Slashdot Mirror
Giving Project Gutenberg Recognition
In an email from Michael Hart, the head of Project Gutenberg, he says:
"Getting the Etexts to twice as many people is just as important
as creating twice as many Etexts. . .but without MAJOR publicity it
is not likely to happen. . .we constantly get messages from readers
who tell us they have been LOOKING for Etexts for years and just at
that present time FINALLY FOUND US. . . . That means we cannot get
to a major part of our audience with the kind of publicity we have,
we need something more. . . . For example, we were the first in an
entirely new column: "People To Watch" in the November 8th edition
of TIME magazine, but we have received less than a dozen emails per
that article. . .what we really need to do is get on Oprah Winfrey,
and hopefully add something to her book club. Those of you on AOL,
perhaps you could email the show and request they invite us. . . !
We should undoubtedly also try the other talk shows, and "magazine"
shows, etc. All the press we receive is from them contacting us, I
have had no luck "generating" publicity. . .which seems to be easy,
for those who have the knack. . .it's just not MY knack. . .help!!!"
So, if there's anything that you can do to help - do it!
Don't think they'll let you in, they'd probably find some clause about you not being the authors or something... Anyway, can you really afford the bribes? =)
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On the topic, I find the Etexts QUITE useful... suggested bookmark #1.
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Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey...
www.stampede.org
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Everybody's got something to hi
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/books.html
Btw.. you didn't say first post.. what's wrong with you ;>
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ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Another worthy Gutenberg-style project which deserves help is the Internet Dictionary Project. They are building the world's first copyright-free English-to-French dictionary by typing in the text from an old out-of-copyright dictionary by Spiers dating from 1853. They're asking for help, which involves typing in the text, using some simple formatting rules, for any of the remaining pages by reading the scanned images of the original book.
After joining the project, you download a scanned page and type it in according to their instructions. An important issue is whether they should be aiming to put the resulting work into the public domain as they state, or under a licence offering something akin to GPL's protections?
I've been using PG for a long time, and it's an EXCELLENT resource. The people running it obviously do need help publicizing, and I think once they get started the project will really take off, seeing as they already have tons of information. As the Subject says, once they hit critical mass in terms of public knowledge they're set. Another hassle they're facing is copyright law. The PG site lists some elementary info on copyright law, and it was changed not too long ago to cover a lot more stuff, so unfortunately we'll be seeing that many fewer etexts in our lifetimes. Ah well, what Project Gutenberg provides is nonetheless fantastic, and hopefully it will soon receive due recognition. Dan
Fuck it
...but they are hardly the only people producing free e-texts. Yes, I remember that in the pre-Web era their ftp site was about the only place on the net for e-texts, but as the existence of huge archive sites like The Online Books page show, PG is just one group among many similar groups these days.
Project Gutenberg has been around for literally years, and is a resource I always check when I can't find that elusive book.
In fact, we used to use the text from many Gutenberg documents when I was fiddling around with data compression (specifically compression methods aimed at text and english in particular).
Also, many of my relatives have asked me "Can you find out about this book on the net, and where I can find it?" and are somewhat suprised when I hand them a disk with the Gutenberg text version of it. First time I did this, they thought it was reviews of the book and details where to find it, instead of the actual text. "Remember how I said that a floppy disk holds about as much text as one small book?". *grin*
However I think they got one of the most important boosts of advertising they could ever want, an article on good ol' Slashdot. Way to go Hemos! (and CmdrTaco of course) *grin*
PS: Heya to FunkyBob, the guy who did most of the coding on that compression stuff was I mentioning earlier - and when will it ever work properly damnit! It's only been about 6 years! *grin*
How about giving Project Gutenberg a free banner ad here on Slashdot? Now that'd generate a lot of traffic and put them right out in the public view!
Whaddya say guys?
if only for one thing, and this is nitpicky, but I think it might help a little:
They need to make their online books a little more web-friendly. I understand PG's reasoning behind keeping everything in pure vanilla ascii, but quite frankly, in that state, the etexts don't look terribly great, nor are conveniently navigable in most web browsers. Appearance and ease of use are, imo, important factors if you want to attain a large audience.
