutenberg.
...that such an important document in the history of human civiization is #10000. Lovers of freedom and more importantly those who would take it away (are you listening John Ashcroft?) should take the time to read this. For my money, it forms the basis of the common law system that we take for granted in the west today.
Yes... with your help Steve Guttenberg will be a star once again! Give before it hurts!
I can read that anywhere with an internet connection. ^^
Thanks PG. Go reading!
As with the last story about project Gutenberg, I have the same comment. I love the philosophy of project Gutenberg, but the fact that they continue to use plain text as the canonical formatting makes the collection seriously less useful. Using XML would give only advantages.
What advantages? Advantages like indicating what words are actually part of a title, so that a reader could display titles in large print and provide a table of contents. Advantages like having real bold, italic, and underline. Advantages like being able to handle characters not in ASCII. Advantages like allowing a reader to break lines however makes most sense for that situation (for example, handhelds are going to have shorter lines than a large monitor). The list goes on.
Their argument for continuing to favor ASCII is to support the widest possible usability, now and in the future, since markup languages can come and go. This doesn't stand up to scrutiny though, for the simple reason that XML contains strictly more information than plain text. XML can be flawlessly converted to plain text by a program, but the opposite is not true: plain text cannot be converted to XML. Was that line break the end of a stanza, or simply a line of a paragraph? Is that single line in all-caps a title or is it a paragraph of shouting? This information simply cannot be extracted from plain text. Not to mention the problem of characters that aren't in ASCII.
Suppose that XML is just a fad, that it's a horrible joke being perpetuated by hordes of clueless professionals who love buzzwards. Suppose no one uses XML in 10 years. Even if this is true XML is still a better choice than plain text because XML has enough information to automatically convert the books into whatever superior format emerges in the future. Plain text does not.
I have a few subscriptions of magazines available free on the net for the very same reason!
Hello "Chris Brewer" or anyone else,
What URL did you visit to receive the information on rejected stories? T
But why the prohibition? Why would pastoral societies adopt as a general rule laws against the accumulation of capital. Think about it.
Da Blog
I've read quite a few books from PG. I reread the Oz series, and now I'm working through all the Edgar Rice Burroughs books.
It's not as good as having a real book in you hands, but it's been fun to have access to all these fun old stories.
Magna Carta Visa Carta Master Charga
I applaud Project Gutenberg and Micheal Hart! Congratualtions on a MAJOR acheivement. I have found this project to be very interesting and useful. THANK-YOU!
If it would be my job to upgrade the texts of Project Gutenberg, this is what I would do:
The reason I would do things in two steps is because the Optical Character-Recognition cannot be trusted in a direct conversion from paper to Application/Xhtml+Xml or other form of Text/Xml. The Optical Character-Recognition cannot even reliably recognize all of the characters in US-ASCII. Dirct conversion paper to a Text/Xml with a textencoding of UTF-8 would drive the proofreaders crazy. Both the humans and the software would choke on direct conversion to Text/Xml with a textencoding of UTF-8. Direct conversion from paper to Text/Xml with a textencoding of UTF-8 is too much too soon.
Recreations of all new texts and conversion of existing texts to Text/Plain with a textencoding of UTF-8 is a good idea, as is markup of Text/plains with a textencoding of UTF-8 to Application/Xhtml+Xml with a textencoding of UTF-8.
Impeach Bush
Search the Magna Carta for "jew".
The power of Christ compiles you!
yBook
www.spacejock.com
Freeware, Windows or Linux with Wine, nice little app.
The only thing I read from Project Gutenburg was Earnest Shackleton's "South" the remarkable story of his expedition to Antarctica that set off in 1914 just the first world war was breaking out. I read it after having seen Channel 4's dramatisation with Kenneth Brannagh.
The expedition went pear shaped but all of the men survived for two years in the Antarctic Circle - camped out on floating pieces of ice, eating penguins and seals, travelling 900 miles across the most inhospitable sea on the planet in an open-topped lifeboat and not one of them died.
It was an interesting read but I'd have preferred a paper version, my eyes hurt when I had finished.
Suck figs.
For better or for worse--IMHO mostly for better--all of the characteristics of PG have been very carefully thought out and articulated. Things such as the emphasis on "plain vanilla ASCII text" are not simply historical accident, but a very conscious decision. PG has already outlived several changes in fashion on text formatting. (Can you imagine what would happened if they had adopted, say, Wordstar formatting? Or even TROFF?)
It is a strikingly original project. And it has some quasi-political overtones. Hart has some well-articulated reasons why he didn't and doesn't believe that, say, the Library of Congress will ever get around to systematically digitizing books.
With approimately 20,000 books online, it is no longer a sarcasm to call the Internet a library, even if it is still far less rich than a small-town public library. Half of those are Project Gutenberg's.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Incidentally, there is a Project Gutenberg Australia which has quite a few works online which are still under copyright in the United States but not in Australia. Those seeking works more recent than 1923 or so might find it worthwhile taking a look there.
