Open Library Project Takes Flight

Aaron Swartz today announced the launch of the new Open Library project. The goal of the project is to produce the world's greatest library on the Internet free for anyone to use. Starting with the Internet Archive's book scanning project and organizing the insertion of new content via a wiki-type model the project seems to be off to a great start. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up today in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.

Comments

Awesome

[CrazyJim1]

Project Gutenberg(sp) never really had a large enough selection to interest me. I would like to see how they do this new library.

Re:Awesome

[Creepy Crawler]

Well, you can thank extensive copyright for that fact.

Go Disney.

Re:Awesome

[lambent]

Not enough of a selection? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg: "As of April 2007, Project Gutenberg claimed over 21,000 items in its collection." There has to be something in there. Somehow, I think you're probably not trying hard enough.

Re:Awesome

[illegalcortex]

Yes, I particularly enjoyed Human Genome Project, Chromosome Number 08. Some fine reading there.

C'mon, I would be fairly disappointed with a library of 21,000 real books even if it contained only fiction from random authors from 1900-2000. Gutenberg doesn't even have that much depth.

That's not to take anything away from them. But to make claims about it being a good selection based on "21,000 - gee that's a big number" is a bit ludicrous.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a huge amount of PD stuff that is in specialist libraries that needs to find it's way into gutenberg, so far it really is just the tip of the ice-berg - granted it's a pretty big tip.

Re:Awesome

[CastrTroy]

As another poster mentioned, you can thank extensive copyright for that. Most books written between 1900 and 2000 are still under copyright, and therefore can't be in project gutenburg. I don't like most of the stuff in project gutenburg either, but it's the best we can hope for with the current state of copyrights.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes, I particularly enjoyed Human Genome Project, Chromosome Number 08. Some fine reading there."
You're using the example of one title to denigrate the whole project?

"C'mon, I would be fairly disappointed with a library of 21,000 real books even if it contained only fiction from random authors from 1900-2000."

Why? What are you looking for in a library that you don't see in Project Gutenberg? Or in a "library of 21,000 real books" that contain "only fiction from random authors from 1900-2000"? I'm honestly curious.

"Gutenberg doesn't even have that much depth."
I see, so, you've tapped it to its fullest, and are now bored? Well, I suppose that makes sense - why else would anyone willingly read "Human Genome Project, Chromosome Number 08"? :)

"But to make claims about it being a good selection based on "21,000 - gee that's a big number" is a bit ludicrous."
Actually, if you re-read the post to which you responded, you'll not find the phrase "good selection". The poster stated (and I agree) that "There has to be something in there".

Finally, you've not defined what you think a "good selection" is, only that you think that Project Gutenberg doesn't have it. Again, I'm truly curious what your definition of such is?

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

The only issue is: how do they get great selection and not violate the ever expanding copyright laws (and terms that those laws are in effect). Initially it was a few years, then 20, then 30, then 50, and last I heard it was 70 years past the death of the original author. Talk about granddad providing for the grandson for the grandsons entire life!!! If J.K. Rowling died tomorrow (God forbid), 70 years from now (in 2077), this project could put Harry Potter online! If she lives 30 more years (likely), the books can be legally put online in 2107, provided the copyright laws don't extend this by a few more dozens of years.

Re:Awesome

[meiao]

The problem with Project Gutenberg is that it only has Public Domain works.
So you won't find any work about Java, Ruby, nor Network Administration.

You may find such in http://en.wikibooks.org/

Re:Awesome

[illegalcortex]

Actually, my picking one example goes to the heart of the fallacy of simply using a big number to "prove" that there has to be something in there. It's wrong because, as my example shows, Gutenberg includes things people would never read. So you need to come up with an actual number of titles broken down by category. Until then, saying something like the original poster did is just ludicrous.

Re:Awesome

[illegalcortex]

Oh, I don't deny that. I hate the system as much as anyone. My comment was solely on the mistake of implying that the 21,000 "titles" were things people would read.

Re:Awesome

[LeadSongDog]

Yes, I particularly enjoyed Human Genome Project, Chromosome Number 08. Some fine reading there.

Even if *you* don't choose to read No8, you're probably still better off that it's open content, and PG is as good a place as any for that. I for one am not big on the idea of having my DNA be someone elses private property.

...someday it may save your life! - Geo. Carlin

Re:Awesome

[Em Adespoton]

Actually, my picking one example goes to the heart of the fallacy of simply using a big number to "prove" that there has to be something in there. It's wrong because, as my example shows, Gutenberg includes things people would never read. So you need to come up with an actual number of titles broken down by category. Until then, saying something like the original poster did is just ludicrous.

You do know how text is submitted to PG, don't you? It passes through the Distributed Proofreaders project, where at least 3 people have read the document prior to it being included in PG.

This would seem to imply that at least 3 people would read each thing that shows up there. Maybe not for entertainment, but there is such a thing as reference text. Personally, I didn't realize that genome information was in there due to PGs size... I might want to reference that text some day.

For comparison, my local library has 4 different books on how to use Microsoft Word 95 more efficently, and a few books introducing their readership to the concepts of 'mouse' and 'icon'. While your argument has some merit, libraries talk about the size of their collections all the time. While the original poster's comment might be a bit of a straw man, it definitely isn't ludicrous.

However, PG also has "bookshelves." Check out the Science Fiction Bookshelf for a listing of only SciFi entries available. There's a surprisingly large amount of good stuff hidden in there. PG also has pretty much anything you'd find in a Norton or Oxford English Lit anthology. I'd say that's pretty impressive.

Re:Awesome

[illegalcortex]

Who are you arguing with? Because I know I never said it shouldn't be in PG. I was specifically responding to the claim that since there are 21k titles in PG, there must be something in there the OP would enjoy reading - claiming they just didn't look hard enough.

Re:Awesome

[Anonymous Coward]

"20, then 30, then 50, and last I heard it was 70 years past the death of the original author. Talk about granddad providing for the grandson for the grandsons entire life"

well i would rather such a law provide for my family, even if im not there, then have someone like disney come and steal my work, use their maketing to run away with the revenue, and influence the general population so much that they even forget who the original author is. besides, if u look a all the rich fanilies in the usa that are your masters, most of that money IS old money, you are mostly born into it, and that group is not interested in outsiders joining. and most of this old money is kept and made by dominating people. and u have a problem someone who created something for the world to enjoy getting benfit for his family?

maybe the anser to copyring isnt only an exclusive monopoly term, but a mixd term. exclusive rights for a while, then a right of revenue for a while after. this would force thieves like disney to 1 attribute the work to the original authur 2 actually pay that author out of the millions they made by stealing his work. and it should be a very generous payment too, like 1/2 gross revenuve + 1/2 net revenuve. this would be done to prevent disney from cooking the books and claiming they didnt make that much, or even posted a loss. trust me they are not above this.

the reason it has to be exclusive at first is because you CANT trust other publishers not to bootleg, lie, cheat, steal, etc. this happens all the time. just read the old copyright notices abuout books not supposed to be sold in various conditions, areas, etc...

PG

[Yaksha42]

Everything about this "Open Library" - from the colors to the fonts used - looks just like Project Gutenberg. Am I missing an important difference?

Perhaps this is going to contain books still under copyright? I doubt the full text will be available, which makes this "library" pretty useless.

Re:PG

[drMental]

Well what you are missing is seeing the grandeur of this enterprise, not only does it hold the books of Project Gutenberg, it _also_ holds links to amazon.com.

In response to your question:

[CaptainPatent]

FALTWSBTFA: (From a link to what should be the feature article)

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book It would probably be sued for copyright infringement.

Re:In response to your question:

[jandrese]

I find it depressing that if someone came up with the concept of a free library system today, they would be sued out of existence by the book companies. What is perhaps one of the greatest triumphs ever for the poor uneducated masses would not stand a chance in our current legal environment.

Re:In response to your question:

[timeOday]

Speaking of which, do you think people would be allowed to drive cars or own guns if they were invented today? I don't.

Anyways, the good news is that libraries do exist, and aren't going away. If the electronic library is to exist, it should be pursued as an extension of existing libraries. In other words, we must ensure that electronic access to text grows out of the familiar library setting, not Napster. There are lots of ways to do this.

For instance, current library filing systems are really just electronic card catalogues, which is quite primitive - what if whoever catalogued the book didn't think up the same keywords you did? Only by digitizing the books will we be able to use all the information retrieval algorithms that make searching the WWW so effective. This would be very useful even if users couldn't "click through" the search results to the content of the book.

Another good argument for digitization is preservation. It just seems reckless not to have an easily duplicated archive of all published works.

