Actually, most of the PG 2 titles are HTML that I did of PG texts for my own site (that one I also scanned with the distributed proofreaders so it sees more moral), but then PG 2 has another 48K books that aren't on Gutenberg, and might just be worth paying $8.95 a year to access, something the article doesn't make clear.
I've also let it be known that Dr. Hart is welcome to use my HTML as he sees fit, not pushing the issue because there are other volunteer initiatives working on this.
To be honest, I'd say the difference between video games and books is that the market for books is SO much greater.
If you look at the history of, say, paperbacks in the '50s, you'd find that there were all kinds of regulations over what could and couldn't be printed, not just on pornagraphic works, but on somewhat lurid titles, and even books, like this one by Vivian Connell, that had exactly ONE "dirty" word.
Eventually, Henry Miller, Grove Press and the rest of the gang knocked out speech restrictions on books with a Supreme Court case, but we're talking '62-63 here, more than a decade after paperbacks really took over the world, and individual states kept their restrictions going, such that one publisher, Greenleaf, then the fifth-largest paperback books house in the country, had its staff going to jail for five years in the mid-70s.
The reason everybody's after video games is, IMHO, because they're so popular and so outside government and *advocate* control. Thus, everybody makes the same arguments against games (bad, leading to violence, over-sexualization of women, etc.) that they made against books in the '50s, and pornagraphy in the '80s, and movies in the '30s and pulps/radio in the '20s and photos in the 1870s and Impressionist painting in the 1840s and so on and so on.
If nobody was buying video games, you wouldn't have these court cases.
eBay prohibits the listing of items or products to be delivered electronically through the Internet.
Examples
Here are examples of items that may not be listed on eBay because of the downloadable media policy:
* A copy of a software program which the successful high bidder can download from your Web site
* Music or video files that you will deliver through a peer to peer file-sharing community or network
* A copy of a downloadable eBook
* A secret URL address where the high bidder can download "freeware" or "shareware" software programs
Guideline
If you are the copyright owner of the downloadable material that you are listing on eBay, make sure you say so in your listing!
Warning
Listings violating eBay's downloadable media policy may be ended early by eBay. Multiple violations of eBay's downloadable media policy could result in the suspension of your account.
Read more information on copyrights.
Unfortunately, the auction will be taken down soon...
For a lot of women authors (particularly back in the day when writing fiction was a good way to make money), kids and career went hand in hand.
One of the most famous is the short story writer Kate Chopin, whose husband was a drunk, died, left her broke with six kids, so she started sending stuff off to magazines at age 40, made something of a career of it (and is taught everywhere today after having been "rehabilitated"... her stories are very good; I'm not that impressed with her novels; but ya can read everything by her free here.)
Come to think, a number of women writers (Toni Morrison's another example), had that later start... typically as single parents with one or more kids around.
FWIW.
(Chopin died at 54 when her last novel was considered too threatening for the period... Morrison won a Nobel for Beloved.)
Not every women was like this (Plath was maybe 32 when she committed suicide; O'Connor died right at 40), but it's the same principle.
Perhaps we could tie women's creative success in with estrogen levels peaking?
And crime. The linked article says this happens to genus and crime in young men.
Well, they say Mediocrity borrows while Genius steals, so maybe the two are more closely related than ya think...
On the other hand, people talk about Hemingway having one good book for each wife... so if you're a genius and worried, you can still be a serial polygamist.
Whose API charges beacoup fees, and makes it pretty much impossible to, say, write an open source shopping cart that'll sync with Ebay auctions (for the 10-50,000 people that sell on ebay and our own sites and might want to keep track of stock).
They (meaning idiot analysts for the most part) always say the real battle is between Ebay and Amazon for the future of online commerce. Amazon's got the right idea here, at least when it comes to getting their brand out free. Too bad it costs so much to list...
Brownback's number one source of campaign cash for 2001-2002 was (drumroll) the Telecommunications Industry--i.e., BellSouth, SBC and a little firm on the East Coast by the name of Verizon (click on communications/electronics then "telephone utilities"). He only received $26k total for those two years, but he's up for reelection now and has likely been pulling down additional funds from his lead suppliers.
Interestingly, Verizon's lead counsel was quoted in a NY Times article as saying "in light of the court's decision, it is time for Congress to become involved and offer a legislative solution" when they agreed to name the names of their four filesharers.
