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."

Comments

Tested

[mpost4]

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)

Re:Tested

[Anonymous Coward]

What I love is the home page that says:

"All contents copyright 2004 Scott Fortmann-Roe."

Yeah, sure.

Re:Tested

[Siener]

OK, the Mazarin site is dead, but if it really contains the whole of Project Gutenberg, then they have 11 books by Martin Luther. Just try this search.

Re:Tested

[wcrowe]

Actually, if it were not for the printing press, the Reformation might not have occurred at all (and not for the reasons one might think).

It was the printing press which made it possible for the Roman Catholic Church to print out screeds of indulgences. And it was this practice of selling indulgences which (largely) led to Martin Luther's revolt.

Re:Tested

[phatlipmojo]

Elizabeth Eisenstein makes a compelling case in The Printing Press as an Agent of Change that if not for the advent of the printing press, the Renaissance might not have occurred at all.

Re:Tested

[wcrowe]

I wholheartedly agree. For example: before the printing press there was little desire people to learn to read. Even much of the nobility were illiterate. With printed material becoming so easy to reproduce and distribute, a desire to read was sparked among all classes.

Looks nice and dandy

[tfbastard]

But did they have to make the tutorial presentation a fullscreen flash file?

thewolfweb.com is faster than slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.thewolfweb.com This website is faster than Slashdot for news.

Re:thewolfweb.com is faster than slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

hell the Gutenberg Project is faster than /. for news.

frist psot?

[dudifeuer]

frist psot?

unhuh

[Anonymous Coward]

System error
error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /var/www/html/mazarin/search.cgi line 118.

context: ...
114:
115:
116: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("books");
117: my $Search;
118: if ($mode eq "header"){
119: $Search=$dbh->prepare("SELECT author, title,id FROM book WHERE MATCH (title, author) AGAINST (? IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT $start, $end");
120: $Search->execute($modQuery);
121: }elsif($mode eq "fulltext"){
122: $Search=$dbh->prepare("SELECT author,title,id FROM book WHERE MATCH (search_text) AGAINST (?) LIMIT $start, $end"); ...
code stack: /var/www/html/mazarin/search.cgi:118 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm:649 /var/www/html/mazarin/search.cgi:84

Re:unhuh

[Wateshay]

Less than ten comments, and already slashdotted.

Re:unhuh

[OrangeTide]

that's perl for you.

PG

[ArbiterOne]

Most of PG's more well-knownalready are formatted into HTML.

Re:PG

[Charles Franks]

The promo.net address is an old one and no longer maintained, please reference gutenberg.net

Charles Franks
Founder, Distributed Proofreaders

Re:PG

[GooberToo]

Ahh. Thanks. That makes putting books into my palm via Plucker, more attractive. I hate having to have all these different readers for different books. The more I can fit into Plucker, the happier I am.

Thanks.

Re:PG

[Charles Franks]

For PDA-friendly formats of PG e-texts try Blackmask and/or Pluckerbooks

Charles Franks
Founder, Distributed Proofreaders

Re:PG

[flimnap]

Indeed, there are many, many sites that do all sorts of wonderful things with Project Gutenberg eBooks. That's the wonderful thing about PG, you can do anything you like with the books.

While personally I prefer the original and the best... hey, whatever floats your boat!

It is very much worth noting that Project Gutenberg would have nowhere near as many eBooks as it does without the help of Distributed Proofreaders. Sign up there, and proof just a page a day to make your contribution to preserving literary history. You can proofread as little or as much as you like, and do something worthwhile! Distributed Proofreaders is a great way to spend some of your time.

Re:PG

[tommy_teardrop]

One of the great mysteries that my girlfriend brought up about working for Distributed Proofreaders was that they would spend so long making sure of every detail of the formatting, and then the final text was as vanilla as manilla... I think she got tired of me asking why this should be, and why there couldn't be a HTML version, let alone a .pdf version.

I actually wrote a .pdf interpreter for the text outputs from PG. None of the files exactly formatted, though there are some similarities, so it took a while, but it basically reads in the file and outputs a .pdf. Of course, there is no 'actual' formatting, but I find it a lot better to read than the ascii version.

Re:PG

[bbc]

PG does accept other formats, gladly.

However, it insists on at least a plain vanilla version of a text, as that format has proven to be the most durable and accessible.

So next time you post a text version to PG, make sure you post HTML and PDF versions alongside.

(Do read the rules for HTML in the PG FAQ first, though.)

Re:PG

[GooberToo]

Ohh. Thanks for the link!

Slashdotted?

[alexatrit]

I searched on "oil" and came up with numerous passages from various versions of the Bible, and a few recipes from an Italian cookbook. Attempted to search again, but amazingly the site fails to respond...

Re:Slashdotted?

[pinky99]

amazingly?
you really want to say, this is the first time you follow a link posted on /. and the server does not respond. Your first link? *g*

Re:Slashdotted?

[alexatrit]

Being facetious ... never really conveys in writing. Actually, I was more suprised that I actually got off a query before it died.

Re:Slashdotted?

[flimnap]

Well, this piddling 'interface' to Project Gutenberg may have died, but the real PG website is still going strong!

While you wait, you could do something worthwhile. (That is, instead of reading the 10,000 other "Its /.ed already" posts)

Re:Slashdotted?

[pinky99]

yes, that's unfortunately true.

Re:Slashdotted?

[Phekko]

No, what he means to say is that against the common tradition in Slashdot he actually tried to read the article ;)

P2P / Library

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ;).

Re:P2P / Library

[shani]

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.

When I go to the Gutenberg site and do a search, it gives me plain text, zipped plain text, and P2P links.

I don't know whether this makes you a genius for thinking of a good idea, or an idiot for not bothering to check to see if it had already been implemented.

Re:P2P / Library

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmmm they changed it around since I was there last, seems to be 'magnet' P2P links. Have to do some research on what type of network that is.

I might implement my own p2p library like Gutenberg. I was planning on making a library for Freenet anyhow with as many books as I could get my hands on.

Fully slashdotted

[SpaceKow]

Fully slashdotted
can someone debug this ?

16: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
17:
18: sub Prepare{
19: $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
20: return $dbh->prepare($_[0])
21: or die "Couldn't prepare statement: " . $dbh->errstr;
22: }
23:

Re:Fully slashdotted

[Whitecloud]

sure thats the modern version of 10,000 students all rushing to get the same book out that is recommended by the professor :)

Re:Fully slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that in between line 19 and 20, there should be something of the sort:

if (!defined($dbh)) {
print "Slashdot effect is complete; $!";
die "Could not connect to database; $!";
}

Error anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever I try to search for, all I get is a nice code dump... Anyone else has the same?

error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /var/www/html/mazarin/search.cgi line 118.

context: ...
114:
115:
116: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("books");
117: my $Search;
118: if ($mode eq "header"){
119: $Search=$dbh->prepare("SELECT author, title,id FROM book WHERE MATCH (title, author) AGAINST (? IN BOOLEAN MODE) LIMIT $start, $end");
120: $Search->execute($modQuery);
121: }elsif($mode eq "fulltext"){
122: $Search=$dbh->prepare("SELECT author,title,id FROM book WHERE MATCH (search_text) AGAINST (?) LIMIT $start, $end"); ...

code stack: /var/www/html/mazarin/search.cgi:118 /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm:649 /var/www/html/mazarin/search.cgi:84

Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[twoshortplanks]

Hmm, nicely formatted error messages. Does anyone know what this is? I'm assuming it's a mod_perl handler of some sort.

Re:Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[dr_dank]

In the spirit of the Gutenberg name, seems like there is a new Perl module that simulates Steve Gutenberg's career.

Re:Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[Zocalo]

Judging by the snippet of Perl at the bottom of the error message I'd say it's part of the Mason CMS.

Re:Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[WWWWolf]

As others noted, this is definitely Perl HTML::Mason, which is one of the best web scripting environments I've ever worked in. An adequate comparision would be something like this: PHP's down-to-earth approach of mixing code and HTML, JSP's and Website Meta Language's ideas on how to separate them again if they need to be (code componentization and tag libraries), Perl as the scripting language, and Apache mod_perl to give it some speed (also works as CGI).

I'm just wishing to know how to turn the cool-looking error dumps off when they're viewed outside localhost =)

Re:Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[twoshortplanks]

Bah, I'm a Template Toolkit user myself. I just want to steal the nice error messages! ;-)

Re:Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[Nachtfalke]

It is a mod_perl handler.
It's HTML::Mason

Slooow

[martingunnarsson]

I think the site is about to go down, it's already terribly slow...