After that, I hope we could consider exemptions to copyright that allow electronic access from anywhere, for a fee. Call it "compulsory licensing" if you like, but it really just means "we won't prohibit people from accessing the information, but we will make them pay and give you the money," which sounds better and happens to be true.

Re:In response to your question:

[PCM2]

Copyright law is no threat to libraries. And book publishers certainly aren't looking to close them down.

The truth of the book publishing business today is that the American public, on the whole, just doesn't read very much. Libraries, on the other hand, stock books -- multiple copies of books, in many cases. And there are thousands of libraries in America.

How do they get all those books? They buy them.

Each year, public libraries buy thousands and thousands of books -- books that individual readers aren't buying. As a result, public libraries are hardly the enemy of the book publishing business that you might assume they are. In fact, they may be the publishers' best friends. Libraries mean a certain amount of guaranteed sales, up front, in a market where so many other factors are uncertain.

Re:In response to your question:

[Anonymous Coward]

The longer copyright laws are, the more books and media cost.

If items from 30 or 50 years ago were public domain, then libraries or others could make cheap copies (or free electronic copies).

Re:In response to your question:

[fyngyrz]

Anyways, the good news is that libraries do exist, and aren't going away.

No, of course not, because they're protected by copyright law, which in turn grew out of article 1, section 8 of the constitution. Just there will never be a restriction on keeping and bearing arms... uh, oh, wait. OK then, like there will never be restrictions on speech... no, no, turns out there are plenty of those. Mmmm, ok, just like the feds can only take action on interstate commerce, because you know, that's an enumerated power they can't step outside... aw, no, they do that all the time. Well, it'll be like how they can't do searches or seizures without probable cause, oath or affirmation, and a warrant... oh... I guess that's no longer true. Well, of course they can't make ex post facto laws... except for the ones they've made, that is, you know, thinking of the children and such.

Wait. Why is it again libraries "aren't going away?"

Re:In response to your question:

[jandrese]

I've also bought way more music online that I ever did on CD (I hate trying to find stuff in record stores, especially since my tastes aren't mainstream). That didn't stop the music industry from totally flipping out over the idea of digital sales, and just think about what they did to free online music. I think you overestimate the average corporation if you think they would realize that libraries would be good for them in the long run. They would just see someone using their tax dollars to let people read books for free, the books they are trying to sell.

You also see this with ebooks. Most of the major publishers have tried ebooks at one point or another. In all but one case, they want you to pay more (you have to buy the reader at least), for less (lots and lots of onerous DRM). Only one company is making any money on ebooks, and it's the one that doesn't have DRM at all.

Re:In response to your question:

[beyondkaoru]

i'd guess that there are more than a few librarians who are uncomfortable about their position regarding piracy. they're expected to support copyright, but are also expected to spread knowledge; the two aren't necessarily very compatible.

anyway, book sellers generally like libraries, since they generate a lot of positive side-effects, at a more noticable level than p2p piracy typically does; people that wouldn't have bought a book read it and tell their friends, for example -- not to mention that libraries buy zillions of books.

well, there was a funny 'unshelved' strip or two on the topic anyway :)

Re:In response to your question:

[Joe Tie.]

I've bought more online than I ever did as well. First with p2p, heavily non-mainstream. Usually a fairly high percentage of off label stuff. Then, since pandora and lastfm I've bought even more. The thing is though, it's been 100% non-label. And I think that's what they're worried about.

Re:In response to your question:

[Anonymous Coward]

FALTWSBTFA: (From a link to what should be the feature article)

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book It would probably be sued for copyright infringement. And still be closed Sundays in the summer...

Re:In response to your question:

[OldeTimeGeek]

Wait. Why is it again libraries "aren't going away?"

Aside from the already mentioned fact that all books aren't digitized, it may be because Internet access is not universal, the barrier to access is still high (computers aren't free, right?) and one of the few places that you can get free access and access to a device to do it is, of course, a library.

Re:In response to your question:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why it would be nice if they didn't go away; it has nothing to do with whether they actually will or not.

Re:In response to your question:

[furzburz]

>>a free library system today

Personally, I find it depressing that so many people don't know that there are free libraries operating. They are generally called "public" libraries. Publishers don't sue them out of existence because libraries buy the copies of the books they circulate, and the publishers make money from that.

Go to worldcat, look up a book you like, and then type your zip code or city and state into the localization box - you'll probably find there's a copy near you that you can pick up at your local library for the price of filling out a form to get a library card. And if there isn't a copy of what you want in their collection, they'll get it for you from someone who has it, very likely for free.

Project Gutenburg

[mickwd]

Have these guys not heard of Project Gutenburg ?

It's been around for years, and I thought it was pretty well-known.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[AaronSw]

Hi, Aaron Swartz here. Project Gutenberg is about putting up text versions of out-of-copyright books. This project is about creating a catalog of _every_ book, with links to PG, scans, Amazon.com, PDFs, print on demand, etc. -- anything we can get our hands on. Gutenberg books are in our catalog, of course, but so are millions more.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Anonymous Coward]

So, its like the Library of Congress that links to your Amazon Referral Page?

Talk about sleazy.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Reziac]

I've been using the openlibrary.org site for a while now. I find these scanned original pages FAR more restful to the eye than any other form of electronic book. This way, I can sit down and read a complete book on the screen -- without suffering the eye fatigue that comes from reading large swaths of ordinary onscreen text. I think it has a lot to do with print fonts being designed specifically for the eye, and somewhat to do with the normal yellowing of paper that produces a less glary background.

Also, many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable -- and quite possibly in danger of being lost to the public altogether. (The first such book I picked at random to read, a late-1800s novel I'd never heard of, also proved to be a very relaxing way to spend an evening.)

Anyway, I've been thrilled with the project, especially with the ability to download the scanned images as well as the plain text.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[PMBjornerud]

I find these scanned original pages FAR more restful to the eye than any other form of electronic book. This way, I can sit down and read a complete book on the screen -- without suffering the eye fatigue that comes from reading large swaths of ordinary onscreen text. I think it has a lot to do with print fonts being designed specifically for the eye, and somewhat to do with the normal yellowing of paper that produces a less glary background. This does not make sense. A scanned document will always have artifacts and imperfections from the scanning process and should by definition be harder to read. A well-sized font on a pleasant background should beat scannded text every single time.

Your issue is more likely that there are a lot of crappily designed webpages out there.

If you're reading "large swaths of ordinary onscreen text", do this:
- Copy-paste in into any word processor
- Choose a nice, big font. (Small is good for UI, not for 400-page-novels.)
- Use a dark background. A page reflects light, a screen projects it. You do not want glaring white.
- Use 8-10 words per line.
- Profit! Err... less mental exhaustation, at least.

Pay extra attention to words per line. It's a key reason onscreen text is often hard to read. Too many words per line, and you'll have a mental overhead every few seconds trying to figure out which line you just read and which is next. Basically, books do it right and you want to display onscreen text at a similar width. Scrolling is easy these days, and wide lines is a remnant from when computers required a click-and-drag to scroll.

Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.

Heck, even slashdot defaults to a glaring white background and text stretched all over my 1920 pixels. Go figure.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Fallingcow]

What I really want are some modern, well-written footnotes and introductions to older works. Maybe throw in some good annotated maps when appropriate.

Older books are often hard to relate to without some context, and that sort of thing is what makes or breaks many editions of the "classics", IMO. If, when shopping for books, I pick up a copy of a book that was written more than 200 years or so ago, and it has no foot notes, most of the time I won't buy it. This is doubly true of translated works.

Wikipedia can usually stand in for an introduction, but there's nothing like footnotes to get you closer to an older text, and nothing that I know of provides that. If someone started a project to provide that kind of information for Project Gutenberg books, I'd get on board to help. Bonus points if they're also putting them in formats that don't suck (making plain text look good on the screen is a pain in the ass).

I'd start it up myself, but alas, I am poor (college). I'd definitely help out if someone else got it going, though.

Until someone does that, PG is practically useless to me.

Will this project do anything like that, or do you know of anyone who's doing this?

It seems to me that 500-1,000 really well-edited, footnoted, and formatted free books are better than 21,000 books worth of plain-text barf.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[TropicalCoder]

Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.

For me, quite the coincidence to run across you comment. Just in the past few days I have taken to resizing my browser to half the width of the screen - like folding a newspaper - because I realized that my eyes tire when reading lines of text running the entire 1280 pixel width of my monitor. It seems to work out great - I am even reading Slashdot this way now. If only I could figure out how to change the background colour without copying and pasting into a word processor. No option for this in Firefox? Perhaps there should be.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[jrl87]

I don't know if there is a good way of doing it directly through firefox, but I know you can add an user style sheet through the web developer plugin (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60 )

In the case of ./ you just have to make a css file with the following code in it ...