IMHO, the only portion of Brownback's bill to pass will be the part concerning big telecom firms... we'll have to wait for Boucher or whoever to reform the DMCA, but I would have liked to have seen Fritz Hollings' face when his fellow committee member offered up this legislation.
Reposting from his site, the next entry -- about losing a sponsor for the Eldred Act (designed to fix part of CTEA by requiring copyright holders to pay a negligible fee for works more than 50 years old that they wanted to keep selling.)
we need your help
About a month ago, I started sounding optimistic about getting a bill introduced into Congress to help right the wrong of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. I was optimistic because we had found a congressperson who was willing to introduce the bill. But after pressure from lobbyists, that is no longer clear. And so we need help to counter that pressure, and to find a sponsor.
The idea is a simple one: Fifty years after a work has been published, the copyright owner must pay a $1 maintanence fee. If the copyright owner pays the fee, then the copyright continues. If the owner fails to pay the fee, the work passes into the public domain. Based on historical precedent, we expect 98% of copyrighted works would pass into the public domain after just 50 years. They could keep Mickey for as long as Congress lets them. But we would get a public domain.
The need for even this tiny compromise is becoming clearer each day. Stanford's library, for example, has announced a digitization project to digitize books. They have technology that can scan 1,000 pages an hour. They are chafing for the opportunity to scan books that are no longer commercially available, but that under current law remain under copyright. If this proposal passed, 98% of books just 50 years old could be scanned and posted for free on the Internet.
Stanford is not alone. This has long been a passion of Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive, as well as many others. Yet because of current copyright regulation, these projects -- that would lower the cost of libraries dramatically, and spread knowledge broadly -- cannot go forward. The costs of clearing the rights to makes these works available is extraordinarily high.
Yet the lobbyists are fighting even this tiny compromise. The public domain is competition for them. They will fight this competition. And so long as they have the lobbyists, and the rest of the world remains silent, they will win.
We need to your help to resist this now. At this stage, all that we need is one congressperson to introduce the proposal. Whether you call it the Copyright Term Deregulation Act, or the Public Domain Enhancement Act, doesn't matter. What matters is finding a sponsor, so we can begin to show the world just how extreme this debate has become: They have already gotten a 20 year extension of all copyrights just so 2% can benefit; and now they object to paying just $1 for that benefit, so that no one else might compete with them.
If you believe this is wrong, here are two things you can do: (1) Write your Representative and Senator, and ask them to be the first to introduce this statute; point them to the website http://eldred.cc, and ask them to respond. And even more importantly, (2) blog this request, so that others who think about these issues can get involved in the conversation.
I have given this movement as much as I can over the past four years, and I will not stop until we have reclaimed the public domain. Stay tuned for more litigation, and more ideas from Creative Commons. But please take these two steps now.
Ebay's got this partnership/close-connection/they spam you with a group called SquareTrade that you can sign up for (I think you have to have certain number of feedbacks/powerseller status).
SquareTrade lets you do feedback resolution--though of course you have to send them an extra couple of dollars each month.
I guess ebay uses a third party to keep from being considered in any way responsible for comments... but I don't think it's that hard to remove negative feedback (never done it myself.)
You're certainly right that every business should have other sources of income (I do worry about my own site's single source). But I think google's raking it in on the click-through ads.
Typically, where I advertise, there are eight or nine other people trying for the same keyword. I've got the green-shifted look despite paying the minimum because I'm allowed to include "free" in my description, but there's usually five people above me, meaning they're paying at least six cents; often as much as.40 cents per click, on keywords that generate around 500,000 impressions a month.
That number really starts to add up when you think of all the web businesses, and all the keywords, and all the searches, and all the clicks, but I guess we won't have a better idea until google files with the SEC prior to their IPO...
One thought, however, is the way google text ads are now showing at places like Metafilter or a number of the PDA news sites. Google's out to score more impressions any way they can... must be worth something to them.
Little text-box advertisements just don't cut it in this day and age where blatant pop-ups and colorful banner ads don't even have much turn-around.
This I dispute sir. Targeted keywords on google, where my clickthrough ratio has averaged 1.3-1.5%, are a goldmine for my site and money very well-spent (averaging $500 a month on those ads, paying.05 in 97% of all cases.)
I've been a google advertiser since Feb. 02, consider their program extremely lucrative, and I guess they like me 'cause I got a picture frame from them last Christmas. It was a Coach picture frame....