Bono Vox, bono@vox.org
Personally, I remember my first run-in with PG back in the days of the BBS... it was a Taoist text in one of the download sections that had been created for PG. I also seem to remember a very lofty goal at the time, something like a billion downloads...?
/. is a huge start.
At any rate, I think a few areas might provide support...
*Amazon (someone mentioned this) is a _bad_ idea. Profit motive and releasing free documents don't coincide well.
*The Palm computing platform is the big plus. To be able to read in such a convenient form is wonderful, and PG offers a large library of material for consumption. However, PG needs to _market_ to them, meaning convenient little formats, getting linked to, etc...
*Align with the OS movement more, there's plenty of talent that would likely work on such a task, but probably isn't even aware of it. Getting mentioned on
*Make better use of technology... I seem to recall very slow rates of progress, which lowers the level of excitement for those involved (it's sad that this is a factor, but very true)- can't many works simply be OCR'ed?
*The general public (Oprah Winfrey's audience, etc.) is most likely worthless. It seems as though most of the public rarely reads, let alone transcribes... The only thing they might be good for is cash to support the effort.
Just my US$0.02
If any of you have played with the E-book readers out there (Rocketbook or Softbook are the main contenders) you'll notice that 90% or so of the books they offer right now seem to be public domain ones, mostly from the Project Gutenberg collection. And that does make sense - PG is all about etexts, the E-book readers are about reading etexts... Anyway, it seems the two parties ought to get together. But unfortunately, the Ebook vendors seem to be more focused on licensing and copyright issues and making money from selling content, rather than just making and selling their hardware. Can't Dell or somebody like that get into this business and show how it ought to be done?
Anyway, if we could get a bunch of recent books out there in the public domain (or GPL of course) - either under Project Gutenberg or some other auspices - I think that would demonstrate this is a serious option for the future of reading. The technical market might be ideal - how about merging in some of the Linux Howto's and the Linux documentation project with this kind of effort? Instead of making a buck for yourself and Tim O'Reilly, how about publishing with Project Gutenberg next time? Just as with Linux and the World Wide Web, it could be a way to guarantee readership you would never get by selling the stuff.
By the way, I prepared 2 books for Project Gutenberg many years ago, and did some work on their Encyclopedia project, but I've not been keeping track for the last few years - it's definitely continued to grow and be successful. Despite Michael Hart's quirkiness, it really has come close to fulfilling the original promise (10,000 free etexts by 2000). A hearty congratulations to Michael and all the volunteers!
Energy: time to change the picture.
Project Gutenberg carries only copyright expired texts, so it doesn't really compete directly with Amazon's business. And it may be a good thing for Amazon: it's a nice service for Amazon's customers to be able to read books online.
Even in the case where Amazon is trying to sell the same books covered by Project Gutenberg (e.g. classics), I think most people still prefer to read the book in printed form, so providing links from the book's page to the project Gutenberg text provides a using previewing service and may help to generate more interest (and sales) for the book.
I've been reading PG books since I've been on the net ('94) and I think they have got to be one of the most important resources available.
People discount PG by saying thing like "Oh, you can get free texts anywhere" and "Books are outdated, anyway".
Well, imagine happening without PG: Copyright laws are changed so that copyright does not run out after 30 years (or whatever it is) - and this is what the film lobby wants.
Then, in 10 years or so, a law is made giving ownership of texts that have become public domain back to the decendents of their owners, who then seel them to film companies or amazon.com
These companies decide that they only want to sell paper-books, and the demand for some titles is so low that you have to get a special publishing run for them.
Then a some books get banned for being sexist/sexy/racist/communist or whatever, and you can no longer get them - period!
Books - or at least the text of then is the life blood of civilisation - and PG is something that is making this freely (as in speach) available to all.
Support it!
PS:yes, I know the scenerio above wasn't real, and I know "the internet changes everything", but in 5 years, when you are reading "Sherlock Holmes" on your Palm XX, you can thank Project Gutenburg for keeping it free.
