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."
...idea of the original project :o(
If it goes to fund the free books, it's a godsent.
Project Gutenberg is one of the top 10 best things to happen to the internet.
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
It strikes me that Project Gutenberg, as a valuable educational tool, should be a prime project to receive lottery grants (not just from the UK) to ensure that it remains entirely free to use and publishes documents in formats suitable for all to use - both proprietary and open formats.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
...I mean, would you actually have the nerve to steal an organisation or free project's name? I'd love to be reading Slashdot the day somebody comes out with Linux 2 or something.
the Humane Society...2!!!! Now accepting unwanted pets and animals from the community which we will be selling to be used in scientific research!
*btw We are not associated with the original Humane Society.
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. "
Does Project Gutenberg 2 have any affiliation with Project Gutenberg? It appears not. This would appear to be trademark infringement.
Apart from that, there's nothing wrong with it. People are making money off of public domain works. Good for them. That's one of the benefits of the public domain. People can do this. I'm not quite sure why people should want to buy something that they can get for free, but that's beside the point. If they want it, PG2 is providing the service.
The leader says that this raises questions about PG's commitment to providing free books? How so? They aren't in any way affiliated with them (at least according to their site).
taken from http://www.projectgutenberg.info/
"Today Project Gutenberg 2, an eBook library consortium adds an additional scope to eBook preservation and access. 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. . "
-- Using the preview button since 2005
But is this an issue? Does anyone actually read books on screen?
I read ebooks almost to the exclusion of paper books as far as entertainment books are concerned - textbooks and manuals are another story. However I do the reading on my iPaq, and there is no Adobe eBook Reader for PocketPC (Abobe eBook != PDF). So I guess I'll have to stick with the free stuff.
Oh no... it's the future.
In this case, some clever business has realized that Project Gutenberg has a good name and is now attempting to make money off it. Thankfully they've had the good sense to put a (rather oblique) disclaimer disassociating themselves from the original Project Gutenberg.
That said, in my opinion, it's certainly unethical and in some case, may even be illegal to attempt to generate business based on fooling the consumer. Perhaps someone should alert the RMS and the EFF of this new method of co-opting open source.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
I think the idea they have is a good one. I've downloaded quite a few texts off of Project Gutenburg, and for those of you who haven't, all of their files are simple plaintext files. I've wished for a long while that project gutenburg would release files in HTML or some other format. If the Project Gutenburg won't, then I see nothing wrong with what Project Gutenburg 2 is doing.
If they would have come up with some better name, then I would have probably considered buying from them, but this is just asinine. It seems to me like they are intentionally trying to use a name very similar to Project Gutenburg so that people who may have heard of Project Gutenburg will be confused and pay them for their services.
Of course I guess this is what Trademark laws are all about, so hopefully this group will have some lawyers on their arses pretty soon.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
Project Gutenberg texts are all in the public domain and the files are created by volunteers. There is no way to protect anyone's labor or philosophy. The material is free as in free.
The only "license scheme" is a protection of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you wish to distribute the files and claim them as Project Gutenberg files you must distribute them unmodified, including the license text.
Since the files are all in the public domain anyone can download them and sell them, either as a computer file, a pdf, or a printed book. Or start a "competing" website with them.
Many already do this, and if people who have donated their time to the project don't understand that public domain allows this, well, I really don't know what to say.
They are in the Public Domain, not GPLed, or BSDed or whatever.
Project Gutenberg continues unabated. Simply go there for all your ASCII format, literary goodness.
KFG
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.
If the ebooks are encrypted, isn't this a valid reason to possess an ebook encryption cracker? It's primary purpose would not be to crack the encryption on copyrighted works, but to crack the encryption on public domain works.
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
The glitz of their webpage, the lack of proof-reading (ye gads!), the pushing of a minor feature as if it was sliced-bread, the data mining of Project Gutenberg's hard work suggests that this is a Get Rich Quick cheesy operation.
Since they were stupid enough to step on Project Gutenberg's good name, hopefully the Flush of Justice will remove this turd quickly.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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
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...)
I think a lot of people are getting the issues confused. What seems to be happening is not an evil corporation hijacking the name of an innocent open source project, it is the head of said project being personally involved in a corporation called PG2 run by a good mate offering the paid options. I have to snigger at all the declarations of evil corporations and telling Michael Hart about this and calling up the lawyer attack dogs, because the article plainly states that he is behind all this. All these statements show is that people really don't read articles on slashdot and have knee-jerk reactions.
