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Project Gutenberg Made Accessible
scishop writes "Mazarin is an open-source interface to Project Gutenberg's library. Mazarin increases the accessibility of Gutenberg's 10,000+ books as it formats the books for HTML display -- providing paginations in addition to generating table of contents and other advanced markup features -- along with enabling users to carry out full-text searches on the entire library."
I can not test the claim of all 10k works, but I tested what I thought would be most likely to be left out, and I found that they were there.
I Tested Martin Luther.
(if it was not for the printing press the reformation would not have been as sucsessfull as it was)
But did they have to make the tutorial presentation a fullscreen flash file?
Interesting idea, I can't get to the website but a feature I'd want is the content shared P2P so you don't have to rely on a central server for the content.
;).
A central webpage index could just have ed2k links to the files: sharereactor for books. When they update the book they release a new hash-link and the file onto the network.
It being P2P it could open it up to more then just public domain books too
Hmm, nicely formatted error messages. Does anyone know what this is? I'm assuming it's a mod_perl handler of some sort.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
This sounds like it just adds complexity and does not make gutenberg's data accessible.
There were several research projects for which I used pg as a corpus. However, pg's a terrible hassle for the first-time researcher, since the format of the introductory text ("we're gutenberg, here's the copyright, blah blah") is inconsistent.
You have to remove the introductory text to avoid bias in the corpus, however there are so many pathological special cases (different formats, spelling, languages, words used, punctuation, case) that it requires several hours of Perl coding to successfully strip the header text from 75% of the documents with >99% accuracy. Yuk.
If gutenberg is serious about making their work more accessible, they should think about the simple concern of ensuring consistency in the header text format.
What's the best way to read online texts? There are a bunch of PG texts I might like to read, but reading them in a web browser, as a big text file gets tiring after ten minutes or so. I'm not sure why I can read a book for hours, but the screen for minutes, but there you have it. I don't think that HTML will help this problem -- does anyone have recommendations for better ways to read these files?
Bah. Posting HTML is so 1996. You can do so much more with these texts. One example is Open Source Shakespeare, which takes all of Shakespeare's texts, indexes them, presents them in an attractive manner, creates a concordance, provides a full-text search engine, organizes the lines by character, etc.
All of the texts are open source, and you can download the database and source code from the site, too. Check it out.
It was very convenient for the Roman Church to have a practical monopoly on what was widely acknowledged at the time to be the main source of information, the Holy Bible. When the printing press was invented, this diluted that monopoly, since then the ordinary people could afford their own copies of the Bible and became independent from the Church for information. Luther was one of the first to realize that, when he urged people to read the Bible. A consequence of that was that people learned to read. Until early in the 20th century, the literacy rate for countries which are mostly Lutheran, e.g. Scandinavian countries and parts of Germany, were much higher than in southern Europe, where people were mostly Catholic.
A modern analogy:
Catholic Church --> RIAA
Lutheranism --> P2P
Information doesn't want anything. It merely is.
and what is wrong with monopoly? Uniformity breeds community.
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext04/awbv110.txt
there in HTML.
The first volume was converted to HTML by hand by someone else and to pdf, by machine, I think, whereas my site simply has the e-text:
http://rjs.org/gutenberg/Stevens_Thomas/
So an automated process would be a boon. What I'd really like to see is an OS text-to-voice reader program. I wrote a wxPython program to assist conversion from scanned text to PG format: http://rjs.org/gutenberg/OCR2Gutenberg/, but I have never been able to find a free set of spoken word wave files or speech library.
Ray
http://rjs.org/ - biking, astronomy, photography
Wouldn't it be great if Google were involved in Gutenberg in a major way?
Quote:
It's great - I now have that on my laptop hard drive, mountable by Alcohol, so I'll never be short of anything to read, especially when the web's not available...
I can't find the torrent file I got it through, but if it helps the filename is pgdvd.iso and the size is 4,139,646,976 bytes.
I agree that flavor of the month representations are bad, but markup languages have been around for a long time and it wouldn't have been hard to use something (like small subset of SGML) to add a bit more formatting info. Then when people want to look at the text in the flavor-of-the-month format, it's just a matter of writing a translator for that format. (illustrations are another matter, but I suspect that things have converged enough in this area so that something could be done from this point forward.)
Don't get me wrong -- I have a huge respect for PG and what they're doing is a benefit to humanity. I just wish that they would aim a little higher than the lowest common denominator for representation, and support other character sets in a simpler manner.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
How do you know that? Apart from the religious dogma that postulates the existence of a homunculus called the "soul", we do not know much about how consciousness arises. What we do know is that information doesn't exist in a vacuum. Information needs a physical medium to exist. Check "An Introduction to Information Theory", by John R. Pierce, Dover Publications, ISBN 0-486-24061-4, chapter 10 - "Information Theory and Physics" for a basic explanation why. Now, assuming a certain body of information and a system to handle that information, we have no idea if a sufficiently large amount of information with the right manipulation system will have consciousness. Sometime in the next few decades we will have machines with the same complexity and information-handling power as a human brain, then perhaps we will be able to create a conscious machine with free-will.
Anyhow, that's not the point. "Information wants to be free" is just an easier way to say that human beings have an urge to share whatever information they have with other humans. History has shown that, given efficient communication media, it's very difficult to maintain information secret.
and what is wrong with monopoly?
Intrinsically, nothing. Some public utilities are natural monopolies, it wouldn't be practical to run several different water, gas, and electricity supplies to each house, for instance. Sometimes a monopoly is useful in developing a new technology. The Bell Telephone Co., in the first half of the 20th century, did create a relatively cheap and efficient phone system using a monopoly. Microsoft created a widely used personal computer standard using a monopoly. There are some circumstances under which a new technology spreads faster if a monopoly exists. But a monopoly also induces slackness. Monopoly holders will not be eager to try harder. When growth starts levelling off, a monopoly usually stagnates. That was bad for Christianism, it was bad for the telephone system, it was bad for personal computers... may I generalize?
I've created an RSS feed from the Project Gutenberg list of etexts. The RSS feed contains titles, authors, descriptions and links to the relevant page or file on http://www.gutenberg.net/
PGDB.rss PGDB.rss.gz