--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com
I like getting my hand on free 19th Century classics as much as the next guy. However, I find Project Gutenberg of dubious usefulness. And I strongly disagree to the claims of some journalists that this project, if completed, will be a great help for the schools of the Third World.
I am sure the Internet and its associated technologies can be used to help impoverished kids worldwide, but I don't think they would benefit much from an electronic version of, say, Boswell's Life of Johnson... in English.
[I know this is slightly off-topick, but I just wanted to prevent someone coming up with the references to rural Kenya that always pop up when discussing Project G.]
Really? I'm rather thrilled to see this here. Until now, I've never heard of 'em.
If Project Gutenberg had been started by Linus or RMS, would it send out hysterical letters every month asking for money to keep the project afloat?
I fail to see how this qualifies as sending out "hysterical letters every month asking for money to keep the project afloat." Rather, it seems to be a request for publicity. It doesn't seem to be all that hysterical at all.
Wondering what this has to do with Slashdot and Open Source and GPL.
I don't see that it has much to do with Open Source and the GPL, but it seems to have a bit to do with Slashdot. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Well, I'm a nerd. I like to read. This is news to me, and stuff like this sure matters to me. End of story here, at least.
Seems PG is a conservative outfit that resists change in technology,
Unfortunately, I fail to comprehend how translating texts printed on paper to an easily-reproducable format that can be easily obtained via the internet qualifies as resisting change in technology.
won't cooperate with other free ebook causes,
Proof? Links, quotes, or something, please. If this is true, I'd be interested in seing something to subsantiate this, as I'm not likely to take the word of an A.C. alone as gospel truth.
is intent on producing numbers of poorly proofread texts and admittedly of not top quality,
Try getting 30 of your closest friends and proofread several hundred thousand pages of material and see how well you fare in getting all the errors. Please cite something to prove that they are "intent on producing numbers of poorly proofread texts."
and doesn't accept criticism from outsiders.
Again, proof please!
BTW, the aforementioned letter from Hart is not on the page linked to, and it contains errors of fact about copyright.
I don't see any claims that the letter is on the page linked to. If if does contain errors of fact about copyright, please cite some.
Maybe I'm way off here. I've never heard of this project before today, and thus my knowledge is limited to what I've seen here and my brief perusal of their web site, which more or less only consisted of checking to see what they had by F. Scott Fitzgerald (only This Side of Paradise) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (nothing). If what you say is true, I'm certain that I, as well as other readers of Slashdot, will benefit from having some primary source material to peruse demonstrating your claims. Right now, all we have to go on are your quite unsubstantiated allegations.
1) Use your domain name: Gutenberg.org 2) Get the crawlers to got thought the texts _at your site_ . You can wrap in pre tags... 3) Your ripe for a grant for outreach. If you don't have the "official" framework, contact some CS or English depts and see about some joint work here. 4) oss4lib is a new group that could be seen as having a relation to you... 5) Perhaps some outreach letters to English depts at various levels, from grade school up. 6) Bells and Whistles: how about some history on gutergerg, past and present. Entertainment. 7) Given talks at various places helps. You might meet some connected people on the way... 8) In general, of the e-libraries, what tactics are the successful ones using. Seems a good learning place. I do like the tasteful layout and quickness of your cover page. I have always been impressed with Gutenberg! Good luck
That really is a quite considerable cost, in much the same way that the production of "free" software requires substantial effort.
It is somewhat unfortunate that there have been such peculiar positions as:
It did not add to the project's credibility when they on the one hand indicated that their funding was maxxing out at around $30K per year, whilst claiming that they were producing "billions" of dollars in value. (Note that the PostgreSQL HOWTO suffers from the same sort of thing...)A claim of $30K on the one hand, and $Billions on the other, do not reconcile very well.
Not unlike the situation with the FSF, they could probably more readily use contributions of time rather than of money, although some of both doubtless prove valuable to some degree...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Anyone who is doing the distributed.net project, you can vote for the charity money that will be won to go to Project Gutenberg.
