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Project Gutenberg 2 Raises Some Hackles
An anonymous reader writes "LISNews.com reports on a new web venture called Project Gutenberg 2, offering access to electronic books in Adobe eBook format on a paid membership basis. Some Gutenberg volunteers are concerned about the use of the PG name in such a context. The news raises questions about PG's ongoing commitment to the ideals of free distribution and nonproprietary formats. Last year PG celebrated the release of its 10,000th title, accomplished with the help of many volunteer proofreaders, many of whom aren't happy about charging people to view these titles in Adobe eBook format."
This won't be any problem at all since the Project Gutenberg folks remembered to register their trademark.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
As far as I can tell the books are still available in HTML. It's just that if you want them in PDF, then they charge you a fee. I have no beef with that.
Underholdning.info
Paying for ebooks i have no problem with but why use the PG name that so may have come to associate with the free PG.
Even if they do put this on the front page...
" Project Gutenberg 2 is not affiliated with the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and has received no funding, materials, or any other support from the Foundation. "
Especially of interests are the following 2 points:
- PG trademark owner and PG2 owner are supposedly friends.
- PG2 tries to claim copyright over the files as well, even though the text themselves are supposed to be in the public domain.
I believe Project Gutenberg 2 is being run by Michael Hart (and others), founder of the original Project Gutenberg and holder of the trademark. At least this is what I am picking up by the mass of emails flying on the gutenberg developers list. So it is affiliated, though in a messy circular sort of way.
The graphic links to a site that seems to be a mirror of a page on Adobe's site. No indication other than the URL that it's not Adobe.com. I checked Adobe's site, and the software they're distributing is only available as part of Acrobat Reader 6. I smell something fishy...
Karma: Contrapositive
That Weasel Reader thing looks great -- *if* you're using a PDA.
There are no good open source projects that I know of to let you read ASCII ebooks on a computer screen.
Constraints I would put on such a project:
* Must support antialiased text. If I'm going to be reading masses of text, I'd rather not see jaggies.
* Must support keyboard and mousewheel navigation.
* Must support some form of good resizing to run in fullscreen mode.
* Must support display with a proportional font. This is harder than it sounds, since proportional display is usually done without a hard-wrapped source, and the PG texts are all hard-wrapped.
* The ability to bookmark locations in the text, and zip back to these saved locations.
* The ability to read gzip- or zip-compressed files. ASCII compresses well, and there's no reason to leave ebooks around uncompressed.
* A find feature. It would be nice if this had glark-style features, so you can do context searches and the like. (actually, it might make a lot of sense to just be a frontend to glark).
* (Optional but nice) the ability to feed output into festival or a similar speech synthesis sytem for listening. Open Source speech synth isn't quite to the point where I'd want to use it for ordinary usage (as opposed to use by the disabled), but it's not awful and some folks may like it.
* (Optional but nice) the ability to remember where you stopped reading.
I've looked at a *lot* of approaches to getting a nice, readable book. This hack takes in a text file and seems to spit out a pretty good pdf viewable in full-scree-mode in xpdf:
#!/bin/bash
# Converts a text file into a nice, computer-readable PDF
# Usage bookize
cat "$@"|tr -d "\r"|enscript -B -f Palatino-Roman24 -M Compscreen --word-wrap -p
"$@".ps
ps2pdf "$@".ps && rm "$@".ps
And the required ~/.enscriptrc:
# Media definitions:
# name width height llx lly urx ury
Media: Compscreen 858 644 0 0 858 644
It is, unfortunately, still not perfect. I've tried writing scripts to feed things in to LaTeX (to enjoy the superior kerning of LaTeX), but I've never been that happy with the results. It's easy to have something that's a metasequence in LaTeX isn't escaped.
May we never see th
Hmmmmm. Linux distros are affiliated with Linux, they make no secret of it. They usually develop products and projects that contribute back to open source, and are generally ethical and a good thing.
These guys are using someone elses name and charging for their work.