What this is, is if Linus (who I think personally owns the Linux trademark) starting up a company with some good mates, which takes the current Linux source, close-sources it and sells it for a profit with the name Linux 2 and takes the domain name, www.linux.com as his company's front. Not only that said company heavily promotes propietry closed-source formats and programs.
Basically, has Michael Hart sold out?
1. There is no trademark issue, because Michael Hart, the founder of PG, who *personally* owns the trademark "Project Gutenberg" is personally involved with the commercial entity called "Project Gutenburg 2" which is run by a good friend of his. The people running PG2 seem to have *permission* from Michael to use the trademark. They are NOT co-opting the name illegally. They have the full permission of the right holder. Calling lawyers to sue in this case is stupid. The issue seems to boil down to a lot of PG people disagreeing with Michael this is an appropriate use of the name, not that they can do anything about it legally. The issue the article raises is whether a single person should have the right to the name and hopes that this incident will lead to a more formal control structure for the project (eg. a committee) which is independent of any single person's control.
(2) There seems to be some problem with the license. Not sure about this. I think the license on the PG2 website asserts copyright over the contents of the public domain books as well.
(3) There is the question over whether Michael is personally profiting from PG2. Whether or not you think he should is another issue, but it is one of the issues the original author of the article is pressing Michael to explain.
(4) In relation to (1). The issue is not whether or not you should be able to repackage and profit from PG's work as this is allowed. The issue is the name PG2 seems to indicate that this is the successor to PG. And also the association with the PG name with closed, propietry formats.
The real Project Gutenberg is unchanged. Furthermore, the whole idea of the original project seems (at least to me) to be to take Public Domain works, and make them freely available to as many people as possible so they can do what they want with them. If what you want to do is sell PDF eBooks with these works, that's fine. To quote the notice on the top of Project Gutenberg works:
So the problem here isn't what these people are doing, but the cynical and callous adoption of the "Project Gutenberg" name, which seems designed to cause confusion in the community and the market. I think it might be time for Project Gutenberg to remind the World eBook Library Consortia the nature of trademarks.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Anyway my idea was to simply enhance the existing system (plain text), not replace it. Obviously this would require the creation of a WYSIWYG editor, but the formatting involved would be fairly basic and could be extended as needed. A library this extensive would warrant a format custom designed for it, as opposed to trying to drive a square peg into a round hole using existing formats (pdf, html, etc, which would introduce a whole new set of compromises).
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
On the one hand, plain 7-bit ASCII text is the single most compatible format; just about any platform and app can handle it in some way or other. And it's likely to last longer than almost any other format. So as Gutenberg says, it's the most accessible format and the most future-proof.
But on the other, it's very thin. It has no structure: nothing to separate chapters, scenes, volumes, &c. It has no metadata: nothing to identify authors, translators, editions, dates, even titles, in a machine-readable manner. And it has no way to represent accented characters, directional quotes, and other characters that would greatly improve the typography.
The compelling argument for me, though, is that although you could automatically convert from a standardised rich format to plain text, it's impossible to convert the other way around without lots of manual work. If Gutenberg had chosen a rich format, even a very simple one, to start with, then all the benefits of plain text would come with that almost for free -- a simple open-sourced program would let people convert from the one to the other, and they could even provide both versions of texts on their web site.
FWIW, for my own reading I keep files in plain text but formatted in a particular manner: in Windows Latin-1, with accents and typography; with Palm-style bookmarks; and with conventions for chapter/scene/volume breaks, bold/italics, and metadata. It's a pain getting them there, but means they're ideal for reading on my palmtop, and also capable of being up-converted if the need arises.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I was unaware at the time of writing that they were using the Trademark with permission . Generally, if you are using someone else's trademark with permission, among other things you identify whose trademark it is as part of the message, something like "Project Gutenberg is a trademark of Michael Hart".
Since I saw no such notice on the Project Gutenberg 2 Website, I assumed they were in violation of the trademark.
Assuming they are legitimately using the trademark, this is a really disappointing usage. They give no credit to the work of the volunteers of Project Gutenberg, and they make their site sound like they are the new, improved replacement for the project. This is confusing to many people, and seriously dilutes the trademark, two things that licensing is supposed to minimize. *sigh*
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Open mind, insert foot.