Is there a copyright-free English dictionary that could be distributed with open-source software like word processors for Linux? This seems to be an important feature that current Linux distributions are missing. I have in mind something better than /usr/dict/words.
Creating a good dictionary from scratch is hard work, but if you can get the structure and the word list e.g. from a copyright-free source then the hardest part is done. Therefore, a good starting point would be to take the structure of the copyright-free Spiers English-French Internet Dictionary, i.e. cut out the French translations to leave the English core. Is anyone else interested in this?
Every submitter formats the text differently, and the inline ("botton of page") footnotes are a real annoyance.
:)
However, I would like to say that via GB, I've read every Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel they have e-published, to much satifaction. I started on other authors, but then a friend introducted me to the Dune and Hyperion series.
I think it's safe to say now that webifing the text would be a wonderful idea. If you were to index them in the web search engines, you would then definately get more hits. I'd love to be able to type in a search engine "to be, or not to be" and get sent to the correct page in the GB e-text.
Once you do that, launch a ad banner campaign with suggestive quotes. ie. "The staircase was darken with gloom...(click here to read more...)"
BTW: I read "Sun Tsu" as well. Way cool...
Some folks want Gutenberg to move past ASCII and become more web-friendly, more non-English-language friendly, more Y2K-friendly, whatever. I happen to believe they're on the right track. They are trying to provide a baseline of texts which can be adapted to specific purposes.
That's how I use 'em. I've downloaded a few such texts and made them into Newton books, which I put on my Web site. (I'm a retro-geek. I prefer Newton to Palm.) I couldn't do that with an HTML page, or at least, not as easily.
The one thing I found in doing this myself is that some Gutenberg texts, at least, aren't error-free, even if they have been proofread. I've proofed two such books so far and I h've had to correct around a dozen errors in each. Now, the books I'm converting are by a British writer named Ernest Bramah who's completely obscure today. I happen to have original editions in hardback, but with a writer as obscure as Bramah, there are damn few of us out here with original editions to check. I could wish the Gutenberg proofing process were a little more thorough. There isn't even a central place to report such errors to: the Gutenberg help line just told me to forward the corrections to the original text provider, which I did.
On the other hand it does make me feel like I'm actually giving something back.
Simply make an IPO on NASDAQ. If possible, associate yourself with Linux as well. Maybe get an endorsement from Bob Young of Red Hat. Wall Street will be beating down your door to give you money, without knowing why or what you do. Use the money to buy banner ads. :-)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Hmm. I looked at that site, and it *looks* like they expect authors to use Word to enter documents. It talks about putting words in italics, which doesn't make much sense for pure ASCII editing. It's not particularly clear, though; will they accept a tagged HTML document?
Also, quick dummy's question: what is the situation with HTML and Unicode? I've always assumed the HTML docs were ASCII, but presumably our international friends have some nicer way to work with HTML and different alphabets.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
If getting more users is really as important to them as getting more texts online (and there really isn't an awe-inspiring amount there yet, so far as I can tell), then they need to be able to pass the mom test (you know, could my mom use it?). I mean, I really *like* having a book on my Pilot at all times -- it saves me in situations where I'm unexpectantly bored. I'd bet I'm not the only one. PG needs to cater to this.
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I just tried to register "gutenberg.org" so that I could give them a domain name. gutenberg.com, net and org are all taken. :( Any sugestions for a good domain name I can point at them?
--GnrcMan--
Ok, that's a falsehood, I have used it, once. About 2 years ago I downloaded Notes From The Underground. It lingered on my hard drive with some Mark Twain that I had also downloaded at the time. I don't believe that I ever read them, because it's too darn uncomfortable to read a full novel on a computer.
Eventually I picked up Notes from the Underground As a Dover Thrift Edtiton. It cost me all of $1.00. I couldn't print it myself for that much. Also I picked up Faust, The Theory Of The Leisure Class, The Devil's Dictionary, The Queen of Spades, Oedipus Rex... and the list goes on. These were brand new. None of them were more than $2.00. And that was suggested retail. Used books fall into much the same category, as they are usually $2.00 for a paperback.
