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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!
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?
...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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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