#wrapper {
background: #ccc; /*put desired background color here*/
color: #999; /*font color*/
}

Of course, this isn't a very good solution for browsing because it seems to remove the style sheet every time the page changes and you pretty much have to scan the css of sites to figure out what to call stuff. But if you intend to spend a lot of time reading something like a book or ./ comments, it may be worthwhile. It should also be fairly simple to change the font type, size, etc. I'm sure there's a better way of doing it hidden somewhere in Firefox, but I'm not sure where

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Anonymous Coward]

Since the ability of users to choose the display format is one of the cornerstones of HTML and was one of the first settings available in the earliest web browsers, it is certainly available also in Firefox, even if it has turned into an obscure setting used by a few odd people. Check out Edit->Preferences->Content->Fonts&Colors...

Re:Project Gutenburg

[overbored]

So are you competing with Google Books?

Re:Project Gutenburg

[koxkoxkox]

The goal of Project Gutenberg is to reproduce books as faithfully as they can. They stick to an out-of-copyright edition and reproduce about everything, including non-trivial errors (with a note explaining there is an error) and formatting, now that they produce HTML versions. At least it is the philosophy now at PGDP, which is the main source of books in PG. Earlier texts were less strict about it.

The ebook produced can then be used by other people if they want to create a new edition with footnotes, corrections, introduction, etc. It is however a very different job, requiring a good knowledge of the period, the country, the author and the book ...

Re:Project Gutenburg

[hcdejong]

I think it has a lot to do with print fonts being designed specifically for the eye,

And screen fonts aren't? That's just plain wrong. IMO, you're better off with a font that's been designed for on-screen use, at a font size and spacing that's appropriate for your monitor, viewing distance and eyesight. Reading a book in Arial 10 on your 20" 1600 x 1200 monitor will induce headaches. Switch to a font like Verdana, increase size to something like 14pt and things will get a lot easier.

The non-white background is a good tip, though.

Scanned pages have a major drawback: you're stuck with the page layout of the original, you can't scale the information to fit an arbitrary reading window. The pagination can induce odd jumps when you move around the page: you lose track of where you are. Scanned pages are unsuitable for small devices. I wouldn't want to read a scanned book on my Palm TX, but HTML and other dynamic formats are fine.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[islisis]

I would like such an option of every app I use. Even if I can't choose the specific colours, a window manager option to invert colours would at least allow me to use 2000's technology without thinking it has de-evolved since the original terminal displays in terms of low-intensity screen reading.

In the e-book front Adobe Reader has the option to do this for text documents but not bitmap (honestly I have to take extreme steps to format most pdf documents to be screen readable, adjusting crop margins to kill the whitespace, and sometimes exporting to tiff to invert colours), while the Window's DJVU reader recently allowed bitmap documents to have colours inverted, probably due to feedback from users. An option I adore.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Teancum]

I'm confused a little bit about what you are talking about here. You are looking for original source material, but you are also insisting on having extensive bibliogrphies and footnotes.

If you have ever read a "Featured Article" quality Wikipedia entry, they will almost always have very extensive bibliographies, footnotes, and links to original source documents, so this statement that you are looking for this seems like you are missing something essential here.

Or that you are looking at older books that don't have bibliographies and dismissing them.... when in fact they are the original source documents you claim to be craving here.

If someone started a project to provide that kind of information for Project Gutenberg books, I'd get on board to help. Bonus points if they're also putting them in formats that don't suck (making plain text look good on the screen is a pain in the ass).

If I am reading this correctly, you are looking for people who mark up the Gutenberg Project files to something that isn't just plain ASCII? Check out these website:

• http://gutenberg.hwg.org/ - HTML Writer's Guild - They have moved to a more XML scheme for markups, but it originally started by a couple of guys who wanted to take the PG material and formatted it using HTML. The raw ASCII is available, of course, if you really want to get it.
• http://www.wikisource.org/ - Wikisource - A "sister project" to Wikipedia and sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, this project aims primarily to support Wikipedia with original source documents, although most of the "regular" participants simply are fans of old documents. You have all of the tools available on the MediaWiki software for markups (aka the same software used for Wikipedia) and some extensive work has been done with many documents to "pretty them up" and format them to something more than a plain ASCII text page. While some Project Gutenberg pages do exist on this site, it isn't exclusively PG material.

I'm sure I could find other websites to do this, but it isn't exactly a brand new idea, and there are groups of people who do agree with you that plain ASCII sucks and needs to be fixed in terms of something more visually appealing. If you want to participate with either of these groups in terms of making it easier to read some of these clasical documents, volunteers are always wanted.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[furzburz]

>>many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable

I agree that this is a problem - "meatspace" (ick) libraries have space limitations, and they usually base their "weeding", or removing of books from the collection, on circulation statistics. Most people these days don't want to read old, obscure 19th century novels (I'm an exception, like you). I find them in used bookstores.

I wish libraries had bigger budgets for acquisition and retention of unpopular books, but budgets are going toward the items that the majority of library users want and need - internet access, DVDs, CD's, audiobooks, and popular fiction and nonfiction book titles.

So maybe the space that Open Library is going to fill is having scanned copies of older books that aren't circulating, so they aren't in any library's collections (and are therefore being left out of WorldCat). I can see some value in that, especially the open source aspect of it.

I also agree that reading conventionally printed text on screen is easier on the eye, even with flaws and artifacts. But it's not something you can copy and paste from (except for Google Books).

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Reziac]

Screen fonts are not quite the same. But...

For ebooks, I use a very configurable reader, that lets me pick font, size, page width, and background. With paper books, large fonts tire my brain out (I think because they induce slower reading speed than my norm, which is about 800wpm) but for ebooks and screen fonts, it seems to work the other way around. Might be partly that a book is 15" from my eyes, whereas the monitor is ideally about 4 feet away.

Unlike most folk, I almost never use maximized windows. On a big monitor, my browser is set at 800x600, partly to control line length. Columns exist for a reason!

My eyes are glare-sensitive, so I use a grey background for most stuff... but have found that these scanned books don't produce the glare-fatigue of a normal light-background screen. One suspects there is actually a good deal less "brightness" than they appear to have, because when you scan paper, you're also scanning a lot of microscopic pits in the paper's surface, which appear as tiny bits of darkness.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Reziac]

So, your bookshelf has lots of weird old novels too, eh? :) A lot of them were really very good books in their own way, written to be a relaxing read, not to be studied and analyzed. Sortof the "TV and a beer after work" of their era. But your average relaxing read doesn't attract literature professors, so as the generations pass and the next popular book hits the shelves, the old ones fall out of memory. But they were the books our great-grandparents read and loved.

It bothers me greatly that libraries cull on a basis of popularity. I've even seen classics and rare reference books on the discard pile, simply because no one checked them out in the past two years. And then educators complain that not enough people use the library, yet this narrowing of available materials becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. (And we older folk then complain about how kids have no sense of history.) But you're right -- budgets only go so far (and are largely wasted in some areas, like L.A. County!), and libraries are now driven primarily by popular demand.

As I began to speculate in another post, the very flaws and artifacts may be part of why these scanned pages are easier on the eye: paper isn't a continous surface; it's a web of fibres surrounded by microscopic pits, which appear dark as scanned. So even tho the scanned paper *looks* bright, it's probably much darker than would be the equivalent colour as generated by a computer.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Reziac]

For me, Slashdot defaults to 12pt Times New Roman, on a grey background (thanks to good old braindead Netscape3 and the low-bandwidth option), in a window about 750 pixels wide. I can't use the default layout at all, it makes my eyes crazy. And as you say, most web pages are clueless about design for *reading*.

I should have specified that I find the scanned books more eye-restful than not only the plain old screen, but also the ebook readers that I use, which allow me to select font, size, line length, page size, and background. Even with the reader set up to exactly mimic a real book, I find that I can only read a regular ebook for about an hour. Whereas with these scanned books, I can read an entire book, cover to cover, however long it takes.

As I speculate in other posts, the very artifacts from scanning paper may be part of it -- scanned paper (especially *old* paper) is darker than it appears, due to shadowing from the micropits in the paper's surface.

There are definitely times when I miss the old Herc monochrome screen, which was dead-black except where it displayed print. Vastly easier on the eyes than VGA, even when said VGA is set to low brightness and with darker "restful" screen colours.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Reziac]

Try the low bandwidth option, and a browser that don't know no CSS. The result is essentially plain text. That's what I see when I come here. :)

Moz/Firefox has a problem with ignoring system colours, but good old Netscape 3 does not -- so I get slashdot with the grey background I use everywhere else. Much easier on these aging, glare-sensitive eyes.