In this era we publish more books than ever before but fewer authors than 30 years ago. Why not use E-texts to promote some authors who cannot get published by the big boys like Bantam, Del, Tor, etc... Why not have a more user friendly site? Why not invite reviews? Reccommendations? Etc...
Why not make it so that PG is accessible to the masses. Let people have their stake in PG, make them a part of something. That is what draws people to participate in these projects. Slashdot is not the best news site out there for news, but it is the best community out there for news.
When I first found PG it seemed like one of those great ideas. I bookmarked it. I stopped back, nothing had changed, A year later I stopped back, still didn't see anything that really caught my eye.
In short, I appreciate what PG is trying to accomplish, but I cannot find where it has any real relevancy to me. Not when the price of the information on a user-friendly, portable media that never needs winding or batteries is available for so little. To truly draw attention and keep it, you need to fight our pitifully short attention spans, and our desparate need for convenience. Why not encourage people to write for PG, not copy. Why not encourage the stockpiling of information, not fiction. What about an app that facilitates the finding and reading of e-texts, something more than "more"...
PG has been around long enough to have garnered the recognition it deserves. If it is concerned that it is not busy enough, then it should be wondering why. It has always seemed to me that PG tries to lure it's readership with the mantra that "This is for the greater good..." Help us... Instead of playing on our consciences, fufill a need. As of this writing there are ~50 responses from people who have all heard of PG. Some use it, some don't. But they all know about it.
PG, give me the slightest reason to come and keep coming, and I will. Until then, I can get Vonnegut for $0.25 at the library and PK Dick for $2.00 at Novel Futures. And god knows that our independent booksellers are struggling too. (Tangent: Don't buy from book behemoths, as smaller booksellers die out our culture moves further into the realm of vanilla pop garbage!)
~Jason Maggard
"Give me convenience or give me death." ~Jello
I remember reading a Wired interview with the PG founder back in '96 or '97.
They were talking about how movies were begining to come out of their copyright period, and how he wanted to make a public domain MPG of "Gone with the Wind" before he died.
I'm not quite sure what the copyright status of early (say, pre-WW2) movies is, now. Anyone?
--Donate food by clicking: www.thehungersite.com
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." -Flaubert
Back in '97, Wired did a feature on PG. The original Gutenberg ftp site was hosted on a UIUC machine. I have some friends who were there at the time, and have regaled me with stories of what a pain in the ass the guy was. The FTP site that is alluded in this article by one Mark Zinzow was on a machine, mrcnext (which no longer exists but still has a DNS entry) adminned by a friend of mine at one point. Anyway, the point is, this article has a lot of interesting things to say about the Project and especially Michael Hart. Check it out.
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"In Cyberspace, no one can hear you be sarcastic"
I think, actually, that project gutenberg ought to store their files in a simple semi-formatted way.
Like, lines beginning with \ are escapes with codes for 'title' 'author' 'chapter' 'paragraph' and 'footnote' Like,
\title The Slashdot Effect
\author Rob Malda
\chapter Chapter One: What is The Web
etc.
(apologies if there's a real book by that title)
Most of it'd just be plain text. With -just- enough formatting that a perl-script (or future-language script) can transform it into the pretty-format of the day with a bit of analysis,
but not so much as to make it unreadable.
Just a thought.
--Parity
--Parity
'Card carrying' member of the EFF.
As distasteful as the thought may sound to some of us, it may be time to solicit the help of the government. Specifically, I believe it was California's governor, Gray Davis, who was recently talking about building a virtual library of all the texts in the California State university system. In this case, collaboration may make sense.
Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution enumerates the relevant federal power as "Congress shall have the power... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;" The key phrase here is "for limited Times". Retroactively extending the duration of copyrights or bestowing perpetual copyrights is plainly unconstitutional.