Great idea, but needs some work

[CleverNickedName]

System error

error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20.

context: ...
16: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
17:
18:&nb sp; sub Prepare{
19: $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
20: return $dbh->prepare($_[0])
21: or die "Couldn't prepare statement: " . $dbh->errstr;
22: }
23:
24: sub SetLanguage{
...

code stack: /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:20
/ usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:26
/u sr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:96
/va r/www/html/mazarin/index.html:3

phonIE payper liesense stock markup FraUD #'s?

[Anonymous Coward]

to be revealed (made excessofbull) buy corepirate nazi ?pr firm? clerics?

don't bet yOUR .asp on that won? lookout bullow.

tell 'em robbIE? tell 'em how easy it was to become won of the soul DOWt payper billyonerrors?

Slashdot turned Project Gutenberg…

[Anonymous Coward]

...deader than Steve Gutenberg's career or even BSD.

and then just think

[bsDaemon]

and just think of all the problems which could have been avoided over the years if the reformation never happened...
it really is one of the most unfortunate twists in history (of course, slashdotters will just jump on christianity in general)

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

I would say not, it was needed, Luther saw the abuses of the Church in Rome, and tried to correct them, he never wanted to break from the church, and infact the break officialy did not happen till 200 years after Luther died, when Rome said there are 2 churches "them and us"

Re:and then just think

[urmensch]

I think a lot of the unfortunate twists in European history are due to the Catholic church becoming so corrupt as to cause a reformation in the first place.

Anyone want to buy an indulgence?

Re:and then just think

[bsDaemon]

indulgences are the only valid point ever made by people against the Catholic Church. They don't do them anymore.

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

OH no??

see http://www.divinemercysunday.com/plenary_indulgenc e.htm

Re:and then just think

[mangu]

While, at first, one would classify your post as either "offtopic" or "flamebait", I think an interesting point can be raised here: the Lutheran reformation was an early consequence of the maxim "information wants to be free".

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

Re:and then just think

[bsDaemon]

I mean /selling/ indlugences. Christ gave his deciples the power to forgive sins in his name. He also gave them the power to recruite more and pass it on. We call these people Priests. The Pope is the direct Apistolic succesion of St. Peter, who was given by Christ the power to make up rules for His Church.
Indlugence is a forgiveness of sins. Selling them is kind of BS. Giving them out is not.

Re:and then just think

[bsDaemon]

Information doesn't want anything. It merely is.
and what is wrong with monopoly? Uniformity breeds community.

Re:and then just think

[krymsin01]

Well, to be fair, luteranism would be more like iTunes or something similar. He still wanted money from the congregation, it wasn't free.

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

Indlugences and the office of the keys are diffent things. As a Luthern I accept the Office of the Keys (I go to private confession every week) but indlugences are you do this good work you get this. Which is probably why the church of Rome is still stuck in works righousness.

Re:and then just think

[krymsin01]

To be fair, lutheranism is more akin to iTunes than p2p. Luther still believed in tithes, whereas p2p is free.

Re:and then just think

[urmensch]

1.Stifling free and creative thought - Inquisition.
2.Corruption, Politics and the Anti-Popes - Great Schism
3.Crusade of 1420 - Hunting the "Heretics" - Great Schism
4.Taxation without representation - Forced Tithe
5.Not honoring the will of Jesus Christ their Lord - General

The list goes on and on, forced confessions, burning bones, and other weird ass shiat and they are all valid. I apologize for the sarcastic tone in number 5.

Re:and then just think

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone mod one of these down, I'm a fuckwit.

Re:and then just think

[Schemat1c]

indulgences are the only valid point ever made by people against the Catholic Church. They don't do them anymore.

Really?
What about the Inquisition?
What about Galileo?
What about pedophile priests?
What about...

Re:and then just think

[bsDaemon]

how does someone named Michael O'Connor end up a Lutheran?

Re:and then just think

[Schemat1c]

Information doesn't want anything. It merely is.
and what is wrong with monopoly? Uniformity breeds community.

Mind viruses are a sad thing.

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

well you might ask:
How some one named Michael Patrick O'Connor end up a Lutheran, when his paternal Grandpartes are Roman Chathloic?
Well I would have to say I think what the [confessional*] Lutherian church teaches fits what I see people to be. aka the total depravity of man, when I look around I don't see that humans are good, when I look inside myself I see evil, though I don't want to be. I look and see a just God, no way I could ever appease him by my works.

(*I use confessional here, because there are some "lutherians" that are not lutherians, read elca manly but there are a few in the lcms too, that are not lutherian even though they claim to be)

Re:and then just think

[bigchris]

Good grief. I think you should review your church history! At the time the Roman Catholic church was a massively corrupt bureaucracy that supressed ordinary people, was largely usurped by those who wanted power, and didn't teach about God's grace to mankind. In fact, much of the doctrine taught was contrary to the gospels. Papal bull, anyone?

I take a different view: just imagine all the problems that we'd still be dealing with if the Reformation had never happened!

Re:and then just think

[bigchris]

Nothing is wrong with a monopoly, however it tends to breed corruption and abuse. In the Roman Catholic church's case, these things happened. Why do you think the church had a counter-reformation???

Re:and then just think

[urmensch]

I am information packed into 4 dimensional space. I want to be free.

Re:and then just think

[wcrowe]

[confessional*] Lutherian church

Is this a particular Lutheran synod? I've never heard of it.

Re:and then just think

[Anonymous Coward]

how does someone named Michael O'Connor end up a Lutheran?

Maybe by being intelligent and reading about the roman catholic curch would make one want to change. Or maybe he was an altar boy when young and didn't like being raped by his priest.

Re:and then just think

[mav[LAG]]

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.

Not only that, but Luther translated the Bible into the common tongue. He used to hang out in pubs and the market and make notes of how people really spoke so that his translation would reflect day-to-day usage. The result - which is solidly argued in The Sovereign Individual and elsewhere - is that the common man realised once he read the Bible for himself that he didn't have to prop up the corrupt and extravagant monstrosity that was Rome then - economically or otherwise.

Catholic Church --> RIAA
The modern nation state is not a bad analogy either - extortion of taxes by force and the threat of jail, mean grasping and extravagant - and totally unnecessary for true free enterprise. But that's a whole other discussion...

Re:and then just think

[mangu]

Information doesn't want anything. It merely is.

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?

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

no, it like you have republicans and democrates, well in the LCMS you have Confessionals and "church grouth"

Re:and then just think

[wcrowe]

I see. But you write LCMS, which I understand to mean the Missouri Synod. All the LCMS members I've known are pretty conservative. The LCUSA(?) seems pretty liberal.

It's just that you don't often see anyone talking about "total depravity" outside traditional reformed circles (of which I am a part).

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

yes the Missouri Synod, but unfortantly there are some liberals still hanging around, all I have to say is Banky, most people might not know what I am talking about there, but in the LCMS that is a hot topic right now.

Re:and then just think

[carlos_benj]

Well, in my converstaions with information I have determined that while some information does indeed want to be free, other information does not want to rock the boat. Some information simply wants to be left alone. There are also some sub-groups of information that are blissfully ignorant of their situation and do not realize that they are not already free.

I have not had the time to speak with all information, so this is merely anecdotal evidence of the diversity of opinion among informations.

Re:and then just think

[__aanebg9627]

Catholic Church --> RIAA

The modern nation state is not a bad analogy either

The proper analogy is to the modern non-democratic nation-state, which was first overthrown in 1776. Now authoritarian power is vested in the corporation. Given the "L'etat, c'est moi" attitude of most CEOs, I wouldn't be surprised to see yet another Reformation or Enlightenment-style overthrow of corrupt autocratic leaders in our lifetime.

Re:and then just think

[ichimunki]

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.

Wrong and wrong.

While it may not be practical to run different water, gas, and electrical conduits to each building, that says nothing about requiring a monopoly. Especially with respect to gas and electricity, the thing being sold is an absolute commodity. The electricity created by wind power isn't any different than the electricity created by nuclear power. So what is needed is simply a way for me to sign up for wind or nuclear power at their price, they contribute to the grid in an amount commensurate to my usage... you get the idea. Same would work better for water if the water being pumped in were distilled (pure) water. But even so, with the certain additives and purity requirements, water is water. So, again, the only thing that needs to be unified is the pipes. These natural monopolies only make sense in the same way the government probably ought to have a natural monopoly on roads.

I also think you're vastly overestimating the power of monopoly for development. Bell did not have a monopoly on phone service until the government handed them one. Microsoft did not develop anything using a monopoly. They built a monopoly after years of competing against companies like Apple, Commodore, and even IBM.

Re:and then just think

[BarryNorton]

But implicit in your argument is the contrary position (not made clear: you have an 'until' but not a 'from')...