Keep in mind that if you don't reside in Australia you would be committing copyright infringement if you were to download anything from that site that is still under copyright in your country of residence.
Go to their site to see what they have, or use the invaluable U. Penn online books page to search for them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
If your Palm has an SD slot, though, why not grab an SD card and fill it with PalmDoc ebooks? Then you don't have to worry so much about file sizes and you don't have to install another piece of sotware (doesn't PalmReader come with most recent Palms?).
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
Personally, I applaud the efforts of this project. Once products like ePaper begin to be mass-produced and available to the public, you will be able to have YOUR way (tactile reading) and I will still be able to have MINE (be able to read the same document off of a computer screen). Well, I actually DO like books, but I'm just trying to say that having a CHOICE is a GREAT thing.
And FURTHERMORE, once all of these books get converted from plain text files into XML files, you'll be able to apply whatever your favorite stylesheet is to it to have your own personalized reading experience. (Examples: If you're older and have vision problems, you can have bigger fonts. Maybe you prefer plain black text on white background; maybe you prefer green text on a black background with a Courier New font. It's up to you!)
And of course, speaking of vision problems, you can also have a text-to-speach program READ the text to blind people (or people who like audio books) as well!
Ain't technology a wonderful thing?!?
Karma: NaN
-=-=-=-=-=--=-=-=-=-=-=-
What would Yossarian do?
Oops. I actually meant eInk not ePaper. (flexible digital paper where you only need an electrical current to change the pages, but not to keep it turned on.)
Karma: NaN
Probably about a year or two ago I read about some (Australian?) company that was creating kiosks, for airports at first, to actually PRINT out an entire book for you. Kind of like a book vending machine. You put your money in, select the book you want from the list of thousands in their database and it would print out the whole book for you in paperback in roughly 10-15 minutes... neatly bound and pictures and everything.
Although, since I haven't heard much of it in a while, I'm assuming they either ran out of funding, it took too long (and used too much ink) to print out the books to be worthwhile, or publishing companies were starting to throw fits about it.
Karma: NaN
First, mirror the site, then set up an eDonkey server. It's a bit more mature and as the MST3K Digital Archive Project can attest, generally a bit more convient for keeping large archives online. Even the best Bittorrent clients out there still parse the entire file on each program load. Not a good thing when dealing with a few gigs of data.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
ebook readers with real CRTs and vacuum-tube drivers, rather than cold silicon transistors and LCDs. Finally... ebooks with _warmth_, and that glow and smell associated so fondly with vacuum tubes. The pixels will blur together slighly, making a smoother display and making digital source material seem analogue again. Requires one A battery, one B, 4 C cells, and your choice of books on special miniature magnetic tapes. Fresnel magnifier sold separately.
(...ducks...)
Better get a patent on it while it's hot.
I have a Handspring Visor that does not have a flashable rom. You can upgrade the OS, but it will be on the actual 8mb Ram. I do not care as long it is works and would not scarifice the space. My Handspring does not come with Palmreader.
I could get more ram for my Visor with a Springboard attachment but I have seen some cheap PDAs selling on ebay, I may as well buy a newer one used from ebay instead of invest in this old one(the only feature I would like is built in lithuim batteries, color would be nice and a faster processor, but only for playing games on it). The only thing I use it for is reading ebooks, typing in data in these things is a joke, even something like the phone book is too cumbersome, much better to use pen and paper!
Gutenpalm is just better in my opinion for reading texts than Palmdoc. It saves considerable space compared to Palmdoc, its features are better than most Palmdoc readers and it is open source and free, what more is there to want? I am not reading texts here that are so huge that they cannot fit on 8mb. This is all I am really using my PDA for, to read pirated books and to read old books from Gutenberg.
Only plain ascii can guarantee the largest possible access to the documents.
This as you reference was by design and has positive indications for both creation and retrieval.
That simple clear text file can be created on the most humble of computers, printed on virutally any printer with or without WP software, and viewed on any device that has the ability to hold the plain text file and display in monochrome, or print.
Maximum access was the point of Project Gutenberg.
Only Ascii can satisfy that in the core project.
From the projects history and philosophy, "The value of Plain Vanilla ASCII is obvious. .
XML is not forbidden, but for inclusion in the project core ascii is required. You or anyone else are welcome to process them into XML but the volunteers who are so few, so valuable, and so varied cannot be required to add the work that XML would require.
10,000 is a major accompishment. And in my opinion in it's own way comparable to anything ever done by any group for the selfless betterment of all mankind. PG deserves a Nobel prize.
Unfortunately this view of the Septuagint has no direct historic evidence, so ultimately accepting it is an act of faith. It's true that the gospel writers were familiar with the septuagint, judging from the ways in which the OT is quoted. And it's an extremely valuable witness to the text alongside the Masoretic and other Jewish sources. But there's no way of *proving* that it's the best witness to the text.
what with amazon's "view the page of the book containing the word you searched for", it shouldn't be too hard to add another 10,000 books to the free online library.