Look at the Adobe banner: it links to
www.worldebooklibrary.info/Adobe
which is a *fake* Adobe website.
World eBook Library owns both sites.
Plus the information given below on their ISP in Maui...
I guess you shouldn't begin to give your money to them...
Anyone knows how to alert Adobe's legal department? I guess it would help solve GP problem...
As a biased supporter of PG, I would really argue that switching to PDF goes against the whole idea of a free, easily-accessible and voluntary-based project. Doing so would cut down any possible motivation for thousands of people to contribute time and work to something that will become proprietary products sold later on to all of us.
But that is not the point, as I am quite sure this idea will be expressed with different accents in thousands of posts. The points are: 1) yes, it is good that PG is trying to get away from pure text. That is the way to go.
2) There already exists a mature project called FictionBook. Basically, it is a derivative of the DocBook format, XML-based, but optimized for books instead of documentation (yes, there IS a difference!) Thousands of books (unfortunately most of them in Russian) are already published and readily available on the net. The standart itself has survived so far for at least 2-3 years, so it is proven by time to work. And there are lots of tools to create, modify and archive books, and readers for almost every platform.
So why reinvent the weel????
http://www.automatiq.se
Project Gutenburg 2 claims to have 27,000 books available for free in HTML format, and 60,000 books they charge for in PDF/eBook format (Those aren't the same format, and their site confuses them.)
So, they're obviously ripping off PG's trademarked name (unless they have permission, as a couple people have speculated), but are they really ripping off their content? And even if they are, where are they getting the rest of their books? Presumably, all 27,000 HTML books are duplicated within the 60,000 PDFs, since they claim they pioneered converting from HTML to PDF... But that still leaves 50,000 books that had to come from somewhere other than PG. PG2 is a front for the World eBook Library, which claims to be a consortium of either 45 or 'hundreds' of companies, depending on what page you're on. But their counterfit Adobe page doesn't exactly instill confidence. Then again, with them claiming support from the likes of PG, the Internet Archive, Google, Amazon, Systran, and the LOC, how can they be bad? I mean, on that page they even list the CIA as one of their contributors, and have an outdated mirror of the CIA world factbook. That book is, of course, in the public domain, except that they didn't bother to strip out the official CIA logo, as required by the CIA. Talk about the wrong people to piss off.
So, this whole thing smells like a major scam, but I still want to know where they got the rest of their content (assuming they actually have it...)
The whois information for projectgutenberg.info (PG2) shows:
Domain Name: PROJECTGUTENBERG.INFO
Created On: 09-Nov-2001 05:08:24 UTC
Last Updated On: 05-Jan-2004 07:01:05 UTC
Expiration Date: 09-Nov-2008 05:08:24 UTC
Sponsoring Registrar: Network Solutions, Inc. Registrar (R122-LRMS)
Status: ACTIVE
Status: OK
Registrant ID: C1449260-LRMS
Registrant Name: Greg Newby
Registrant Street1: CB 3360 Manning Hall
Registrant City: Chapel Hill
Registrant State/Province: NC
Registrant Postal Code: 27599-3360
Registrant Country: US
Registrant Email: gbnewby@ils.unc.edu
This is the SAME Greg Newby who is the CEO of the original Project Gutenberg. Make of that what you will.
The parent post is overrated, IMHO, since there's no background knowledge on the author's part.
Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, has given full permission to these guys to use the name. Here's part of a post to the ebook-community mailing list (a yahoo group):
PGII only charges for certain files they modified or created, and is paying PG the same royalty as we require from anyone.
and
Anyone who calls for such drastic action immediately just doesn't want to see how things will work, they want to force the worst assumption on us all. Project Gutenberg has always been open to experimentation. And we also have always had the fine print that has allowed for the production of "Project Gutenberg CDs" DVDs, etc., all by anyone who wanted to give it a try.
In my humble opinion, this dilutes the Project Gutenberg name and idea, but it's Hart's to do with as he sees fit.