Before the printing press, literacy among Roman Catholics was surely higher than among the populations of non-Catholic countries since the Roman Catholic Church was actually able and willing to educate people (albeit, in some part, to copy the vulgate bible... and paid for by scaring the laiety by reading and misinterpreting only the Latin therein!)

(This also extends to your analogy: RIAA versus P2P - because, before the change in technological climate, RIAA, like the Roman Catholic Church, did do some good... Just not enough to justify their own existence in the modern world, imho.)

Re:and then just think

[mav[LAG]]

I really hope you're right...

Re:and then just think

[kbahey]

True, there were abuses in the Roman Catholic church at the time, mainly by a pope who came from rich and powerful family (Medici), and spent lavishly and wanted to replenish the cash he wasted by selling indulgences.

Luther wanted to reform the church, however, the events that ensued, compounded by Luther's personality and style made the schim irreversible.

The church called him to answer for what he wrote. He did not obey. He found protection with a ruler. The church played the excommunication card. He responded by declaring the pope to be Anti Christ. His abrasive and confrontational character, and his fire and brimstone rhetoric made reconciliation impossible.

Had he been more like Calvin, reconciliation was possible

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

Luther was there, it is called the Diet of Worms, that told him to recant, he told them unless he was shown by scripture or plain reason it was not safe to recant. They could not show him where he was "in error"

And the the pope being the anti-christ "he sets himself up in the temple of God, and says blaspmis things" seams to fit the office of the pope.

Re:and then just think

[plus10db]

No argument printing and literacy are linked. However, since most people would consider the Bible more of an historical account than "the main source of information", even 'at that time', it's a weak premise that printing the Bible awakened people to any greater purpose. Besides which, printing only correlates to the Bible thanks to Gutenberg. It is rather narrow minded, if not self serving, to 'read' more into that correlation. It isn't the control of the Bible but the control of ideas that the printing press removed the strangle hold on.

Re: and then just think

[gidds]

That way of allowing multiple suppliers of gas and electricity is exactly what happens here in the UK -- leading to the bizarre situation where you can get your electricity from British Gas, and your gas from Eastern Electricity!

Re:and then just think

[Farce Pest]

If I had a diet of worms, I'd be abrasive and confrontational as well.

Re:and then just think

[kbahey]

Thanks for the details.

I think after that Diet, he was summoned to Rome, to appear in presence of the Pope. He did not. And since he found a protector, and supporters, the schism just widened, instead of being killed there as just another heresey.

Of course there are other factors why the Protestant movement was successful and not suppressed. For example, Henry VIII of England adopting a version of it. The alignment of various hostilities in Europe to either pro or anti Reformation. The allure of 'by faith only' and 'not by deeds'. ...etc.

The Catholic Church was due for a reformation. Why it was a schism and not just a movement within Catholicism is mainly due to Luther's character and style.

Re:and then just think

[jtev]

Galeleo was a dick, he was put under house arrest for calling the pope a simpleton, and for refusing evidence at his trial that would have proved the Copernican model. While the Inquizition was bad, Galileo isn't anything you can pin on them. Now the Peodphile preists thing they are arguably handling poorly, but they are probably trying to avoid another inquisition.

Re:and then just think

[Anonymous Coward]

What doctrines were contrary to the bible, which by the is a catholic book if you did not notice, can you point out what these doctrines were an why they are contrary

Re:and then just think

[1arkhaine]

Of course, a large part of Henry VIII's adoption of a version of Protestantism was because he wanted to get divorced so he could marry again...

...Gotta love how a self-serving interest can be an instrument for such fundemental social change!

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

The reason he did not go, was he was informed that if he would go he surly would have been killed on the way. In fact the "holy roman emperor" had ordered him killed on his way home from the diet, he was abducted by agents of King Fredric the wise and hidden away for to protect his life.

Re:and then just think

[mpost4]

it not a diet of worms as you read in english it is a german statment meaning

diet = A formal general assembly of the princes or estates of the Holy Roman Empire

worms = the location of the diet

hence the diet of worms.

Re:and then just think

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, why not?

Papal Indulgences were the biggy - originally they were a development of the idea of atonement through your own merit, which is contrary to what Paul writes in Ephesians, that "it is by grace you have been saved, through faith - and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God - not by works, so that no one can boast" (Eph 2:8-9) Of course, these soon became sort of a magical sin-forgiver that fixes up all evil done. My favourite story is one I heard about a Duke who purchased an Indulgence that forgave him for all sins committed, and all sins that he was still to commit. This cost the Duke a fair amount of money, so he waited for the Indulgence seller to ride by again and, with his men, robbed him blind (thus he gained all his money back). When the seller objected, he was informed that the Duke had committed no sin, and the document was produced that the Indulgence seller had sold to the Duke!

Now let's not talk about Lent, where the Roman Catholic church jailed and fined Zwingli's friends for eating sausages. This was done on religious grounds, and it's hard to work out where in the Bible it states that people must be forced into fasting!

And incidently, the Bible is not a "Catholic" (by which I guess you mean Roman Catholic) book, it's a collection of books formalised in the canon. You might be interested to know that the canon was only gradually formalised after there was a fair degree of consensus in the church. In fact, you'll find that the canon has been changed a few times in the history of the Church - the Muratorian Canon (formed about 200AD), the New Testament used by Origen (about 250AD), the New Testament used by Eusebius (about 300AD) and the NT formed by the council of Carthage in about 400AD.

Re:and then just think

[Lady Jazzica]

The problem is that, in Christianity, you can only have a monopoly, at least as far as Christ's intentions are concerned. Christ only founded one Church (Mt. 16:18-19), not several churches.

While it's good to correct abuses, that's no excuse for doing what Luther did, i.e. making up new theology that contradicts the teaching of Christ's Church.

Re:and then just think

[Lady Jazzica]

Not only that, but Luther translated the Bible into the common tongue.

The idea that there were no Catholic editions of the Bible in vernacular languages is a myth:

Nor is it at all true that the Catholic Church was opposed to the printing and distribution of Bible translations in vernacular languages (it did oppose some Protestant translations which it felt were inaccurate). For instance (utterly contrary to the myths in this regard which are pathetically promulgated by the movie Luther), between 1466 and the onset of Protestantism in 1517 at least sixteen editions of the Bible appeared in German, with the full approval of the Catholic Church:

High German:

Strasburg: 1466, 1470, 1485
Basel, Switzerland: 1474
Augsburg: 1473 (2), 1477 (2), 1480, 1487, 1490, 1507 [also in 1518]
Nuremburg: 1483

Low German:

Cologne: 1480 (2)
Lubeck: 1494
Halberstadt: [1522]
Delf: [before 1522]

(From Johannes Janssen, History of the German People From the Close of the Middle Ages, 16 vols., translated by A.M. Christie, St. Louis: B. Herder, 1910 [orig. 1891], vol. 1, 56-57, vol. 14, 388)

Was the Bible unknown in German before 1466 and the printing press? Hardly. Raban Maur (c. 776-856), had translated the Bible into the Teutonic, or old German, language. Valafrid Strabon (c. 809-849) did the same, as did Huges of Fleury. Ottfried of Wissemburg rendered it in verse. So we see that the "conspiracy" of the Catholic Church to eliminate the Bible from the common man by banning the vernacular was singularly unsuccessful.

Re:and then just think

[mav[LAG]]

Good page! Too much here for me to argue with right off the bat. I guess it's time to stop putting off my study of the Reformation...

Re:and then just think

[leandrod]

> after that Diet, he was summoned to Rome, to appear in presence of the Pope. He did not

Quite wisely. A Pre-reformer who went, Johann Huss, was granted a promise of his safety. The then-current Pope gave him audience and asked him to explain his views. Behind a curtain the Pope's secretary took notes, and instead of allowing him back to Bohemia he was given to the Inquisition to be burnt, with the secretary's notes as proof of heresy.

> Henry VIII of England adopting a version of it

He never did. He only separated the Church of England from Rome. It was not until the reign of Elisabeth that the bishops of England reformed their church.

> The Catholic Church was due for a reformation. Why it was a schism and not just a movement within Catholicism is mainly due to Luther's character and style.

The Roman Church had already killed quite some Pre-reformists. Why it would have been different with Luther I don't see.

Go read Luther's thesis. They were quite respectful to the Pope. It was the Pope who insisted on the status quo, and that Luther's conscience could not accept.

Re:and then just think

[leandrod]

> Henry VIII's adoption of a version of Protestantism

He never adopted Protestantism. He merely separated from Rome. Reform in England was done by the bishops after Henry's death, during the reign of Elisabeth.

Re:and then just think

[leandrod]

> Had he been more like Calvin, reconciliation was possible

How come Rome never reconciled with Calvin, nor with Constantinople, nor with Huss, nor with Jean Valdo...