I've noticed that more and more people use a browser fullscreen, no matter how wide that is, then they wonder why they can't FIND stuff on the screen... When I design websites, I try to compensate by constraining text and navigation to a reasonable width, so these folks' eyes don't go whanging into the far edge of the screen with every line they read.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[furzburz]

>>It bothers me greatly that libraries cull on a basis of popularity.

It bothers me, too, and a great number of other library people. I can't remember which library system it was that, a few years ago, didn't even give their discards to their Friends of the Library for fundraising, but dumped them into dumpsters. Tragic. At least, it is to me, but then again I'm one of those people who haunts used book stores and finds treasure in "trash".

S.R. Ranganathan wrote that "the library is a living organism", it must always change and grow in response to users' needs. Libraries need to cater to their users in order to continue being useful. Interlibrary loan exists to help them cope with the budgetary limitations that keep them from acquiring everything that users want - even newer books that don't fit the collection for whatever reason.

These discussions have been going on since the beginning of the modern public library, though. Even the "new technology" panic: there is a story that goes around about a librarian who questioned management's demand in the 1920s that she add a telephone to her desk, because it would just be in the way, and how would she ever get her work done while receiving telephone calls! Pick up any old book on librarianship and there is a lot of debate, especially about public libraries and what their responsibilities are to popular tastes vs. "good" literature.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Fallingcow]

Bibliographies? No, unless it's appropriate, in which case it's probably part of the text already.

Footnotes can be downright necessary to getting much out of older works. Try reading just about any ancient Greek or Roman author, or Medieval, or anything before 1800 for that matter, and really understanding all of it without informational footnotes to clue you in to things. Hell, Shakespeare is full of vocabulary that most people will never encounter outside of those works, but that's an easy case where one can fire up an online dictionary and get a definition (though it's still not as nice as glancing to the bottom of the page), but what about historical allusions, or when an author subtly references another of his own works or those of another without naming it? There is no substitute for 3rd party expert (or at least non-professional enthusiast) help on these things, and there's no way to find that information online (or to put it online, in such a way that people can actually find and use it) unless the work happens to be both VERY popular and to have a widely-followed standard for line numbering (incidentally, Shakespeare's works are some of the only ones that meet both of those qualifications) so that one can ask the question, "what does x phrase on line y of work z mean?"

Notes accompanying the text are the only solution; the difference in accessibility between a well-footnoted "classic" (and most of the books that have any chance at broad appeal in these free archives can be characterized as classics, or at the very least as "really old") and an unaccompanied text is tremendous, and the usefulness of these online books would, in my opinion, be increased severalfold by including this information. Don't get me wrong, PG has done a great job, and I understand why they're doing things the way they're doing them, but to me they are like the Linux Kernel folks, in that they produce a more-or-less complete product which must be fixed up and built upon by other projects before it can truly be useful (as of the 2.6 kernel series anyway, what with the "no more dev branch" philosophy) to... well, just about anyone at all.

That's fine, and it works for both the Kernel devs and PG, but it doesn't mean that I want to use either product without it first having had some work done to it and some things added--or even that I could use it in its raw state, unless I were doing so for the sake of it rather than to learn or be productive.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[LeadSongDog]

I've got no objection to a WorldCat on steroids, but it would inspire more confidence if the project either *was* or *didn't pretend to be* a library. Frankly, I'd prefer the latter. An open catalogue shouldn't have a bias between repositories (or for that matter vendors.) The best and most credible way to do that is to be truly decoupled.

One thing I'd love to see added is a spine-recognition tool. I should someday be able to take a photo of a bookshelf and automagically convert that to a first-approximation catalogue. This would free up scads of librarian time for useful work.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Teancum]

OK, so you are talking about annotated texts. Wikisource has a number of those, as does Wikibooks (much better done on Wikisource IMHO).

Annotated texts are exactly as you are describing them: They take an older work (say the '''Holy Bible''' to give a strong example of something very commonly footnoted and annotated) and add additional details including glossaries, alternative text, historical information from other sources, and speculative commentary about specific wording.

Another kind of very typical "book" that is annotated, and serves humanity much more powerfully than the original "source", are annotated legal codes. Aka the laws of countries, states, and municipalities. Often these get so intense on the annotations that even the annotations themselves are annoatated with subsequent commentary.

Writing these kind of books is not easy to accomplish, and it takes somebody who is an "expert" on the subject and has done additional research well above and beyond the mere words of the book itself. Most of these annotated books are commercially sold if they have any value at all, but free content books of this nature do exist already... at least in limited forms. Again, if you want to get into this kind of activity on something like say the books of Samuel Clemens (or any other author), there are forums for you to help out.

BTW, I would love an annotated copy of the Linux Kernel. At least something from one of the stable branches. What I'm talking about is something very extensive in terms of internal documentation explaining the various variables used and the explicit coding techniques and philosophies for how everything was put together. Ordinary comments simply wouldn't work in a situation like that, and it would have some very real value to the larger community. So yes, I can even see value for something like this beyond even classical literature (unless you consider the Linux Kernel to be classical literature :)

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Fallingcow]

Sorry for my poor choice of words; annotated is more accurate.

I've been to wikibooks, but was under the impression that they were more concerned with writing from-scratch instructional books than anything else. The site seemed sparcely-populated and more than a little neglected the last time I looked at it, but they seem to have made good progress since then.

They need publicity more than anything else, I'd say. If more learned individuals with a passion for their field and lots of free time (*cough*professors*cough*) knew about it, I imagine a good many would be happy to contribute.

They've still got that small-population "pet project" feel to many of these (usually single-author) "books", which makes me a bit afraid to jump in and start changing the prose--often clunky, incomplete, and opinion-filled, by the look of things, though mostly well-intentioned--for the better, for fear of a pointless revert-war. But, I guess the only way to fix that is to jump in and change the vibe through action.

Re:Project Gutenburg

[Teancum]

There are a couple of full professors that I am aware of (and not like the Essjay affair) that are contributing to Wikibooks, and a few "class projects" where a professor has assigned grades based upon a student's participation in the creation of content for a particular joint project, but you are correct that many of the books do tend to be single author projects with only occasional extra contributions.

The atmosphere does tend to be much less charged than on Wikipedia, and a much longer view to just about everything also takes place... even to the discussions about deletion of content which can take months in some cases to resolve.

Still, in terms of establishing a very high quality annotated text on Wikibooks, there really isn't a prime example. There is a Wikibook about the Harry Potter books, but they have the added problems of dealing with content that is copyrighted. I've seen some attempts at trying to annotate the New Testament, but that is also fraught with all kinds of problems of its own due to the subject. Explicitly permitted by policy, there hasn't been a good treatment of any kind of classical book.

question...

[joe 155]

someone asked a good question on the website; how does this relate to Gutenburg?

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

they have a great collection of ebooks online already and your free to grab and share them. I wish that they would have the base for this though in a country which doesn't have insanely long copyright laws, then it could really add value over gutenburg

Relevance?

[cdrguru]

As long as it is limited to rather dusty tomes that are "out of copyright" this is going to have limited, if not zero, value to most people. What exactly is the difference between Open Library and Project Gutenberg? Aren't they going to have 99% overlapping content?

Re:Relevance?

[RalphBNumbers]

Project Gutenberg is a collection of full text works.
The Open Library is a database of books, which sometimes includes the full scanned text, and sometimes does not.

So if the same work was published a dozen different times, it would have an entry in The Open Library for each edition, and usually just one entry in Project Gutenberg assembled from all of the out-of-copyright printed editions.

wikipedia 2.0

[wizardforce]

so basically they are building a library that works a lot like Wikipedia but it is like an online library [creative commons I presume] how do they incorporate editing into the system without it having the same problems that wikipedia has? what does the project do that couldn't just as easily be done by expanding Wikipedia? any thoughts?

Re:wikipedia 2.0

[The Iso]

It's called Wikisource. Mod this article redundant.

Re:wikipedia 2.0

[timmarhy]

wikipedia is just peoples pesudo expert knowledge. open libary is actual books.

Re:wikipedia 2.0

[EinZweiDrei]

Then again, one must keep in mind that 85% of 'actual books' are written by pseudo-experts anyway; if Theodore Sturgeon has taught us anything, it is this.

Re:wikipedia 2.0

[ozphx]

Wikisource is copyleft.

This is for the other 99.99% of content.

Re:wikipedia 2.0

[Joe Tie.]

Amen. Primary source material or nothing when it comes to trying to actually get to the heart of anything.