Needless to say, unconstitutionality has never prevented legislators from passing unconstitutional acts, and the late Sonny Bono had his day in Congress a year ago and changed the rules, and we'll all suffer for it. There are some legal battles being fought on this issue, but I can't seem to drag up the references.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
It definately does need to have markup codes, though. I'd personally prefer XML, because it would allow the documents to include book-relevant tags like <chapter number> and such, which would make the e-texts a great deal more machine-readable, and accessible for everyone. (in addition, it would make it a lot easier to re-publish the texts.)
I design and typeset books for a living, so I know what I'm talking about when I say that it's a lot easier to remove or process existing codes than it is to insert them. A machine can easily reformat a marked-up document; if plain text is wanted, a one-line perl script can be written to remove everything within angle brackets. The reverse is not the case. Computers are not currently smart enough to know where to add tags, so right now, every single tag in a document has to be inserted by a person.
All too often, that person is me. ;-)
I don't really understand licenses that well -- this is just my uneducated opinion.
I don't think the GPL would work well with something other than software. Once I tried to think about how people could copyright music under less restictive licenses. You'd want to copyright a song (not necessarily a given recording of the song) so that coffee shop/bar bands could legally sing it, but you have to do something to preserve the integrity of the art. I don't think the GPL really does that, because with the GPL people can modify your work and distribute those modifications. This has practical value in the software community, but in the music community people want their work to remain unique and intact. I assume that authors would feel the same way.
What you'd need, in my view, is a copyright license that allows people to distribute an etext freely and ensures that no one down the line can take that freedom away. However, people should be forbidden from altering the etext, and the author should always receive credit for the work. That way, you can give your stuff to Project Gutenberg without fear of compromising its integrity.
This is just an idea, and I know that it isn't a perfect solution yet. But I think that a license based on these ideas could be worked up and actually used by authors, musicians, and artists to promote the exchange of ideas and information. That's really the spirit of the GPL anyway, right?
Take care,
Steve
*Amazon (someone mentioned this) is a _bad_ idea. Profit motive and releasing free documents don't coincide well.
I suggested Amazon earlier, but I guess I should have argued my point rather than just suggesting it. Why don't profit motive and releasing free documents coincide well?
Profit motive and free documents can coincide perfectly, and work to each other's mutual benefit. The free software world shows that the profit motive, demonstrated by companies like Red Hat, may in fact be the *best* way of supporting the development of free stuff (software, documents, and who knows what else). What Project Gutenberg needs is publicity, and who can do publicity better than companies like Amazon with plenty and of money and marketing skills?
But why would Amazon want to help PG? For the same reason why enlightened bookstores make it easy for customers to browse through books -- letting customers browse increases sales; putting links to PG texts brings this browsing experience online (imo, there isn't much worry that the customer will just read the whole book online rather than buy it -- reading a whole book online is just too unpleasant).
Furthermore, the PG deals with copyright expired books, so the market is different in most cases; linking to PG is just another value added service that online booksellers like Amazon can provide for their customers.
The question here isn't whether to use ASCII, HTML or LaTeX, because there already is a highly developed, sophisticated markup language for electronic text editions, TEI-SGML, specifically designed to preserve all structural information of the original text. Some e-text projects such as the Victorian Women Writers Project code in TEI-SGML. This is not only good for scholars/literature hacks, but also allows lossless reformatting of the source code into HTML, ASCII, PDF, RTF, etc..
The Gutenberg Project certainly was a good idea and a great achievement when it is founded, but might have to rethink its coding policy. Other e-text projects are already doing better here.
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
I think they should accept XML submissions, process the XML to produce pure ASCII, and then make both availbale. That way they have the power of XML while still having archived the least common denominator.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It would also facilitate content based indexing. After all, it's the content that counts.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In fact, you can use the Gutenburg text create your own edition, with your own illustrations, introduction and footnotes, and publish it. Perhaps for distribution to your students if you are a teacher,or perhaps to the world at large.
The Guteburg copyright restrictions are a lot like the BSD license. They're aimed to get the work used as widely as possible. If you modify the work, you just strip out the Gutenburg notices and it leaves you with the unencumbered text to do what you will.
