Slashdot Mirror
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."
go figure an anagram for project gutenberg is "OBJECT EGG PRE RUNT"... I don't know what to say....
Feed my eyes...
And there's no way to delete my posts so I can mod instead. +1 informative, David Moynihan.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I agree that it goes against all the hard work the PG crew has done over the years. to try and lock in something pppl have worked hard on to give away to improve humanity almost sounds like theft. But I have a good solution. here it is, i'd appreciate any comments, kudos, flames (puts on asbestos bodysuit) suggestions etc. the solution is to send your money to us instead. we have been folowing pg, and other pd libraries for some time. we are not doing this for any monetary gain (it doesnt take an mba to figure out you wont make much trying to sell what can be gotten for free.) You can easily make more flipping burgers, working IT, cobbling shoes etc. our product is the gutenberg files zipped on 2 cd's and sells for 20$. we take paypal, and the email addy is 8000books@mail.com. now you may ask why are we doing this. there are several reasons. 1 we want to spread computer literacy, as it has developed recently. in the past few decades there has been a lot of computer aided textual, literary, philosphic , theological analyses. tact is one ofthe more recent ones being done at u of t. this will only become more necessary. why did they have to say 10,000 books? no man can read 10,000 books... our goal is to make these public domain libraries as mainstream as possible. one way of doing this is putting it into a box and selling it thru retail. this has a 3 fold benefit. 1 it exposes pl to pc libraries nad all the really cool search, concordance and other functions that can be done with simple an free software out there. 2 a search cannot be done easily without having al of the books on your hd, cd etc. the free option is to download them all. this can take some time, even with broadband--believe me i tried it, and i'd rather pay 20$ than have to do that again. nobody who has bought the product to date has complained that they culd have gotten it for free by spending a few days dragin n dropping. 3 all of that downloading costs project gutenberg real money in bandwidth costs. 4 buy buying our cd, you not only save them this money, but will provide more money for them since we donate generated revenue. this in turn wil alllow then to release even more books. 5 sure it is a small difference, but it may grow to bea big one someday. thx for your time in reading this post and any response will be appreciated (ie money, kudos, sugestions, volunteering time, hell even flames and trolls. I wil try an answer everyone just hope nobody signs me up for any spam lists. sorry for putting an advertisement on this site, i kinda feel bad about it, but since its not for monetary gain, i felt it might be worthwhile. I wont be advertising anything else on this site, and only got this idea in my head cuz it was a thread about gutenberg, and wanted people to know about this little hobbly some friends and I are working on. btw i will send a free copy of the cd's to anyone who tells me what shnives means. by free i mean winners pay shipping, since if 200 ppl guess it , and its like 5 bucks per, that would tenderize the ol' wallet a bit too mcuh. those who win can choose any shipping method they want, and il give my addy to calculate the exact cost. ps please excuse they bad typing. got a broken finger and scaphoid, so cnat aim or time the keys as fast as im used to , dont want to go back to 2 finger typing. hope to hear from you soon :)