Re:and then just think

[leandrod]

> Nothing is wrong with a monopoly

Plenty is wrong. A monopoly means the exclusion of all others, and consequently of at least some freedoms.

In fact the only way of keeping a monopoly eternally is creating a police state.

Re:and then just think

[leandrod]

> Christ only founded one Church

Problem is, that is quite the only place where church is used in the universal sense. Mostly everywhere else the sense is local.

Even if you take the universal sense, there is no indication that the universal church is to be one only institution. The church is a body, not an institution.

> what Luther did, i.e. making up new theology that contradicts the teaching of Christ's Church

That's not what he did.

What he did was to recover Christ's and the Apostles' theology against Rome's relatively new theology.

Re:and then just think

[leandrod]

> The idea that there were no Catholic editions of the Bible in vernacular languages is a myth

But that was never the point, it is common knowledge that when the Vulgata was translated, Vulgar Latim was the vernacular in the West.

The point is that Rome resourced not to the Bible, but to the more recent Fathers and to itself, effectively discouraging the reading of the Bible to the point of requiring episcopal approval for someone wishing to read it, as per its inclusion in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Re:and then just think

[Farce Pest]

That was supposed to moderated +5 Funny.

Re:and then just think

[bigchris]

Well, I maintain there is no excuse for the Roman Catholic church to teach that which isn't in Holy Scripture.

I strongly suggest you read church history again. Luther didn't initially want to split with the church. He was a monk, for goodness sake! He actually read scripture properly.

Roman Catholics who follow the traditions of the church rather than follow the Bible should consider very carefully what they are doing.

10,000+ books?

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

10,000+ books. Right, so I've got to read all of them before I can post a comment?

Oh wait, this is Slashdot.

Site not /. certified

[Frit Mock]

Well, the site failed the /. test ...nice try, though

10 comments and then /.

[Lord Zerrr]

raw error

Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20.

Trace begun at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Exceptio ns.pm line 131
HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('C an\'t call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20.^J') called at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20
BookTools::Translator::Prepare('SELECT id FROM language WHERE language_code = ?') called at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 26
BookTools::Translator::SetLanguage('en') called at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 96
main::_('PROJECT_NAME') called at /var/www/html/mazarin/index.html line 3
HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Componen t.pm line 134
HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Com ponen t::FileBased=HASH(0x9d64cb4)') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm line 1069
eval {...} at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm line 1068
HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm line 338
eval {...} at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm line 338
eval {...} at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/Request. pm line 297
HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Requ est:: ApacheHandler=HASH(0x9e20d14)') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/ApacheHa ndler.pm line 134
eval {...} at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/ApacheHa ndler.pm line 134
HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HT ML::M ason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x9e20d14)') called at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.3/HTML/Mason/ApacheHa ndler.pm line 792
HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('H TML:: Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x9d56f8c)', 'Apache=SCALAR(0x9e2045c)') called at (eval 34) line 8
HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Maso n:: ApacheHandler', 'Apache=SCALAR(0x9e2045c)') called at /dev/null line 0
eval {...} at /dev/null line 0

Re:10 comments and then /.

[Lord Zerrr]

Hey Mod your a Moron to mod parent as OFF TOPIC. Why don't you go RTFMG (Mod Guidelines). A Proper Mod would be Redundant. Ass

Re:unhuh-explanation

[rakjr]

A guess would be that the script is accessing the database remotely. Thus, if the server is getting slashdotted, there is no way it can talk to the remote database. Instead of die, they should have sent a small text message of "Remote database unreachable."

Hind sight is 20/20 ;)

Redundant

[Big Nothing]

Bah - I already have a fully functional API to the books.

Gutenberg is totally inaccessible

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gutenberg is totally inaccessible

[geoffspear]

They're meant to be accessible to people who want to read old texts, not specifically to people who want to do some sort of arcane text processing on them.

Re:Gutenberg is totally inaccessible

[Anonymous Coward]

Would it be easier to find and scan the old books yourself?

Re:Gutenberg is totally inaccessible

[dvdeug]

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.

It's part of the big plan to convert everything over to XML. But this really isn't a big concern of Gutenberg, as most people don't use the entire archive as a corpus, and removing the headers and footers from even a couple dozen texts is no big deal.

Re:Gutenberg is totally inaccessible

[Bingo Foo]

Not to subtract from the truth of your statement, but the fact that your comment needed to be made at all, much less modded insightful, says a lot about Slashdot.

Re:Gutenberg is totally inaccessible

[goldfndr]

it requires several hours of Perl coding to successfully strip the header text from 75% of the documents with >99% accuracy

If you haven't already, have you considered publishing your perl script(s)? Something that took hours oughtn't be reinvented.

Text version

[Whitecloud]

since some seem to have trouble on the index page... here it is:

Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael Hart, who in 1971 decided that it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world. Since then, he has been joined by hundreds of volunteers who share his vision.
Now, more than thirty years later, Project Gutenberg has the following figures (as of November 8th 2002): 203 New eBooks released during October 2002, 1975 New eBooks produced in 2002 (they were 1240 in 2001) for a total of 6267 Total Project Gutenberg eBooks. 119 eBooks have been posted so far by Project Gutenberg of Australia.

Click here for the full PG story and here for the latest News , and learn about the Stockholm Challenge Award recently won by Project Gutenberg in the category Culture.

The key link is search page.

Re:Text version

[iggymanz]

Ah yes, project Gutenberg, providing important text to the whole world.......well, to those with computers & internet connection.......who can read English.....if the copyright has expired....come think of it, it's not that important or useful for most people on earth.

Re:Text version

[jonathan_ingram]

well, to those with computers & internet connection...

One of the projects run by the Internet Archive is the Bookmobile, which creates, prints, and gives away (for a nominal production fee) books created from public domain sources. One of their most popular products is an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland.

who can read English...

Yes, PG's content is primarily English at the moment, but this is only because most of the volunteers up until now have been English. If you are confident in a language other than English, you can help us get more books in this language -- either by scanning them, or by proofing the books which other people have scanned by joining the Distributed Proofreading Project (or the new EU sister-project DP Europe). At the moment the main site has projects available for proofing in German, Latin, French, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Hebrew, Danish, Italian, ancient Greek, and Gaelic. The EU site has, in addition, books available in Serbian, Slovenian, Romanian, Welsh, Hawaiian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukranian, modern Greek, and Bulgarian.

if the copyright has expired...

Yes, the vast majority of books in PG are copyright expired. This isn't a big problem, though, as we've only scratched the surface of the number of copyright expired books. Even at the current rate of growth, there's enough to keep us going until the US copyright regime starts letting new books into the public domain in 15 years or so.

Re:Text version

[dvdeug]

project Gutenberg, providing important text to the whole world.

You want that we should be miracle workers? We do what we can.

who can read English

What, at least a half billion people? That's completely ignoring the German, Latin, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Serbian and Chinese which have gone into PG in some quantities.

if the copyright has expired

Out of the about three thousand years of important writings, we're restricted from 95, or about 3%? Even acknowledging the desire for those books, we still have a vast array of material to distribute, and far more than 97% of the material that culturally priceless, the Shakespeare, the Goethe, the Carroll, the Bible, the Dhammapada, the Illiad, are available.

it's not that important or useful for most people on earth.

Nothing any mere mortal can do will really be important or useful to most people on Earth. That's no reason to denigrate what people do do.

PG slashdotted..

[d4rkmoon]

I guess this is about the time we take the Internet Archive's cache of PG eh? I wonder if they cache all 10k books. :)

Best way to read online texts?

[GGardner]

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?

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[gunne]

If you have a palm pilot, i can recommend Weasel Reader.
I've been using it for a couple of years on my Palm V, and despite its small screen size it works perfectly for reading ebooks.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[CGP314]

does anyone have recommendations for better ways to read these files?

On an old palm pilot or in the notes folder on an ipod. I found that it's the backlight of a computer screen (and on the new palms) that is what hurts my eyes when trying to read.


-Colin

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[bw5353]

What works best for me is any text-editor/word processor. I delete line by line or paragraph by paragraph as I have read them. Don't know why I feel that is comfortable, but it is.

(Keep a backup of the original in case you want to check again what the name of the butler's niece was.)

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[werdnab]

I don't enjoy curling up on the sofa with my computer to read a novel. It isn't the warmest way to spend a few relaxing hours with a book.

It is however a great way to research the classics for info and reports.