Re:wikipedia 2.0

[Teancum]

You missed the reference. The parent was referring to http://www.wikisource.org/, one of the Wikipedia sister projects that works with original source materials.... and yes, actual books.

Often criticized as a duplication of Project Gutenberg, it does have some unique documents that you can't find elsewhere, and is *much easier* to add new documents to this project than say PG or other free text websites. I like Distributed Proofreader's approach to text quality quite a bit, but this is an alternative.

Take flight?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Taking flight" normally denotes escape from a perilous situation, not emergence as is intended by the author.

Mod me down if you must but it's annoying when otherwise intelligent people cannot write a simple sentence and the editors are so lax in their responsibilities.

I must be new here.

Re:Take flight?

[Reziac]

Actually, you're wrong -- to "take flight" primarily means to take off, or to start a project. So the usage was correct.

Re:Take flight?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to buy or borrow a dictionary because most accredited English language dictionaries dispute your interpretation.

Just sayin'

Re:Take flight?

[muszek]

take flight
  v : run away quickly; "He threw down his gun and fled" [syn: flee,
  fly]

taked from the Gnome's "Dictionary look up" panel widget. I have no idea which dictionary(-ies) is/are being used by it.

These aren't the right people...

[Anonymous Coward]

People who understand both literature and libraries should be behind this project--not ego-geeks.

Not good

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

I know their intentions are good, but for these various online text-searchable book projects to be of maximum usefulness, they really need to be merged into one big project. Or, at the very least, a search engine needs to be set up that will search them all. Right now I basically just stick to Google Books, although I'm fully aware that the content I'm looking for but can't find is likely out there in one of the other few dozen open library projects.

Libraries don't get sued for infringement

[Anonymous Coward]

Even in these litigation-happy days, physical book libraries don't get sued, and indeed they normally get direct governmental funding to continue their work.

If an electronic library can find a way to obtain support as a literacy project, there are plenty of traditional avenues open. Suits against council literacy efforts don't go down well, at least in Europe.

Re:Libraries don't get sued for infringement

[techno-vampire]

Even in these litigation-happy days, physical book libraries don't get sued...

Of course not, because they've paid for their copies. Makes a difference, doncha know?

Re:Libraries don't get sued for infringement

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

Of course not, because they've paid for their copies. Makes a difference, doncha know?
--
There is no such word as "alot," and if there is, there shouldn't be. It's "a lot." Two words, not one.

There is no such word as "doncha," and if there is, there shouldn't be. It's "don't you." Two words, not one.

Re:Libraries don't get sued for infringement

[joto]

There is no such word as "doncha," and if there is, there shouldn't be. It's "don't you." Two words, not one.

It's interesting you should note that. I would like to point out that it's actually three words: "do not you". The word "don't" is a contraction of "do" and "not", which has somehow found its way into spelling as well as in verbal usage.

The word "doncha" is common enough that I, a man who does not live in an english-speaking country, and does not have english as my first language, has been exposed to it numerous times through popular culture. It is therefore a word, just one that hasn't been allowed into any spelling reforms yet. Unlike programming languages such as C, which are defined by a specification; a grammar and dictionary of a real language like English can only document current usage, and is therefore not authoritative in the same way.

In other words, it's up to you to document that "doncha" is not current usage, if you are to claim it's not a word.

Re:Libraries don't get sued for infringement

[HeroreV]

Doncha wish your words rolled off your tongue like me?
Doncha wish your words had no apostrophe?
Doncha?
Doncha baby, doncha?

Re:Libraries don't get sued for infringement

[HTTP Error 403 403.9]

In other words, it's up to you to document that "doncha" is not current usage, if you are to claim it's not a word.

Look up sarcasm and then read my post again.

Now, it is up to you to document that my post wasn't sarcasm, if you are to claim my post was sarcastic.

More Optimism, less cynicism

[Anonymous Coward]

As an anonymous coward with little desire to register at this point I would like to say that such an Open Library should be labeled as the "wonder" of our digital age. All you cynics complaining about copyright are being too idealistic at this point (irony is fun). The website clearly stated that it will catalog information on where to buy or borrow (from brick libraries) the books it lists. This alone would be a great source, and even still many books WILL be offered online.

Perhaps such a project would eventually inspire many publishers to "donate" their copyrighted materials under a special license that would let them retain the right to be the sole publisher of paper copies. I think many books 5 to 10 years after publication would probably receive this treatment as the peak sale period has already passed.

Remember, even within a twisted and convoluted legal system the power is still with the people (in this case, most importantly the COPYRIGHT holders).

-Gabriel

Not Project Gutenbeg

[krelian]

Don't compare this to Project Gutenberg. This is the supposed to be the Internet Movie Database" for books (as far as I understand anyway). Anyway, I am pretty sure that a big part of this information can filled with calls to Amazon web services.

Re:Not Project Gutenbeg

[dwarfsoft]

This is exactly what I was going to say. It is basically an overview of books with links to Amazon or wherever. I forsee reviews, quotes, and links on par with IMDB. Only there is a benefit of being able to have full-text books too.

I had a play with it and it is quite limited at the moment. I did manage to add a book, but there was minimal instruction on how to go about this, and uploading covers at the moment is not available (as far as I could determine in 5 minutes anyway).

Re:Not Project Gutenbeg

[hcdejong]

Except that they'll also store and supply the books themselves (scanned and/or as text), if available.

Re:Not Project Gutenbeg

[webmind]

This is exactly what I was going to say. It is basically an overview of books with links to Amazon or wherever. I forsee reviews, quotes, and links on par with IMDB. Only there is a benefit of being able to have full-text books too.
So it's not like a library at all? in a library I can -read- books. Atleast that's always been the main point for me to go :)
I fail to see how this will be anything better than gutenberg in that respect. Maybe the interface, but I'm not sure, it's all a bit too flashy for me.

The actual site ...

[Petrushka]

... here it is.

Re:What good will it be?

[dhasenan]

Or creative commons, like Cory Doctorow's work (which is on par with most similar fiction).
Or just old, almost like James Joyce's work, which arguably nobody reads, but for Joyce at least, a lot of people talk about it.

And as for getting stuff...at least for now, the experience of an ebook is a lot less enjoyable to most people than that of a dead tree book. Dead tree books have portability advantages as well. So if someone likes a book they find on Open Library, they might well buy it on Amazon.

IPL?

[hisstory student]

How is this going to be different than the Internet Public Library? http://www.ipl.org/

Re:IPL?

[TTK Ciar]

OpenLibrary is a lot more complete, for one .. searching on "Ogorkiewicz" in IPL yielded no hits, while OL gave me several. The Archive is well-connected to various institutions like the Library of Congress and Bibliotech, and is able to pull a lot of help from these other organizations into making a more complete service.

OpenLibrary is also a catalog of metadata, providing information for each book like physical format, publisher, ISBN#, number of pages, and so on. This metadata has a lot of holes for now, but hopefully that will change as publishers and/or people who own copies of these books fill in the blanks, much like the Internet Movie Database.

Finally, OpenLibrary has its own staff which is dedicated to working with Internet Archive partners to make this the most complete catalog on the planet. IPL is cool (I like it!) but it does not seem to be very actively maintained.

(disclaimer: I work for The Internet Archive, but I do not speak for it, and the OpenLibrary team is in a completely different department from mine so DO NOT treat this post as necessarily any more authorative or correct than any other slashdot post.)

-- TTK

Re:IPL?

[hisstory student]

I see! Well now, that sounds very promising indeed! Thanks for clarifying all that for me. I'm really excited about this and know it will be tremendously successful. It may take a while, but it's certainly a good start.

Re:IPL?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenLibrary is also a catalog of metadata, providing information for each book like physical format, publisher, ISBN#, number of pages, and so on. This metadata has a lot of holes for now, but hopefully that will change as publishers and/or people who own copies of these books fill in the blanks, much like the Internet Movie Database.

They should ask the people at LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) for a dump of their MARC records.

Of course with something like LibraryThing already in existence and already used by the people who own the books, I have to wonder about the relevance of OpenLibrary.

Re:IPL?

[furzburz]

>>searching on "Ogorkiewicz" in IPL yielded no hits, while OL gave me several

Worldcat yielded 80 hits, which could be refined by author and included works in which Ogorkiewicz' work is cited.

More of an IMDB than a library

[ringfinger]

The new site looks like it will host info on books and only provide downloads for some. It looks like a good place to find info (like the ISBN) of an old book you only remember parts of.