This is a incredible idea, and one that deserves support. Maybe they should be nominated for a MacArthur grant?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Since the content is freely reusable, strip off the Guteburg notices and make your own archive of e-text's in your favorite format! They've done the hardest part of the work, HTML-izing the work with CSS should be a breeze.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Who says it has to be this way [mostly meant for stuff like Shakespeare or other important literary works]?
.an operating system, a program, a markup system. . .will not.
Project Gutenburg.
Who says books have to be this way to be online?
Project Gutenburg.
http://www.promo.net/pg/history. html#beginningphil
Where does it say that this is PG's purpose,
Here: http://www.promo.net/pg/history.h tml#theselection
and who wrote that?
Project Gutenburg.
Wow, you've impressed me with your fine reading skills. Next time, try reading the source material before engaging in combative behavior.
You are doing a hell of a lot of whining about something that is completely free and explicitly tells people to add markup if they so choose. If you can't understand them, it's probably because they are thinking in the long term, and you arent'. Quote from the above referenced page:
Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others will be with us as long as civilization. .
Quit whining, AC.
One problem might be that Micro$oft has claimed in the Calera suit that it lost the source code to DOS.
Hmm, seven major versions, countless minor versions, over the span of many years...
Ooops, all lost. Even Win95/98... Joe Bob brought them home for an elementary school project and his dog ate them all...
The court didn't actually *believe* that did it? For a lie, that's pretty damn boldfaced!
Anyway, the reason I'm posting is that I've registered the name anthology.org (not yet active) to provide a directory to etexts from various collections/projects. Sorta like a card catalog (or maybe the interlibrary loan database? whatever) -- probably a yahoo-style navigation. I'm sorta surprised that I no-one else has done this (with high visibility, anyway) -- does anyone else think this would be useful?
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<SIG>
"I am not trying to prove that I am right... I am only trying to find out whether." -Bertolt Brecht
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Since I entered the Web in 94 Gutenberg has been one of the most important points I have found there. What it has done is of fundamental importance. Let us note that some of the texts are considered World Literature. Besides project Gutenberg allows us to reach literature that hardly one can find today.
However I am very critical of project Gutenberg in other point. It is good to be conservative. Specially if we consider the nature of this project. However it is too much conservative.
Project Gutenberg always suffered from a illness of having a very primitive search interface. Or by preserving for too long an interface that is morally old. The problem is that sometimes it may not be only necessary to search books by author or title. There are a lot of other search classifications and tools. One of the most important is to search for specific context much like Altavista or Excite do. If project Gutenberg wants to deliver availability then it needs to work on this.
The other point is the cumbersome nature of texts. I agree that it was rather dangerous to choose a text format that could deliver some incompatibility in the future. But that was good in 1994. Today HTML is standard, SGML is standard, XML is new but it is also a standard, TEX may not be so popular but it is also a standard, PDF may carry a commercial tone but anyway it is a standard. And there are tons of tools for converting and reconverting from one standard to the other. So it is time to rethink the standards.
Other point is organisation. Project Gutenberg was and is badly organised. This may look as a seen for some but I really think that a little bit of marketing would help the project a lot. And maybe a little commercial flavour would help even more. Much like what RedHat is to Linux. Gutenberg needs a face. It needs a design. It needs to deliver people something. Frankly no one is borned with the name Oesopus burned in big letters in the brain.
I don't pretend that Gutenberg should become another Amazon. But I think that by making literature a free tool, by delivering an infrastructure in a very GPL'ed nature and, by building a commercial basis for more complex tasks and material support, I believe that Gutneberg may become another lighthouse of the Web.
Sincerly it would be sad to see project Gutenberg closing its doors. Yes we hackers may give some help on making tools and helping project Gutenberg with some design and technical support. Humanists may help by translation, classification and analysis. We may try to push a marketing campaign all over it on our own resources. But this will not save the project if there is not an organisation. If there is not a mechanism to deliver people that the world does not end on The Matrix and Coca-Cola. And if we don't take the care to feed the project with some material resources that may be needed for its future.