I still like to hunt around old bookshops, and often I can find those works for a buck or two.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[henben]

Seconded. Let's hope someone writes a web app to generate Palm Doc formatted versions of Gutenberg texts on demand.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[Stalus]

The last time I had to read something off of PG, I made a local webpage with an embedded frame, and used a little bit of scripting to allow me to change the colors and fonts and such occassionally. So I'd start with a dark background and light foreground, and when my eyes got tired of that I'd change the contrast. I usually just stuck with the same font, though larger. Surprisingly enough it made it easier for me to get through it. Unfortunately, I have no idea what I did with that page - probably trashed by now.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[bbc]

Try http://manybooks.net

Not exactly what you were looking for, but they have a large chunk of PG's texts in zText (Weasel's) format.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[bbc]

Myself, I don't really like reading off a static CRT, but I guess sitting on the couch with a notebook could work. If you have a notebook, you may want to try yBook.

PDAs usually come with their own readers, or reader programs are easy to get for them. I prefer Weasel on my Palm Zire, but also have the Plucker HTML viewer installed, for content that more or less requires it.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[El Dopa]

manybooks.net has the majority of PG's etexts available in PDF as well as many formats suitable for reading on your Palm, or other PDA (including zTXT for weasel reader, iSilo, Plucker, PalmDOC, eReader, Rocketbook, etc).

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[bbc]

Another interesting site that should be mentioned is GutenTalk, because it also offers hand-crafted HTML versions if they are available, rather than just machine generated ones.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[tehcyder]

Anything longer than 10 pages, I print off at work and read offline.

Oops.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[WillAdams]

I prefer to make them into .pdfs and read those in Adobe Acrobat Reader on a pen slate (Fujitsu Stylistic).

I've one example up in my portfolio, http://members.aol.com/willadams (it's also in the TeX Showcase, http://www.tug.org/texshowcase ), Okakura Kakuzo's _The Book of Tea_ --- got the text from PG, set it, made some corrections (I've a (letterpress) printed copy in its slip case at home), sent those to PG (took two tries, but they finally accepted and applid most of them), and printed and bound a copy as a gift for my sister.

William

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[numpins]

I have Weasel Reader installed in my Palm but CSpotRun has been so good I don't find a need to explore Weasel Reader. It carried me through many of my first eBooks (and will continue to do so). I recommend it and it uses the GPL.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[dvdeug]

It is however a great way to research the classics for info and reports.

That's quite a failure on some levels, if that's all we're doing. One of my personal favorite authors in PG, J. S. Fletcher, is never going to be considered part of the "classics". But he's a nice read for mystery lovers who like Victorian London.

I still like to hunt around old bookshops, and often I can find those works for a buck or two.

Which books? Some of our books can not be found that cheap and many of the ones which can, might take a lot of searching. We're not just the big name classics; we handle a lot of non-fiction and obscure fiction, too.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[anadem]

for PG texts that have been converted to HTML -- e.g Mazarin (http://open.palary.org/mazarin/) or ebooks@adelaide (http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/) -- the FOSS Plucker reader (http://www.plkr.org/index.plkr) for the Palm is excellent. It's very nice to be able to navigate through etexts, as opposed to having to work your way through a whole book as onle blob.

I read PG texts with Plucker on a Palm IIIxe ... tiny screen no problem to get lost in the story ... and three weeks battery life even using the backlight every night. Carry your library in your back pocket.

Plucker also grabs websites, useful as an offline reader for BBC etc. Highly recommended!

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[Bystander]

Reducing eye strain and mental fatigue when reading from an electronic display can involve changing the size and style of text font used, the foreground and background colors, the average number of words displayed per line, and the average number of lines displayed per page. I've found the use of small portable devices such as a Palm PDA places limitations on the amount of flexibility I have adjusting one or more of the above at the same time. Viewing etexts on the high resolution display of a laptop or desktop computer using an appropriate reading program allows me to fully customize the display, but trades off some of the convenience factors.

On my Palm PDA I use the already mentioned Weasel Reader program. Nice because it's zTxt file format supports adding bookmarks and annotations to a copy of the etext for later referral. On a desktop or laptop, I use the PyGERS reader from the PyGE project. It also uses the same zTxt format as Weasel Reader, while allowing full control over fonts, colors, line length, and pagination while reading.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[Anonymous Coward]

Already available at:

http://www.sakoman.net

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[Anonymous Coward]

The best program by far that I've found for reading long text files such as books is Ice Book Reader Pro. It's not a free program, but it has some very nifty features that all of the other book reader programs that I've tried are lacking. Here is the URL to go check it out for yourselves: http://www.ice-graphics.com/ICEReader/IndexE.html

Site don't open

[golge011]

I can't open site with Mozilla. Simplified error is below:

error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20.
context: ...
16: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
17:
18: sub Prepare{
19: $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
20: return $dbh->prepare($_[0])
21: or die "Couldn't prepare statement: " . $dbh->errstr;
22: }
23:
24: sub SetLanguage{ ...
code stack: /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:20 /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:26 /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:96 /var/www/html/mazarin/index.html:3

the tutorial talked to me

[Lord Zerrr]

I love sexy robot voice tutorials! mazarin tutorial

So much for that theory: ERROR!

[crashnbur]

This is what I get when I visit the Mazarin link:

error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20.

context: ...
16: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
17:
18:&nb sp; sub Prepare{
19: $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
20: return $dbh->prepare($_[0])
21: or die "Couldn't prepare statement: " . $dbh->errstr;
22: }
23:
24: sub SetLanguage{
...

code stack: /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:20
/ usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:26
/u sr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:96
/va r/www/html/mazarin/index.html:3

Re:So much for that theory: ERROR!

[mcleaver]

Looks like it only likes Internet Explorer...
I get:
System error
error: Can't call method "prepare" on an undefined value at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm line 20.
context: ...
16: my $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
17:
18: sub Prepare{
19: $dbh=DatabaseConnect("translations");
20: return $dbh->prepare($_[0])
21: or die "Couldn't prepare statement: " . $dbh->errstr;
22: }
23:
24: sub SetLanguage{ ...
code stack: /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:20 /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:26 /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.3/BookTools/Translator.pm:96 /var/www/html/mazarin/index.html:3
raw error

It appears search results are being translated

[Anonymous Coward]

...into Latin or some other dead language.

OKAY WE KNOW THE SITE IS SLASHDOTTED

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is with people who say that "haha - the website is slashdotted, here is the error message". WE WILL FIGURE IT OUT OURSELVES OR READ THE OTHER TEN MESSAGES THAT SAY THAT. Thanks for your consideration.

I hope Slashdot never gets Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I fear a source code dump would put me off my lunch faster than a goatsex link.

pateNTdead PostBlock devise still fauxking broken?

[Anonymous Coward]

real creators suggest using newclear power vs. (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 24, @09:39AM (#9237105)
unprecedented evile, whilst participating in the increasingly popular planet/population rescue initiative.

no contest. this stuff is unbreakable, & wwworks on several (more than 3) dimensions.

it's probably just a suggestion.

consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... with power to spare.

eye gas robbIE's fired up the pateNTdead PostBlock devise, wonce again?

Due to excessive bad posting from this IP or Subnet, anonymous comment posting has temporarily (forever, if we had some ept) been disabled. You can still login to post. However, if bad posting continues from your IP or Subnet that privilege could be revoked as well. If it's you, consider this a chance to sit in the timeout corner or login and improve your posting . If it's someone else, this is a chance to hunt them down (like with fuddles' phonIE bouNTy hunter scam). If you think this is unfair, we just don't care.

Straight HTML = archaic

[Leobinus]

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.

Re:Straight HTML = archaic

[MadEyeMoody]

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.

Great site! It's a joy to browse, with no wasted time trying to figure out the navigation. Can you cite any similar ones? Thanks for the link!

Re:Straight HTML = archaic

[RESPAWN]

Actually, this could be useful for some of the dedicated eBook readers. I personally have the Rocket eBook reader (it's been in a box for the last 2 years, but I still have it), and their software allows you to convert HTML to their eBook format. This is much more convenient due to the Table of Contents markup and (typically) non-fixed width text formatting. Without those two features, reading an eBook on the thing becomes much, much harder. Otherwise, tou have to do a text search for chapter titles and you have to deal with the fact that since some of the texts have hard page breaks, then when they are reformatted to fit the screen, 1 line in the text file may end halfway on line 2 on the eBook screen.

I say congrats to PG for making their content much easier to use.

Re:Straight HTML = archaic

[RAMMS EIN]

And what's not HTML about that site?

HTML is great stuff. Please don't bash it senselessly.

"Project Gutenberg Made Accessible"

[trezor]

And that is why we are slashdotting it?

At least thats my experience after "testing" it now.

Bam

[kunudo]

Monday May 24, @03:14PM : Project Gutenberg made accessible
Monday May 24, @03:15PM : Project Gutenberg made inaccessible

Coming soon, to a post near you

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFL

Read The F(ine) Library!