Yeah, and I'd also add that one of the big sources for books on DP is (currently) large, grant-funded, completely useless to the average reader operations like MOA and, to a lesser extent, CWRU or Canadiana.org.
These other sites digitized 10s of thousands of titles, but the stuff isn't even really available (think huge single page images, slow-moving search engines, etc.).
However, these images download great through a second PC, get OCR'd, ftp'ed, copyright clearance, tons of volunteers help, another person manages the project: boom! DP's gonna easily do a million pages this year should have their 1,000th book next month...
and they're growing.
Thanks!
(I'm the one responsible for Anatomy of Melancholy, but also lots of mysteries, Parkman, 'n stuff so please don't kill me.)
Well, there's a general consensus that mainstream reference sources have been going down in quality over the past decade (not really the advanced stuff, I'm thinking more like grade school textbooks).
It's gotten so bad that the publishing trade group has a report textbook error link.
But of course, those errors won't be fixed until next year (if ever). Collaborative effort has that kind of thing beat cold.
OK, I'm linking to my own site here, cause OMACL seems to be down for the count.
You're absolutely right in your Christian elements--still to be chatted about is Tolkien's use of the Story of the Volsungs -- text that most feel is his primary source.
Then, like Wagner, he also read up on the Nibelungenlied (though not to the same extent as Wagner) as well as the Elder Edda
If you're not into reading online, I do recommend a Haney translation.
Hmm, it's a number I've heard. The weekly booklist.csv file has around 18,000 titles listed, though it includes some PG works, and groups entire series as one line (for a sci-fi series, that can be quite a few titles).
However, booklist.csv is by no means complete, containing 0 technical works, for example (which are the most significant pirated books, from a revenue standpoint, and look to be damn numerous... then there's that.rpg group.)
Booklist.csv also doesn't categorize sites like this one...
Oddly enough, Linux might have a real shot in the "larger pda/tablet market." There are stories out there about IBM's Meta Pad, as well reports of an AMD/China/Alchemy Semiconductor type thing... both situations where MS need not apply.
Even the Lindows guy is talking about $500 tablets... though he's thinking handwriting recognition isn't needed.
I think tablets look cool, and do have applications in medical/retail/industrial settings, but not for $2,000, not yet. Hoping Midori or whatever, plus other chip options, besides full-fledged Pentiums can get the cost down.
Pitchbabe for Dayquil--"and I was going to a commercial, but my head on the cold medications was like, beep, beep, beep so my speech went zoink--it would have been a good commercial."
Re:use proofreading meta-data to improve OCR!
on
Just One Page a Day
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, they're working on that.
The program is Gutcheck, was developed by PG's Jim Tinsley.
Funny thing, Project Gutenberg, Eric Eldred's site and, oh, other places give away pretty much every public domain Dover reprint that we can get our scanners on. Gutenberg and other sites have shown phenomenal growth in readership... a lot of people are downloading and reading these classic titles.
So how's that affecting Dover's business (Dover produces no new titles, apart from original translations of non-copyrighted work)? They're booming.
Heck, with those sort of results, Dover ought to be providing financial support for PG (or at least releasing edited/translated titles into the public domain). Though I guess I'll settle for that nice brief they filed in Eldred's behalf.
Slight disclaimer here, Dover was bought by a big printing company that's really helped them with distribution (just came back from the beach and all the little bookstores there were well-stocked with Dover thrifts), but every other publisher on the planet has seen sales fall, while Dover's sales, since the acquisition, have grown tremendously.
Or, just sell your own stuff on ebay, make a decent listing, fair price, put a copyright notice in place, and drive the would-be pirates out.
Sounds to me like you're missing out on a market...
(I've had the same sort of thing happen, but I e-mailed the guy, amused, and after a conversation where I got to use the phrase "don't you lie to me like I'm Montel Williams," dude pulled away.)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, most of the PG 2 titles are HTML that I did of PG texts for my own site (that one I also scanned with the distributed proofreaders so it sees more moral), but then PG 2 has another 48K books that aren't on Gutenberg, and might just be worth paying $8.95 a year to access, something the article doesn't make clear.
I've also let it be known that Dr. Hart is welcome to use my HTML as he sees fit, not pushing the issue because there are other volunteer initiatives working on this.
God, I've been getting hit by Inktomi bots (IP 66.196.**.** ) for months now.
To be honest, I'd say the difference between video games and books is that the market for books is SO much greater.