Re:More of an IMDB than a library

[maddskillz]

That's what I was thinking. Sounds a lot like what http://www.librarything.com/ already does. Of course, they already have a big head start

Re:More of an IMDB than a library

[DaftShadow]

It's bigger than that though. They are attempting to create the central clearing house for access to book information. This is less of an imdb, and more of a Library of Congress size endeavor. Whereas imdb only has to deal with a a limited number of new monthly movies, these guys are attempting to deal with the thousands of new monthly books and the millions of previous ones :)

They are adding all sorts of new internet touches, like tags and metadata far in advance to what libraries have been keeping previously. They are also hooking it up to things like Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive's book scanning project. Imagine imdb linking to YouTube videos :). It will also be accessible for anyone who publishes a Creative Commons book, for example, to get it into the library 'system', get it classified and tagged and numbered, and also link to and access it. And while it's currently illegal to copy and put online most every new book, maybe in the future it will no longer be the case.

These guys are attempting to be ready for that eventuality, and more.

- DaftShadow

Re:More of an IMDB than a library

[furzburz]

>>the central clearing house for access to book information

Good luck to them, though they have an uphill climb ahead.

Putting aside LibraryThing for the moment, there already exists a central worldwide clearing house for access to book information: WorldCat, operated by OCLC.

OCLC is a pretty sharp bunch, and very tied in to Google as well as Google Books. They have already done the collective cataloguing of more than 1 billion items (and that includes audio books, music, videos, etc., as well as books), and their data warehouse grows with every book added to any of their 10,000 member libraries. LibraryThing, which is probably the leading contender for real competition to this project, has 16 million books.

Granted, the quality of the data in WorldCat is only as good as that provided to OCLC by those 10,000 libraries - but librarians are generally pretty picky about the quality of their data. And WorldCat can give more than the book information - it can give you you fast, free access to the actual book, in your hands, via your local public or academic library. As for virtual books, Google is working hard to corner that market.

Which isn't to say that this is not a worthwhile undertaking, just that they need to be aware of everything that's operating in the universe they want to be a part of.

Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

She is correct. This is not a 'library' per se but a catalog of books, with links to PG, Amazon, B&N, etc. Most books are NOT free.

The difference between this and other catalogs (Library of Congress, etc.) is that presumably you can customize it more.

Not a problem for Pirate Bay?

[megaditto]

Where are the Pirate Bay kiddies on this? Wouldn't that fit their idea of all the information belonging to 'the people?'

Or does it only apply to stealing popular movies and music?

Re:Not a problem for Pirate Bay?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an assload of ebook torrents. What I want, and which I hoped just for a second this might provide, is a way to get access to science journals. The public is becoming more and more ignorant of science every day. The journals are locked up in ivory towers, public libraries usually don't have the funding to get subscriptions, and as a result every day more and more people are falling for faith healers and the like. I'll be able to pirate the next harry potter hours after it's released, if not sooner. JAMA, on the other hand, pretty much never shows up.

Re:Not a problem for Pirate Bay?

[furzburz]

>>a way to get access to science journals

Fortunately there is a way. Universities offer community cards to local users, usually for about $25 a year. With a community card, you can access science journals online, plus borrow from their book, music, etc. collections.

Re:Not a problem for Pirate Bay?

[Christian Anarchist]

>quote> and as a result every day more and more people are falling for faith healers and the like. /begin rant And more and more scientists/technologists (they aren't the same, after all) are forgetting that faith in something is an unavoidable part of living, working, and playing. It might be faith in reason, in the "scientific" method, and "empirical" evidence. But it is still faith. No scientist, and no engineer, can take every assumption back to first principles. Or does. No empirical evidence is more than a sample from the larger, perhaps more varying, universe. Don't get me wrong. The capacity of people to be deluded by charlatans (/see, generally, much of the programming on the Trinity Network) is doubtless growing. But its a problem far bigger than mere ignorance of science. And far, far bigger, than a failure to access scientific journals. And, while I share your dismay about the inaccessibility of those scientific journals, even did we make them all freely available it wouldn't significantly reduce the ignorance. Because those who write for scientific journals are so caught up with their intellectual superiority and their disciplinary expertise, that they don't bother trying to write for a larger educated audience (much less try toconnect with the masses). Except in the abysmally written literary institution called a "textbook", which no one in their right mind would spend time on except insofar as they can't avoid it (because it is required by their teacher or for a job). You want to know why no one reads any more? Because their damn teachers have been talking out of both sides of their mouths since they were in first grade (and for today's young, since pre-school). We (the teachers) have been ranting all these years about how important it is to read, have quantitative skils, etc etc, all the while emphasizing reading of that which is horribly written. And rightly, they stopped listening to us. I've been a teacher for 20 years. I have a bachelors degree, a masters degree, and two degrees that allow me to call myself "doctor." Big effing deal. I've also been a reader of non-textbooks and non-university press books and non-scholarly journals for more than twice that period. I've been a fan and reader of science since, well, since I could read. But not because of my exposure to the scientific method in elementary, secondary, or higher "education." But because I was lucky enough, somehow, to fall into the pages of Heinlein and Niven and Gibson and Sterling and dozens of other science fiction readers. And because no one stopped me from reading the crap (whose names fortunately are largely forgotten) along the way in my "free" time. Along the way I've been duped by charlatans of "faith" and charlatans of "science." (I know at least one L. Ron Hubbard novel I've read multiple times!) Alas. But those charlatans have done far less damage to me, or to others, than I and my teaching and researching colleagues have done with all our degrees and our scientific pomposity. If you want to know the cause of the dupability (is that a word, I wonder?) of the "people," don't blame libraries and don't blame the greedy journals and don't even blame the stupid politicians and funding agencies. Blame the teachers and the other pretentious, arrogant "experts". A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. You may not believe, as I do, in a god that "passes all understanding" (Phillipians 4:7), but put it in scientific terms: Compared to what we don't know about the universe, all the knowledge of all the Nobel Laureates and all the understanding reflected in the existing archives of scientific journals can't be seen under our most powerful electron microscope. We of the degreed classes have gotten so caught up in the little bit of our understanding, that we have forgotten the cosmic scale of our ignorance. /end rant

Re:Not a problem for Pirate Bay?

[Christian Anarchist]

And as evidence of the extent of that ignorance, and of the problem I claimed, I submit to you the formatting of my previous post.

I was so caught up in the superiority of my educated understanding, I made a newbie's error and forgot some basics of how HTML-formatted text works.

The capacity of the educated to be unaware of their moronitude knows no bounds!

Ahem.

(And yes, moronitude is not a word, I'm sure.)

One thing new about it

[treeves]

is an error like this:

<type 'exceptions.TypeError'> at /search
unbound method remove_node() must be called with LRU instance as first argument (got NoneType instance instead)Python    /1/pharos/code/production/pharos/infogami/tdb/tdb. py in remove_node, line 607
Web    GET http://demo.openlibrary.org/search

Traceback (innermost first)
/1/pharos/code/production/pharos/infogami/ tdb/tdb.py in remove_node
...
        node = LRU.remove_node(node) ...
&#9654; Local vars
/1/pharos/code/production/pharos/infogami/td b/lru.py in prune
...
            self.remove_node() ...
&#9654; Local vars

That was just my first try, but it doesn't really encourage me to try again.

A Library Card Tip

[Revenge_of_Solver_Ta]

This is great news, I hope it actually works. Related: I recently discovered my local library has about 50% of the books I usually buy. Why didn't I think of this earlier? Must of lost about $10K from that during the last decade. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must go check out a copy of "How to Make a Your Very Own Video Game in 16 Days Using ONLY...Wordstar!"

Re:What good will it be?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read and enjoyed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. No need to speculate, people do read Joyce.

portability advantages....

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.booksinmyphone.com/ lets you have the portability advantages of the dead-tree versions (better even as you are carrying the phone anyway) for a good selection of PD content.

Gutenburg

[jshriverWVU]

Uhm, it's kinda already done with Project Gutenburg and Librivox. How is this different?

Re:Gutenburg

[wootest]

By being a listing/index/catalog of all books with references to where to get them instead of being a site dedicated to reproducing the source material of stuff in the public domain, perhaps?

I'm curious how they'll make money?

[Anonymous Coward]

But I'm sure it'll come down to some banner ad/mining user data scheme. Books are old hat today, I've been cleaning house on reference and history books that are still useful if not the most current. This is also in direct contradiction to the way most librarians are seeing the world. They're gearing towards a future of information--it's all in databases and online sources, never mind books, even if condensed as online parcels on information, are still useful. The metadata/database descriptor field they're using seems to follow standard library format to a degree, the sort of stuff librarians require a master's degree to supposedly understand. Still, there's no catalog number system (Dewey Decimal, etc.) or seemingly any provision for serials. In this respect it looks more like a bookstore than a library.

