[PGCanada] eBooks in French

Wallace J.McLean ag737 at freenet.carleton.ca
Mon Nov 29 13:54:04 PST 2004


----- Original Message -----
From: Carlo Traverso <traverso at dm.unipi.it>
Date: Monday, November 29, 2004 4:28 pm
Subject: Re: [PGCanada] eBooks in French

> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Hart <hart at pglaf.org> writes:
> 
>    Michael> Will there be a particular interest in doing eBooks in
>    Michael> French?
> 
>    Michael> If so, would you be willing to cooperate with volunteers
>    Michael> who actually live in France [and other French speaking
>    Michael> countries]?
> 
> 
> We had a meeting in Paris last saturday, exactly on this issue, to
> arrive at a coordination of all francophone PG-like projects. The
> outcome might be a site in french, located in Canada, and a close
> coordination of PG/DP activities in french with
> http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/  ; PG clearance procedures are
> currently the main obstacle to having more french books in PG, with
> clearance tailored on Life+50 we could reach 1000 in a short time.


There are several non-DP, non-PG efforts in Canada:

http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/
http://jydupuis.apinc.org/
http://www.bnquebec.ca/numtextes/accueil.htm


The first might be amenable to co-operation and co-ordination.

The second, from my dealings with him, wouldn't be. Someone else may 
have better luck in opening a dialogue.

The third, through Rénald Lévesque and other DP volunters, has already 
contributed some works to DP/PG by providing scans that were stored at 
the BNQ as PDF files. I was actually going to start work on this title 
before I noticed Rénald had beaten me to the punch:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/0/3/14030/14030-h/14030-h.htm

Life+50 does open up a good number of works, but the PG/US rules, with 
everything pre-1923 up for grabs, also open up the use of what must be 
at least several hundred, if not thousand, Canadian books in French 
alone; that's not even considering other francophone countries (most of 
which are life+70); or non-monographs, esp. magazines and other serials.

I find the main problem for a lot of European imprints and the existing 
DP site is the infuriating lack of a publication date anywhere in the 
front or end matter. I would have picked up a lot of books in LOTE, 
including French, at recent sales; as it was I had to restrict myself 
to material that was either dated, or very very clearly pre-1923.



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