If you look at the history of, say, paperbacks in the '50s, you'd find that there were all kinds of regulations over what could and couldn't be printed, not just on pornagraphic works, but on somewhat lurid titles, and even books, like this one by Vivian Connell, that had exactly ONE "dirty" word.
Eventually, Henry Miller, Grove Press and the rest of the gang knocked out speech restrictions on books with a Supreme Court case, but we're talking '62-63 here, more than a decade after paperbacks really took over the world, and individual states kept their restrictions going, such that one publisher, Greenleaf, then the fifth-largest paperback books house in the country, had its staff going to jail for five years in the mid-70s.
The reason everybody's after video games is, IMHO, because they're so popular and so outside government and *advocate* control. Thus, everybody makes the same arguments against games (bad, leading to violence, over-sexualization of women, etc.) that they made against books in the '50s, and pornagraphy in the '80s, and movies in the '30s and pulps/radio in the '20s and photos in the 1870s and Impressionist painting in the 1840s and so on and so on.
If nobody was buying video games, you wouldn't have these court cases.
That site didn't have the complete text, which is available here.
Sorta interesting with all its boy inventor stuff...
Bistable nematic screens can do 25 hz--difference is they're shipping it out right now.
Unfortunately, the auction will be taken down soon...
For a lot of women authors (particularly back in the day when writing fiction was a good way to make money), kids and career went hand in hand.
One of the most famous is the short story writer Kate Chopin, whose husband was a drunk, died, left her broke with six kids, so she started sending stuff off to magazines at age 40, made something of a career of it (and is taught everywhere today after having been "rehabilitated"... her stories are very good; I'm not that impressed with her novels; but ya can read everything by her free here.)
Come to think, a number of women writers (Toni Morrison's another example), had that later start... typically as single parents with one or more kids around.
FWIW.
(Chopin died at 54 when her last novel was considered too threatening for the period... Morrison won a Nobel for Beloved.)
Not every women was like this (Plath was maybe 32 when she committed suicide; O'Connor died right at 40), but it's the same principle.
Perhaps we could tie women's creative success in with estrogen levels peaking?
Well, they say Mediocrity borrows while Genius steals, so maybe the two are more closely related than ya think...
On the other hand, people talk about Hemingway having one good book for each wife... so if you're a genius and worried, you can still be a serial polygamist.
Whose API charges beacoup fees, and makes it pretty much impossible to, say, write an open source shopping cart that'll sync with Ebay auctions (for the 10-50,000 people that sell on ebay and our own sites and might want to keep track of stock).
They (meaning idiot analysts for the most part) always say the real battle is between Ebay and Amazon for the future of online commerce. Amazon's got the right idea here, at least when it comes to getting their brand out free. Too bad it costs so much to list...
Brownback's number one source of campaign cash for 2001-2002 was (drumroll) the Telecommunications Industry--i.e., BellSouth, SBC and a little firm on the East Coast by the name of Verizon (click on communications/electronics then "telephone utilities"). He only received $26k total for those two years, but he's up for reelection now and has likely been pulling down additional funds from his lead suppliers.
Interestingly, Verizon's lead counsel was quoted in a NY Times article as saying "in light of the court's decision, it is time for Congress to become involved and offer a legislative solution" when they agreed to name the names of their four filesharers.
IMHO, the only portion of Brownback's bill to pass will be the part concerning big telecom firms... we'll have to wait for Boucher or whoever to reform the DMCA, but I would have liked to have seen Fritz Hollings' face when his fellow committee member offered up this legislation.
I just wish Larry would mention Gutenberg more...
Actually, it gets weirder.
Ebay's got this partnership/close-connection/they spam you with a group called SquareTrade that you can sign up for (I think you have to have certain number of feedbacks/powerseller status).
SquareTrade lets you do feedback resolution--though of course you have to send them an extra couple of dollars each month.
I guess ebay uses a third party to keep from being considered in any way responsible for comments... but I don't think it's that hard to remove negative feedback (never done it myself.)
You're certainly right that every business should have other sources of income (I do worry about my own site's single source). But I think google's raking it in on the click-through ads.
.40 cents per click, on keywords that generate around 500,000 impressions a month.
Typically, where I advertise, there are eight or nine other people trying for the same keyword. I've got the green-shifted look despite paying the minimum because I'm allowed to include "free" in my description, but there's usually five people above me, meaning they're paying at least six cents; often as much as
That number really starts to add up when you think of all the web businesses, and all the keywords, and all the searches, and all the clicks, but I guess we won't have a better idea until google files with the SEC prior to their IPO...