Lastly, in an age where the visits to libraries are increasing mainly to use computers, and budgets keep dropping and print collections suffer (notice how many still have science books from the fifties in them?) I wonder how will this will work since it's a private enterprise. My dream would be the Library of Congress becoming the online resource with all the books available or at least links to where you can buy OR borrow them, but that will likely never pass. Still, one can dream.....

Re:I'm curious how they'll make money?

[furzburz]

>>My dream would be the Library of Congress becoming the online resource with ... links to where you can buy OR borrow them

WorldCat provides this, at least for the borrowing part. If you want to shop for a book you find there, you can copy the ISBN number from WorldCat's record to Amazon.com or your favored online bookseller (or Google Books, for that matter).

Kinakuta

[EnsilZah]

How about placing the servers somewhere where copyright law hold no sway?
Are there really any working data havens?

Re:Kinakuta

[Anonymous Coward]

[quote]How about placing the servers somewhere where copyright law hold no sway?
Are there really any working data havens?
[/quote]
Imgbay would be the key... that's Pirate Bay's image catalog... only way to go about this on there, assuming it would work, would be to have tons of people scan books and they upload them there and someone would have to make a website to logically link what scans go to what books and/or just put them all in a zip file named logicially like, chapter1.jpg, chapter2.jpg, etc since img bay will make zip files in to image archives that are linked together...

Vandalism controls?

[Creosote]

First thing I did on the site was pull up an entry for a book my university press publishes. It had no "Buy" option. I edited the metadata to add the ISBN-10 number for it, and voila, a Buy option.

It then took a certain amount of self-control for me not to go into various titles dealing with George W. Bush and enter the ISBN-10 of the storybook containing "My Pet Goat". Purely as a proof of concept, you understand.

This is simply the Wikipedia vandalism problem writ large. What controls will OpenLibrary put in place to guard against it?

great but/and .....

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the biggest problems remaining with these developing libraries is that we still have no good portable reader, at least in this case they want to support 'print on demand'. It hooks with the Internet Archive's book scanning project and their vision is fantastic.

Other sites

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.europeana.eu/
http://www.liberliber.it/ (Italian language ... but have also classic music)
http://www.gutenberg.org/

http://www.babelteka.org/ (Italian language)

Some thoughts

[harmonica]

I know the project is just starting, but here it goes.

They should republish the raw data the same way Wikipedia and even IMDb does. I for one am not going to contribute to any data collection project that I can't later use myself.

Their schema doesn't differentiate between editions. If I understand it right, that means that for the 3000 existing editions of "Tom Sawyer" released over the years, by different publishers in different countries and languages, the book's description has to be replicated for each one. That can't be good. I don't have a quick solution to this myself. Sometimes (esp. with tech books), a new edition changes content significantly compared to the previous one, sometimes they're exactly the same.

Collecting the cover images is a great service. However, doesn't this infringe on the publisher's copyright? Is this still fair use? What about countries like Germany without fair use laws--will German books still be OK because the data is collected in the USA (I guess)?

Add a feature to upload book descriptions as XML. Suggest a DTD. I have a list of my book collection stored as an XML file, so have others (maybe not natively, but book collection management software usually has an export function). It should be possible to automate the process of adding book information already stored in some digital format.

There should be some category system to pick from. Some may put Tom sawyer into "Novel, USA antebellum", others into "Novel, USA 19th century".

Somehow connect this to Wikipedia. The more prominent books have article pages. Maybe data could be retrieved from it as well. There are currently Tom Sawyer articles in 16 or so languages.

The edit page should group items better: stuff everyone understands (year published, title) first, then those things only specialists know.

The edit page's descriptors shouldn't be images but text which links to an explanation page for the same reason. BISAC? LCCN? UCC13? I know, I can find out what those are with a search engine, but I shouldn't have to.

Prepare for i18n. I guess LCCN is a library of congress code number? Those types of libraries exist in other countries, too. Each book can have a gazillion codes. Make this another tuple in the database: (book_id, code_id, code_value) instead of (book_id, lcc_id, isbn10, isbn13, 10 other codes in the same record).

Also i18n: store language codes with all textual columns. A description is most likely going to be Hungarian for a book published in Hungary in Hungarian.

This complicates the schema a lot. Having very few tables is tempting, but it usually doesn't work well with the real world.

Re:Some thoughts

[Teancum]

Here is some additional food for thought about this idea.... coming from somebody who has only given this concept just a few minutes of thought, but having dealt with this issue extensively in the past (of trying to catalog e-books):

The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that. And developing these skills is not something very easy to accomplish either. Certainly some basic tools can be developed that would make it a bit easier to climb up the steep slope of learning various cataloging techniques and understanding ontology as a discipline, but it is unusual. Most professional librarians that I have met (I'm talking people who actually work in real libraries) may have taken a college class or two about the subject, but even they seldom get into this sort of activity.

Here is the main point about this discussion, and why this is a much harder task than is apparent: Almost all cataloging work in the USA (and the rest of the world too, BTW) is done by the national libraries (aka Library of Congress) and the thousands of other libraries largely rely upon that cataloging effort to come up with their own numbering scheme. Especially with the "cataloging in publication" process where the process of formal copyright registration assigns cataloging numbers happens well before the book even arrives at a typical local or even university library.

At even a large library, those involved in the cataloging of content are usually a small team or even a single individual who has to catalog the couple dozen books that come in each year that aren't from major book publishers (often local histories that are self-published). Even then, it is hardly a full-time job and library staff like this usually have many other job duties.

How this relates to eBooks and content on the internet is that there are many electronic resources in book-like form that are largely uncataloged. I would put it at close to 100,000 books, perhaps even more that are original "books" that have been written in the past 20 years, and are available under a free (as in beer and freedom) copyright license. The "low-hanging fruit" is the Project Gutenberg collection, but much of that surprisingly has already been cataloged in more than one form. This is because they are older books and have been cataloged years ago. While there certainly is value in preserving older documents like the PG collection, there is so much more, and in many ways more relevant explicitly because it is up to date.

BTW, in response about the cataloging numbers, you can't simply assign a book to a single cataloging ID and expect it to work in every situation (without something incredibly complicated). Every classification system; ISBN, Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal, and about a dozen other classification systems; each have their own strengths and weaknesses. And different strengths and weaknesses. If a book has any value, it covers a very unique topic that is one of a kind, and it is these books which are the ones that you need to have a clean cataloging system that is able to allow you to "place" the book in a format that there are multiple methods for being able to find that content. For the hundreds of books about how to write HTML (to pick a topic that is common) they are largely the same... but my experience in trying to deal with book cataloging is that something so common like this is a rare situation, and at least 50% of all books in an e-book library are going to be something completely unique in terms of the topic covered. In short, you need the dozens of cataloging ID numbers for each book and not just a single cataloging ID number that is cross-referenced into a much larger and more complex database.

Re:Some thoughts

[furzburz]

>>The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that.

Well said. I am working on an MLIS degree (yes, Virginia, there are still new librarians being trained) and just having learned the baby steps of cataloguing, I can tell you that it is not simple, for many of the reasons cited above. Most cataloguing is "copy cataloguing" - replicating the data provided by WorldCat, with the potential for some refinement if an item is of particular local interest. There are a lot of reasons for that, mostly to avoid duplication of effort, but also because libraries are constantly facing a budget squeeze with regard to staffing. Cataloguers aren't rare, but people who work full-time cataloguing for a library are. And because it's a skill best acquired through lots of practice, it's going to be a rarified art form in another decade.

Re:Some thoughts

[deanlandolt]

I happen to be working on a masters in the library school in parallel to the MLS cohort (right across the river in MD), and I've taken a number of their classes. Gloriously outdated class titles like "ISAR: Information Storage and Retrieval" abound. I've learned of the finer nuances of the differences systems and I agree it's not simple, also for the reasons in the GP post. I also agree that every system has its strengths, but what you librarians fail to see is that they all share a common, easily rectified weakness—a weakness that cannot be rectified by a folksonomy alone, as some (David Weinberger) would have you believe. It wouldn't be particularly hard to roll all of the monotonous, tedious effort of catalogers the world over into an artificial taxonomy—a folksonomy that could accommodate the hierarchy of each and every one of these ill conceived classifications.

The world doesn't need more trained, specialized catalogers—the world needs more people doing the cataloging, and this project is a good first step in that direction. Once we get this data, we can map to and emulate any and all classification the world over.