Unless you have read the entire body of work that makes up human civilization, you do not have the requisite knowledge to comment on any aspect of it.

Slashdot'd

[Bipedismaximus]

"Project Gutenberg Made Accessible"

Oh, the irony that is slashdot.

No database handle was returned.

[oneiros27]

The 'DatabaseConnect' function didn't return anything.

Not a big deal, really, but they probably should have trapped that, as it could happen for any number of reasons (database down, authentication failed, etc).

I find that I'm getting much slower when I write programs these days -- because I'm checking errors for those things that I would've just blown off, or not have thought about in my earlier days.

[there's a few different things that could be done to this -- but I don't know why they're calling DatabaseConnect both at lines 16 and 19, so it would be careless of me to recommend a solution to code that I don't fully understand, and can't see the whole context]

Re:Die dame christian

[Anonymous Coward]

I say kill all christians they all should be killed starting with this idiot.

Project Gutenberg Made Inaccessible

[Pedrito]

Mazarin increases the accessibility of Gutenberg's 10,000+ books

In a related story, the Slashdot effect decreases the accessibility of Gutenberg's 10,000+ book.

SCO will file a lawsuit saying they wrote them all

[HiyaPower]

Gotta turn a living you know...

Re:printing press

[Anonymous Coward]

and just think, the Chinese and Koreans both had movable typeface long before Gutenberg did.

Re:printing press

[mpost4]

maybe if we had them when they did, John Hus would be the one that did the reforming instead of being burned http://www.greatsite.com/timeline-english-bible-hi story/john-hus.html
think of it if Hus was successfull instead of being a lutherian I would be called a husian (ok maybe not)

Mazarin made inaccessible

[Anonymous Coward]

Film at 11.

the eighteenth folk belief

[Anonymous Coward]

is that when the body of a text passes is a certain length it should not all be in italics, because a long body of text written in italics becomes difficult to read, similar to the practice of writing a long document IN ALL CAPS, BOTH OF THESE FORMS OF AWRITING A LONG DOCUMENT MAKE THE TEXT VERY HARD TO READ, BECAUSE OF THE WAY THE EYE VIEWS THE SERIF LETTERS. THIS FOLK BELIEF IS TRUE.

Gutenberg archive and access

[rjs.org]

Too bad the site couldn't hold up, I really wanted to see my contribution
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

Re:Gutenberg archive and access

[SnarfQuest]

What I'd really like to see is an OS text-to-voice reader program.

What's wrong with festival?

Re:Gutenberg archive and access

[KevinDumpsCore]

> What I'd really like to see is an OS text-to-voice reader program.

Beg your pardon? There are many, listed here at linux-sound.org. I know the Festival program works...

Re:Gutenberg archive and access

[Bystander]

Since you're already familiar with wxPython, the PyGE project may interest you. Among the applications is an etext reader program which includes text-to-speech capabilities for both Windows platforms (using SAPI) and Unix/Linux platforms (using Festival). The Python modules for generating speech from text could be easily adapted for generating .wav files, which could then easily be converted to the compressed format of your choice.

I've debugged the problem:

[Anonymous Coward]

The site is written in Perl.

Re:printing press

[urmensch]

I always thought you would be called the Hussies ;)

Gutenberg, Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be great if Google were involved in Gutenberg in a major way?

Re:Gutenberg, Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't it be great if Google were involved in Gutenberg in a major way?

Yeah! And, um, beef jerky! I love beef jerky! Google, Gutenberg, and beef jerky would be an unstoppable team!

Yeah?

[bigchris]

What about how the Reformation tackled: transubstantiation, Papal Succession, the ability of priests to marry, idolatory, salvation by works, and the way that the church held (and still holds) Roman Catholic dogma over Holy Scripture. There are more, but I think this will do for now.

Really, Indulgences were a way of raising money for the church, and I see it as a symptom of the wider corruption that had occurred in the Roman Catholic church.

Re:Yeah?

[bsDaemon]

the whole lot is backed by the bible.

Re:Yeah?

[Anonymous Coward]

There Bible. yes its differnt.

Re:Yeah?

[bsDaemon]

no, it has a few extra books that the protestents took out. However, the gospels didn't get line-item veto. Jesus still says to Simon Peter "you are the rock upon which i shall build my church"; Jesus still says "whatever you shall hold true on Earth, i shall hold true in Heaven."

QED

Not that I expect a Slashdotter posting AC to have any actual facts or a valid opinion.

Re:Yeah?

[leandrod]

> it has a few extra books that the protestents took out

Quite to the contrary, these books were added by Rome at Trento. Until them they were usually copied along the Bible without being considered part of the Canon, just like the Shepherd of Hemas before the Montanist heresy.

It was only when Luther decided to have them printed apart from the Bible that Rome decided to try to accuse him of tooking them out of where they never belonged...

> Jesus still says to Simon Peter "you are the rock upon which i shall build my church"

You misquote, actually "you art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church", Mt XVI:18 RSV, and the unanimous consent of the Fathers of the primitive churches is that the rock wasn't Peter, but his confession.

> whatever you shall hold true on Earth, i shall hold true in Heaven

Again you misquote: "I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven", Mt XVI:19 RSV. This is spoken of the church which started with Peter and the Apostles, and it goes without saying that an institution having for its head a man instead of Christ ceases to be a legitimate church.

n fact, the analogy of the keys relates to the custom of giving the keys of a city to the person appointed by the king to have authority there. The authority is taken by the king if it is not duly used.

Gutenberg Disclaimer

[Twinky]

What always struck me as odd is the enourmous length of the disclaimer that Project Gutenberg attaches to every text. To me it seems to be the most obvious sign of a law system that is ridiculously screwed. No book I ever read had a legal statement like this.

Quote:

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below, [1] the Project (and any other party you may receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that time to the person you received it from. If you received it on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement copy. If you received it electronically, such person may choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to receive it electronically. THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you may have other legal rights. INDEMNITY You will indemnify and hold the Project, its directors, officers, members and agents harmless from all liability, cost and expense, including legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext, [2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext, or [3] any Defect.

Now might be a good time to consider

[SolemnDragon]

...donating to the good cause. If you don't want to donate money, volunteer to proofread, or it might be worth it for writers out there to consider a notation in your will that will allow your works to pass either directly into the public domain, or, as i have been in contact with lawyers to discuss, simply passing the copyright of your own works on to project gutenberg. This allows them more work to publish, and if you're in a contract somewhere that allows for royalty collection, you can set it up so that those royalties switch to project gutenberg at the time of your death.

Now might also be a good time to contribute an hour a week to a literacy project, or to make a donation there. Adult literacy is a serious issue all over the world, and that includes right here in the states, where there really are bright people out there who could have better lives if they could read. I can't think of a more on-topic subject than project gutenberg to discuss adult literacy and the need for both literacy teaching and to support free literature for the masses such as this project provides.

Just my $0.02...

solemndragon

Funny definition of "accessible..."

[dpbsmith]

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Michael Hart's decision to make the basic format of PG texts "plain vanilla ASCII" has resulted in texts that are highly accessible by any meaning I can think of for that word. They are also compact, platform-agnostic, and durable. Texts contributed in the 1980s are fully usable today.

While there have been constant complaints about PG using the "wrong" format, opinions on the "right" format have been the flavor-of-the-month (or at least several flavors per decade). Had PG decided to use a "better" format, all of their volunteer time would probably have been taken up converting (say) WordPerfect to RTF to HTML to SGML to XML, leaving relatively little time to digitize and proofread texts.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[pedantic bore]

The problem with "plain vanilla ASCII" is that expresses less information than is present in the original and is a PITA to recover this information. This is especially true for texts that use non-ASCII characters (or illustrations of any kind).

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.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[bbc]

There are plans to use a base storage format that is going to use some XML flavour.

PG will then store the text in both the base format and the minimum required format for a certain type of content (for instance, maths books, IIRC, are already posted in TeX, and music in Lillypond formats). The server will hopefully acquire automatic conversion to HTML, PDF and whatever people desire later.

Setting such a system up is not trivial, that's why it is taking a while.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[bug-eyed monster]

Yep. To me, and probably many others who are exposed to human-computer interactivity issues, accessibility has a particular definition including:

Accessibility refers to ensuring that Content is accessible, ie. ensuring that Content can be navigated and read by everyone, regardless of location, experience, or the type of computer technology used.

The original text format is obviously tailor-made for accessibility. The HTML format will make the data more useful (perhaps even more usable?) for those people who have an HTML browser, but will make it inaccessible for some users.