One thought, however, is the way google text ads are now showing at places like Metafilter or a number of the PDA news sites. Google's out to score more impressions any way they can... must be worth something to them.
This I dispute sir. Targeted keywords on google, where my clickthrough ratio has averaged 1.3-1.5%, are a goldmine for my site and money very well-spent (averaging $500 a month on those ads, paying .05 in 97% of all cases.)
I've been a google advertiser since Feb. 02, consider their program extremely lucrative, and I guess they like me 'cause I got a picture frame from them last Christmas. It was a Coach picture frame....
Yeah, and I'd also add that one of the big sources for books on DP is (currently) large, grant-funded, completely useless to the average reader operations like MOA and, to a lesser extent, CWRU or Canadiana.org.
These other sites digitized 10s of thousands of titles, but the stuff isn't even really available (think huge single page images, slow-moving search engines, etc.).
However, these images download great through a second PC, get OCR'd, ftp'ed, copyright clearance, tons of volunteers help, another person manages the project: boom! DP's gonna easily do a million pages this year should have their 1,000th book next month...
and they're growing.
Thanks!
(I'm the one responsible for Anatomy of Melancholy, but also lots of mysteries, Parkman, 'n stuff so please don't kill me.)
Well, there's a general consensus that mainstream reference sources have been going down in quality over the past decade (not really the advanced stuff, I'm thinking more like grade school textbooks).
It's gotten so bad that the publishing trade group has a report textbook error link.
But of course, those errors won't be fixed until next year (if ever). Collaborative effort has that kind of thing beat cold.
Though it will take time...
OK, I'm linking to my own site here, cause OMACL seems to be down for the count.
You're absolutely right in your Christian elements--still to be chatted about is Tolkien's use of the Story of the Volsungs -- text that most feel is his primary source.
Then, like Wagner, he also read up on the
Nibelungenlied (though not to the same extent as Wagner) as well as the Elder Edda
If you're not into reading online, I do recommend a Haney translation.
Hmm, it's a number I've heard. The weekly booklist.csv file has around 18,000 titles listed, though it includes some PG works, and groups entire series as one line (for a sci-fi series, that can be quite a few titles).
.rpg group.)
However, booklist.csv is by no means complete, containing 0 technical works, for example (which are the most significant pirated books, from a revenue standpoint, and look to be damn numerous... then there's that
Booklist.csv also doesn't categorize sites like this one...
Oddly enough, Linux might have a real shot in the "larger pda/tablet market." There are stories out there about IBM's Meta Pad, as well reports of an AMD/China/Alchemy Semiconductor type thing... both situations where MS need not apply.
Even the Lindows guy is talking about $500 tablets... though he's thinking handwriting recognition isn't needed.
I think tablets look cool, and do have applications in medical/retail/industrial settings, but not for $2,000, not yet. Hoping Midori or whatever, plus other chip options, besides full-fledged Pentiums can get the cost down.
Pitchbabe for Dayquil--"and I was going to a commercial, but my head on the cold medications was like, beep, beep, beep so my speech went zoink--it would have been a good commercial."
Actually, they're working on that.
The program is Gutcheck, was developed by PG's Jim Tinsley.
Catches a lot!
Actually, the quote's from Mike McGee at the Inquirer.
So how's that affecting Dover's business (Dover produces no new titles, apart from original translations of non-copyrighted work)? They're booming.
Heck, with those sort of results, Dover ought to be providing financial support for PG (or at least releasing edited/translated titles into the public domain). Though I guess I'll settle for that nice brief they filed in Eldred's behalf.
Slight disclaimer here, Dover was bought by a big printing company that's really helped them with distribution (just came back from the beach and all the little bookstores there were well-stocked with Dover thrifts), but every other publisher on the planet has seen sales fall, while Dover's sales, since the acquisition, have grown tremendously.
another country that's sticking to Life+50 (or, why you can download 1984 and The Great Gatsby from a legit server).
Way to go, Taiwan!
Or, just sell your own stuff on ebay, make a decent listing, fair price, put a copyright notice in place, and drive the would-be pirates out.
Sounds to me like you're missing out on a market...
(I've had the same sort of thing happen, but I e-mailed the guy, amused, and after a conversation where I got to use the phrase "don't you lie to me like I'm Montel Williams," dude pulled away.)