Re:Some thoughts

[furzburz]

>>you librarians

Thanks for the promotion. :)

>>the world needs more people doing the cataloging

I don't disagree. My point wasn't that non-experts shouldn't be enabled to do cataloguing, but that cataloguing is an art and that it takes practice to get good at it, whether you are a "trained" librarian or not.

Very few people get an MLIS to become "experts" - at cataloguing or anything else. (Most of my classmates in my cataloguing class hated doing the actual work of cataloguing, and I suspect it's always been that way.) Most get an MLIS because it's required to be considered for professional-level positions in libraries. That unfortunately makes it akin to a vocational degree, unless you strive to make it something more. The ALA has discussed standardizing MLIS curricula for ages, but that has yet to happen. Until the curriculum you get in an MLIS program is standardized, and those standards are adhered to for hiring and retention purposes (a la medical school followed by ongoing board certification), an MLIS will continue to be seen as a job ticket.

It's too bad that you took some outdated courses (they still exist, unfortunately, as anyone currently or just out of almost any MLIS program can tell you). But they definitely don't represent current thinking in information studies. All of the issues you bring up are being discussed in forward-thinking IS programs.

But I digress. My point is that cataloguing is complex - not because the AACR2 is full of arcane rules and strangely organized (although it is both), but because teasing out all the details can get very interesting. That's what makes cataloguing something more than "monotonous, tedious effort".

>>a folksonomy that could accommodate the hierarchy of each and every one of these ill conceived classifications

Why would you want to accomodate an "ill-conceived" classification's hierarchy into anything? The problem with LC classification is not that the hierarchy is bad -- it's extremely thorough and well thought out -- but that it's so rigid and hidebound. As Sandy Berman discovered, it cannot be changed from the bottom up, and once everything began to be standardized for the sake of sharing data, the idea of cataloguing "for the people" (and Sandy's job, unfortunately) went by the wayside. His subject headings have recently been revived on the Internet by some of the Code4Lib people. If I get your point, you are saying that his classification system, as well as LC's and anyone else's, could be included in an über-classification system that pointed to all related classes from central database. I wonder whether Open Library could be a rallying point for such an effort -- it would have to be fixed to be in line with FRBR first (separating works, expressions, and manifestations, for one thing), but that's an interesting idea.

Personally I think these debates about classification will fall by the wayside as systems like Google Books, and perhaps this new effort, really get going. As Google knows, nothing beats a full text search for locating all and every related piece of information. Classification will be for locating information (physically or digitally), perhaps for refining searches, and most certainly for the intellectual task of organizing information hierarchically. Full text search will be for finding (what you're looking for). In the real world, it's already that way to some extent, thanks to our Friends at Google, and that will intensify as Google Books heats up.

Re:Some thoughts

[Teancum]

To let you know where I'm coming from in all of this, I'm a volunteer with Wikibooks, one of the sister projects to Wikipedia that is more involved with writing book-length content.

One of the problems we (as project participants) are currently facing is an overwhelming need to somehow index the content that is currently on the website. With over 26,000 pages of content currently, about the only way that you can find anything is to perform a google search. That has some value, but there are limits on even a Google search.

One of the sub-projects that I've been trying to work on over the past year or so is to try and organize the content into something perhaps some of the people visiting the website would be a little bit more familiar with: Card Catalog classification systems.

The best "source" of people who seem to have any skills in this area seems to be the Open Directory Project, but even then the number of people who have any real skills seems to be astonishingly low.

In trying to come up with a classification system of some kind to help organize the roughly 2000 e-book on Wikibooks, I've also been interviewing libraries and trying to find guides to classification that don't require paying expensive fees and can be used for new volunteers who want to help but aren't ready for a full-time job either. When I talk to professional librarians, what astounds me is not so much their confessions of a lack of knowledge about the topic, but the utter blank look on their faces when I try to explain the scope of what I'm doing. And it has so far proven to be far more complex than even what I thought it was going to be at the start.

Currently on Wikibooks, we are using a trio of the Dewey Decimal system, the LOC classification, and something "home grown" that we call bookshelves. Our catalog tends to be very tech-heavy in terms of the kinds of books we are dealing with (over 2 dozen books just about programming languages), but there is also some strength in linguistics as well. Some very surprising books have been written about learning some languages that would normally be considered obscure, and much better written than say a book about German. On the LOC top level, however, we have books in every classification letter except military and naval science, so there is some breadth to the topics covered as well.

As this is a volunteer effort, we have to use ressources available that are free (as in beer) to perform this effort. Even on this limited library of books, I have already come across severe limits to what we can do in terms of further refining some of the categories, as guidelines like the Dewey top 1000 topical summaries are already breaking down.

A project such as this open library project, dedicated to this kind of effort, is noble and something worthwhile but I also see some real practical problems once they move beyond just a few dozen books. It will be interesting to see how they solve some of those problems.... if they solve them at all. And this group seems to be operating in a bit of a vacuum here in terms of trying to reach out to other projects that may be doing the same sort of thing. That is always concerning when you think about supporting a crazy new project idea like this when it doesn't appear as though they have done their "homework".

My eyes....

[joto]

My eyes... They failed to see what you were commenting on. The horror...

Change the name first

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of the confusion here arises from the fact that this claims to be a "library". A library is where you can borrow books. An online library would be something where you can download books. On their site you can't even read books. It's a (bookstore/library/etext) catalog at most.

Re:Change the name first

[Anonymous Coward]

Possibly, change the concept instead? Create PDFs with a password, printing restrictions (none), and an expiration date, making the file useless after two weeks. Only allow the number of purchased copies the library has rights to check out to be "checked out" (downloaded) and since the expiration date is know, the file can become available after two weeks, eliminating the cries of copyright infringement. ie really make this like a library. The technology exists... why not use it? Act exactly like a library (and get government money to do it).

UH OH! We better watch out

[manowar821]

Here comes the W.I.A.A. The Writing Industry's Association of America.

User Browser Preferences Should Rule

[Anonymous Coward]

Mozilla'y browsers have the option, View -> Page Style -> No Style. If you don't like the result, use the browser's Preferences.

I sure would appreciate web designers not defining color and font properties for main content though, so my preferences can shine through. But alas, designers prioritize form over function.

hgw quiecent? layers of annotations Re:PG

[bukuman]

I was thinking about annotated texts and the need for richer encodings of the works (that could be 'rendered' as plain text PG style files). I had looked at hgw but it seemed like there was not any recent activity (a 2001 story as recent news on the news page), and it seemed they were using html as an encoding of presentation.

It would be great to host a cleaned up structural representation of the book (author, edition, publisher, chapters, para, etc) and then allow people to layer annotations over it via some kind of wiki capability. Then support tagging of sets of annotations so that one could render/generate/export a version appropriate for a lit scholar or a different version appropriate for a 'casual' reader or a reader interested in how events in the authors life found their way into the book (say). It would be nice to allow groups of annotators to 'own' their sets, both to avoid edit wars and to allows a variety of consistent note sets. And of course you'd want to be able to render/export/generate to a number of representations html/pdf/ebook reader etc.

I could not find anything close to that capability does anyone have any pointers to something like that?

Re:What good will it be?

[Auldclootie]

My (dead tree) book library weighs well over 1,000 kg - more than 1 metric tonne. I have paid to transport it across and between 3 continents for 30 years - and yet I still rarely have it where I want it when I want it - and it's always a little more damaged when I get it. This has frustrated me for years because I travel a lot and read a lot. Now, I have an old IBM ThinkPad that does the job perfectly. It's a dedicated portable library. I have installed MS reader plus ABC lit converter, + Adobe Professional and Openoffice. I can make any e book/text comfortable to read in about 5-10 minutes editing time. If you convert any doc to c5 size pdf - you have a reasonable paperback experience. MS Reader has brilliant type and a real book-sized viewing area with adjustable font size. While I agree that reading on CRT is useless, a decent LCD is no problem. My ThinkPad is about the size and weight of a many hardbacks. Type size, and back lighting are adjustable, and it rests on a small pillow for reading in bed, on the sofa or in a hammock. It currently holds around 20,000 books plus a decent reference library of several hundred volumes. I have read on this device daily for several years and now actually prefer it to the experience of reading many of the older original volumes I own, especially those with brittle yellow pages and fixed type sizes. Forget about the negativity of those who will tell you its not the same unless you can hold it and smell it and feel the texture of the cover. If you are a REAL reader and interested in books for their actual content - ebooks are fine. I promise you, those who take the plunge will never look back. The ebook is the future. Having said that however, there is still absolutely no way I would buy a dedicated reader locked into any particular format. Also, I will not have a DRM'd book on my hard drive and never register my copies of MS reader - if it doesn't work, or comes up with a copyright 'please jump through these hoops' request - it's recycle bin time!