Overall it's a really poor choice of wording in the Slashdot title and summary. But then again, Slashdot and many of its visitors seem to get the terms accessible, usable and useful totally wrong while they chide others for misusing hacking and cracking. ;-(

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[furry_marmot]

I have to disagree. Many texts, though not all by any means, lose information due to loss of fonts, illustrations, TOC, and index, as well as pagination or chapter structure, or even something as silly as lines in a poem where the words use margins in a creative way to sort of swirl down a page.

If texts really had been formatted in WordPerfect or RTF, a converter could easily be written (have been for years, actually) to convert the texts to any other format. The fact that the starting point for PG is now an unstructured, unformatted, plain vanilla ASCII format that does not contain all the original text's information means that it is NOW in exactly the situation you describe. For PG to ever digitally recreate these texts will take up an immense amount of volunteers' time, leaving relatively little time to add new texts to the collection.

I've read about a dozen books from PG. Each time I've had to do some formatting to either get to fit well on paper or to convert it to something I could then convert to read on my Palm. I really appreciate what Michael has done and is doing, and I also understand that in 1971 plain-text might have really been the right choice, but I've felt for quite a while now that each passing year compounds the mistake of this original choice.

-dd

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[bbc]

a converter could easily be written

I you checked the volunteer mailinglist of Project Gutenberg, you would see that every now and again somebody waltzes in and says: "Why don't you do such and so? It's easy! You guys must be idiots for not doing it my way."

Neglecting the fact that such people rarely have the decency to find out if this discussion has already been held, and what the arguments were, list members will then ask the question:

"If it's so easy, why don't you show us how its done?"

That will usually shut up the it's-easy-sayers.

There are of course those who act, rather than talk. Those people have built the PG website, the PG database, the Distributed Proofreaders environment, all the 'easy' little things that are required to keep PG's library double in size every 18 months.

Next time you say "it's easy", try to have a system in place that shows you know what you are talking about.

P.S. I realize you did not say PG are idiots. Quite the contrary. However, such emotional outbursts are often the next step in the mode of discussion of those who think others should fullfill their desires at no cost and immediately. That's why I put it in the example.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[dvdeug]

loss of fonts

If you want the fonts, use scans. You can't preserve the fonts in any sane transcription medium, and nobody tries.

TOC

Historically, PG doesn't lose the table of contents. It's usually pretty trivial to reconstruct, even if lost, and most PG to HTML converters do so automatically.

If texts really had been formatted in WordPerfect or RTF, a converter could easily be written (have been for years, actually) to convert the texts to any other format.

And each time you did that, it would get uglier and hairer, and quite likely lose some of the detail that you worked on encoding into the RTF. You can't really go from one of those formats to HTML and get a sane output.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[furry_marmot]

such emotional outbursts are often the next step

I am well aware of Michael's intention to move in an XML-based direction for the database and happen to disagree with some of the choices that have been made along the way. I didn't call anyone an idiot (as you point out) and I didn't demand my desires be fulfilled immediately. I must say your threshhold for defining something as an emotional outburst is much lower than mine.

If a choice was made early on to put texts into any markup format at all, one that preserved more of the basic information of the original texts than plain-ASCII, then a converter could easily be written to convert from one format to another. It's done all the time: databases to text, XML to HTML, RTF to PDF, POD to LaTex, etc. etc. Why do you think me a nay-sayer?

I converted a bunch of PG texts to HTML once as an experiment. It was successful, but it required a lot of hand-holding of the Perl script I wrote, since I had trouble teaching it to recognize what it was looking at -- which is the point I was making.

With plain text, a paragraph is a visual conceit, where two linebreaks are considered the delimiter -- unless they aren't! If you convert a book
to some e-reader format that
doesn't wrap your paragraph text blocks,
then you might end up with linebreaks in
unappealing places that
distract from the text.
But with only a computer's interpretation of our visual conceit, a program is just as likely to wrap a TOC or index, which is equally unappealing. You could put markers in the text to indicate that this is a TOC, this is a paragraph, this is poem that keeps its linebreaks...but then you are already creating a primitive markup language and moving away from plain ASCII (at least to the extent that we're saying <text markup> tags are not text in this discussion).

I believe I do know what I'm talking about; but thank you for your input.

-dd

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[furry_marmot]

Point taken. What I meant was font size, bold, and italic (such as for emphasis or to make titles stand out). I don't want to debate the merits of including the font information, but if the original author included such formatting in the paper original, even just to add emphasis to dialogue he/she had written, I think it's accurate to say that "information" is lost in the plain ASCII version.

Wrt TOC's, maybe I worked on the wrong texts. If I remember correctly, PG text TOC's are simply lists of section or chapter titles (since the concept of a page number is lost). It's more information than simply deleting it would provide, but it no longer serves the purpose of directing you to the location of that section or chapter. In a PG text to HTML converter I wrote once, where I hoped to create a link from the TOC to the item in question, I ran into issues like:

Chapter 1: Something happens
Chapter 2: Something even more amazing
happens which requires a very long title
Chapter 3: Something less dramatic happens

...which required me to manually remove a linebreak so my converter could read it as a title. (Yes you could program around it, but not every text's chapter title begins with "Chapter X:") It's been a few years, but I think it was the Oz series by Frank L. Baum. I got it to work eventually, but it required a lot of manual work, and one or more of the chapter titles mapped to a phrase found in a paragraph, meaning I had to manually create the anchor and didn't ever get the script fully automated. Other anomolies in other works included header or footer information from the original text that was included throughout the PG text. It confused me until I realized what it must be. I also seem to remember different aspects of the texts being handled differently by different editors, so that even a collection of books by the same author and publisher ended up formatted for PG differently.

I agree that RTF is not structured, but I've converted many documents from RTF to HTML. Not excessively formatted documents, I grant you, but I used to be in charge of this thing at work that converted Word documents from various departments into HTML for our intranet. The RTF-to-HTML converter I wrote worked surprisingly well (I used to develop MS-Help files in raw RTF, so I knew a bit about it), and then only required a bit of tweaking to get right -- much less than was required for PG-to-HTML.

I really don't understand why so many people think plain ASCII is so great. As I'm writing this, I realize that even on a printed page, the output is viewed not as plain ASCII, but as a bunch of symbols that are placed in proximity to each other on the space of a page to convey meaning. In changing that, often nothing is lost. But where context and visual information are lost, I believe the failing of simple ASCII becomes apparent.

-dd

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[bbc]

Of the 100 most recent etexts posted from Distributed Proofreaders to PG (DP is the main supplier of texts), 46 come in an HTML version. I would not be surprised if a large part of the remaining texts did not have any special needs to begin with.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[jesterzog]

What I meant was font size, bold, and italic (such as for emphasis or to make titles stand out). I don't want to debate the merits of including the font information, but if the original author included such formatting in the paper original, even just to add emphasis to dialogue he/she had written, I think it's accurate to say that "information" is lost in the plain ASCII version.

I'm not sure what the official PG archive line says, but the stated Primary Rule in the Distributed Proofreaders Proofreading Guidelines states that "the final electronic book seen by a reader, possibly many years in the future, should accurately convey the intent of the author".

It's true that some information may be lost, but I read this to mean that at the very least, some intelligence will be applied when deciding what information to keep and what to throw away. It's fortunate that most authoring is more about writing words than formatting them, and the majority of the works currently being preserved by PG would have originally been typed on a either typewriter or something with less accuracy.

The proofing guidelines also instruct on how to mark up bold and italics, and the proofing interface makes it relatively easy to enter non-ASCII characters, such as accented letters, which come up in books from time to time. Even if it's not official, there appears to be an attempt to save a lot of the important information so that at the very least it can be translated later.

It's still kept quite simple though, and I guess that's because for every extra complication, the participation would go down.

But all of that said, I don't think the main goal of Project Gutenberg is to provide output that will easily parse in people's perl scripts. The primary goal is to save as many out-of-copyright books as possible before they completely disappear, and make them reasonably accessible... which plain text files do remarkably well. If added complication causes things to go noticibly more slowly then it conflicts with that goal.

Perhaps instead, a separate project is needed with different goals, that would take works outputted from PG and standardise them to a format that's more accessible to technology. If it works out and they liaise well enough, they might end up merging in the end anyway. I think a good proof of concept would be needed first, though.

Re:Funny definition of "accessible..."

[dvdeug]

What I meant was font size, bold, and italic

Italics are preserved _like so_. As a general rule, TEI doesn't preserve these things, either; instead it marks up things up as titles and what not. Again, most non-facsimile reprints don't preserve font size and formatting of titles.

[PG's TOC] no longer serves the purpose of directing you to the location of that section or chapter.

Use the search function, Luke. Hit control-F or whatever, enter the title name, and it should take you right to it.

I really don't understand why so many people think plain ASCII is so great.

Because everything supports it, and it's simple to produce. If FooOS doesn't support it, it's not a real operating system. If Foo Text Processor can't import text, than it's not a real text-processor. I can run grep and awk and vim on it and see a book, not a bunch of markup.

And because Project Gutenberg was not created yesterday. In the days when PG mailed 360k disks, the only thing widely supported was plain text. Now that we have 10,000 books in plain text, we can't change direction on a fly, so whatever formats we produce (and we frequently produce different formats when the book calls for it) we keep a plain text copy around.

Already very accessible...

[ricky-road-flats]

I only last week downloaded Project Gutenberg as an ISO - it has 9,500 books on it and weighs in at about 3.85 GB. All the books are as plain text within a ZIP file, accessed through a set of basic web pages also on the disc.

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.

Re:Already very accessible...

[bbc]

Torrents, ISOs and what have you are linked through the PG site. You can also order a gratis copy of CD or DVD if you like (please consider making a donation in that case).

There used to be a special library archive format (Green thingy something), but I don't see it on the site anymore?

Re:Already very accessible...

[mrchaotica]

It's too bad they don't just use bzip2, since it can (unlike zip) compress the text without putting it in an archive first - I find that it's reasonably convenient to just use bzless to read a *.txt.bz2 file, or bzcat |

Re:Already very accessible...

[Damiano]

The Bittorrent link is at http://syd2.ausgamers.com:88/incoming/torrents/pgd vd.iso.torrent

Check it out.

Re:Already very accessible...

[dvdeug]

It's too bad they don't just use bzip2, since it can (unlike zip) compress the text without putting it in an archive first

The big problem is that modern versions of Windows and Linux come with zip decompressers, and they're pretty much universal on any personal computer platform still in use (personal computer not meaning IBM PC-compatible here.)

The same thing you complain, is part of the reason that they don't use bzip. It's more convenient to zip multiple files (like illustrated HTML) than to have to use two tools to compress it.

BTW, you can usually use zcat file.zip to read the contents of a one-file zip file.

How about:

[Anonymous Coward]

6. Celibacy - Pederasty

10,000+ books

[Anonymous Coward]

And not one mention of the screenplay for Police Academy.

Re:10,000+ books

[bbc]

PG has a very strict policy that it will not publish works that have been refused by all other publishers. :-)

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

frist psot?

Sorry, but you are a dismal failure. Better luck next time.

Fuck the trees.

[mangu]

Support HP and Lexmark, print it. Unfortunately, I have never found any electronic reading medium that compares with a paper book. In my experience, there's no way you can lie down in a couch or bed and have the same experience with a computer as you can have with a book. I have used my very lightweight Sony Vaio, but it still generates a lot of heat, and has a ridiculous 1024x768 resolution.

Assuming they let them out...

[SeanDuggan]

What with Disney getting the copyright limit extended each time they risk losing the Mouse and the laws saying that a copyright exists on all works even if not formally copyrighted, unless otherwise stated by the author, there's a good chance that we won't have new books in the public domain for a long time...

Bruce Sterling

[Discoflamingo13]

Information wants you to give me a dollar.

Emacs on a pocket laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Fujitsu p1120 + SuSE Linux 9.1. Very light, less than 1 Kg, lighter than many books, I can hold it in a single hand. It has an 8.9 inch panoramic screen; it is MUCH better than any PDA or dedicated book reader. It comes with a 30Gb drive, which I replaced with an 80 GB drive. Right now no PDA or book reader has 80 GB storage!. The Gutenberg DVD is only 4 GB, I copied it to my p1120.

already done...

[TaddyPorter]

This site has done basically the same thing w/ Gutenberg text, and did it years ago. Provides searching, html format, bookmark, etc. www.crankylibrarian.com

Re:They don't do them anymore

[meanroy]

Hey I will indulge you for *FREE*
BTW, re: bsDaemon anyone else think this handle is hilarious?

Steven Guttenburg Filmography?

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't know he had 10,000+ films under his belt! I need to update my "Three Men And A Little Bastard" collection!

Re: Save the trees and real paragraphs (biased)

[FlaSheridn]

I've found only three acceptable ways to read electronic literature:
(1) The late, lamented Newton.
(2) A high-resolution Palm screen with PalmReader Pro (now eReader) and the Bell 18-point serif font. Some, but not all, of their commercial books do paragraphing correctly (i.e., \n\t, not \n\n); almost all the non-commercial ebooks I've found get this uniformly wrong: A decade of low-resolution screens is no excuse for ignoring a millennium of reading tradition.
(3) Safari on an LCD screen with a custom style sheet, rendering

as \n\t:

P {text-indent: 1em; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 0;
padding-bottom: 0; padding-top: 0; }

---
Disclaimer: There are various complicated relations between some of my employers and the companies mentioned above.

How about the TEI XML format?

[KevinDumpsCore]

> However, it insists on at least a plain vanilla version of a text, as that format has proven to be the most durable and accessible.

Sometimes the illustrations that accompany a text are crucial for its understanding.

How about using the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI XML format instead? Graphics can be included using its figure tag. Combine the TEI XML markup with Dublin Core metadata and people could search PG's library by author, publication date, publisher, etc.

The markup can be stored as ASCII text and edited with a simple text editor. This format can also be rendered to ASCII for legacy purposes...

Re:How about the TEI XML format?

[bbc]

TEI XML ... Dublin Core

These are indeed, AFAIK, technologies that are being considered.

The markup can be stored as ASCII text and edited with a simple text editor.

That is a rather optimistic view. XML, AFAIK, was never intended to be human-writable. (Despite the fact that most TEI tagging seems to be done by hand with a simple text editor.)

Re:How about the TEI XML format?

[dvdeug]

Sometimes the illustrations that accompany a text are crucial for its understanding.

And you can include them in zip file with the text with appropriate markings in the text.

How about using the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI XML format instead?

Have you ever marked up a book by hand in TEI XML? I can produce an ASCII book suitable for PG in a hour or so, from the output of DP. Every book I've tried and eventually quit trying to produce in XML took hours and hours, and it wasn't in working to make a text that had fewer textual errors.

Re:How about the TEI XML format?

[KevinDumpsCore]

> Have you ever marked up a book by hand in TEI XML?

I marked up a 1,000+ page book by hand using DocBook/XML.

> I can produce an ASCII book... from the output of DP.

Sorry, what's DP?

> Every book I've tried and eventually quit trying to produce in XML took hours and hours

You're not specific about your problem so I can't point you to any helpful resources. However, a good example of XML being used to create a large book is The FreeBSD Handbook.

Re:How about the TEI XML format?

[KevinDumpsCore]

> XML, AFAIK, was never intended to be human-writable.

According to its specification, some of its design goals were to be "human-legible and reasonably clear" and "easy to create".

Re:How about the TEI XML format?

[bbc]

There's something I should add here: TEI is indeed a fine format, and its XLITE version seems to be covering the same sort of ground that the DP formatting guidelines do.

However, there are currently no widespread viewers that can do something useful with the image entities the figure element requires (useful like: displaying the image). So, we'd either need to roll our own version of TEI (which pretty much negates having a standard in the first place, although the TEI-C seems very much in favour of such an approach), or convert the TEI(XLITE) documents to HTML.

The latter is much harder to do (currently) than creating an HTML version in the first place. There are several (perhaps dozens) of such tools that will take a PG formatted text and help you turn them into a basic HTML file.

The Project Gutenberg Index as RSS

[grrussel]

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

Works in other languages and diacriticals?

[wheatwilliams]

Unicode 8 is what is called for in the future.

I read French, Spanish and German in addition to English. These languages have diacriticals and special characters which are not covered in ASCII, because ASCII was created for English and English only.

So you can say that the use of ASCII prevented Project Gutenberg, in the earlier days, from considering working with any texts in any language other than English.

Now that Unicode 8 is a standard, it's possible for classic works in many languages to be represented in Gutenberg or affiliated projects.

iSilo on Palm

[wheatwilliams]

First I search to see if the public domain book is already available in HTML on somebody's web site.

If not, I get text files from Gutenberg and format them in HTML.

I purchased the iSilo program for the Palm for US $20

http://isilo.com/

, which comes with a free program (IWindows, Mac and Linux!) to convert HTML pages into iSilo format. It works great and preserves graphics, hyperlinks, CSS, bookmarks and more. It uses color if your handheld supports it.

So I do all my Gutenberg reading on my Clie SJ22 with a 320 x 320 color display.

That's perl for you

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess some people on /. can't face the truth of this fellow's statement.

Re:printing press

[leandrod]

> the Chinese and Koreans both had movable typeface long before Gutenberg did

Even more interesting, they never did much of it, as with powder, the compass, long-ranging ships...

The same applies to Greeks and Romans with steam power.