December 2004 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Final Report on eBookWise 1150
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 26 Dec '04

26 Dec '04

I promised a final report after the eBookWise 1500 Librarian was released. It was released last week. It took me a little while to get the computer and the device to talk to each other, but the problem turned out to be that I had only turned the computer off and on after each program was installed. I was supposed to have completely unplugged the computer. Please do not flame me over this. You are authorized to disagree with me. I know that some people would rather spend 42 days stuck in a semiprivate hospital room with a roommate who is in love with the soaps, than possess a device that will allow them to read and mentally tune out the television. Forget about all the negative comments in my initial report. As long as I have loved and been faithful to my Rocket, I have to admit that the 1500 is better. It will allow me to do things that my Rocket won't allow, including making handwritten notes with my stylus, so henceforth the Rocket will be my pleasure reading device and the 1500 (we have named her Isis, to relate well to my computer, whose name is Sesheta. Sesheta was the ancient Egyptian goddess of libraries and librarians; Isis was the Lady high everything else.) will be my work device. The only problem I'm still having is the fact that Isis holds only about 20 books. But after I get to the computer store and get a SmartMedia card and its driver, Isis will hold over 300 books very easily. This is a winner. If you have any interest in being able to carry 300, or even 20, books around in your purse or backpack without tearing your shoulder into shreds, hie yourself over to eBookWise.com and buy the eBookWise while the price is right. $110 will buy and deliver it, and you'll then be given $20 to spend on books. All books are 20% off for about another week. With this device, you can read ANY BOOK ON THE INTERNET, unless it is in an encrypted format incompatible with .txt and .htm and .doc. You can definitely use it to read anything posted on PG and anything posted on Blackmask. Between FictionWise and eBookWise, literally thousands of commercial titles are available. Also anything you can get in .rb will transform itself into the right format in less than a minute. If you use a PDA or even a cellular phone with a lot of memory, you can carry around one to three books, if you don't mind reading in teensie weensie typesize with a line that consists of three words (or two if they're longer words). Blech. Yesterday at the family Christmas party I was showing this thing to my husband's former wife, and she held it in her hand and said, "Well, it doesn't weigh less than a book that size." I conceded the point--a Rocket is 18 ounces and I think an eBookWise 1500 is about 22 ounces-- but then pointed out that it weighs far less than 20, or 300, books that size. (When anybody in our family is in the hospital for more than a day, daily book runs are necessary to take away the read books and bring new ones. This device will obviate that necessity. Although it is true that you should never have valuable stuff lying around your hospital room, as thieves are familiar with hospital rooms, you can ask a kind nurse to lock it away for you when you're about to go to sleep.) Or--You're travelling cross-country. Every evening you stop at a motel. At the motel, you have your choice of the Gideon Bible if it hasn't been swiped, the food service menu, or television--or your own selection of 300 books. OR--if you're stuck in the hospital emergency room waiting interminably for somebody to come and attend to you or your loved one, wouldn't you like to have something to read with you? Maybe even two somethings, so that the person in bed, if it's not you, can also have something to read? If I had the money I'd give one of these to everybody I know. If you don't want one, don't buy it. But if you can afford it, at least give it a one-week trial. Then if you still don't like it, give it to somebody you don't like. Anne

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Revolutionary chapter / Google's ambitious book-scanning plan seen as key shift in paper-based culture
by Steve Thomas 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

Not sure if I sent this already, but it provides some useful info on the process Google is adopting. In the light of discussion on this topic so far, this may be enlightening for some readers. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/20/BUGROAD6QT1.DTL -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, Adelaide University Library ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 8 8303 5190 Fax: +61 8 8303 4369 Email: stephen.thomas(a)adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/

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Re: [gutvol-d] RE: [gavel-d] Ibn Batuta
by D. Starner 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

"Dave Fawthrop" writes: > Maybe a friend of a friend of someone on gutvol-d? I don't think it's helpful to try and push people into handling a entire specific book right at the start, especially without OCR. > There are quite a lot of people who can read Classical Arabic, There's a lot of language communities out there that PG doesn't have much contact with. > Unicode has all the characters required. Also right to left writing. Unicode has pretty much all the letters we need, sans the myriad varietes of early 20th-century phonetic characters. That doesn't mean we can transcribe them easily. > Also because Arabic is a language designed for calligraphy, a page scan of > a well written copy would be useful. It's not really any different from English. A page of English calligraphy may be beautiful, but it's not a text version. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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!@!Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Project Googleberg (fwd)
by Michael Hart 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

Request permission to quote/forward your comments, you can be anonymous if you like. . .as it may get back to Google. . . . > I have examined what seems to be the preliminary "Googleprint" > catalog. It consists of books scanned and posted by other people > including us. At least half of them that I looked at are available > only as page scans, and I have to want a book an awful lot to put > page scans together just for my own use. They use a LOT of our > books; in fact, everything they have that they are aware we have > shows us as the best or only site to go and get the book. Though from this message it wasn't clear whose words these are. David A. Desrosiers desrod(a)gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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Re: [gutvol-d] RE: [gavel-d] Ibn Batuta
by D. Starner 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

"Dave Fawthrop" writes: > The original ?Arabic? would be nice. In etext form? Yes. In paper form, it'd be down right useless for PG. We just don't have anyone really capable of handling it. We don't have OCR--the Urdu team at DP-EU is completely type-in, and I don't know of anyone interested in proofing more than a few lines of Arabic. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Project Googleberg
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

In a message dated 12/24/2004 6:43:46 PM Mountain Standard Time, flis(a)detk.com writes: Who would put such an attachment? I haven't the foggiest. Some great guru of the Internet must have done it. I'm glad I'm not the culprit. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Project Googleberg
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

In a message dated 12/24/2004 11:37:36 AM Mountain Standard Time, jlinden(a)pglaf.org writes: All your messages come through with an attachment because you use HTML formatted mail. I didn't know that. What kind of an attachment is it? Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Project Googleberg
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 24 Dec '04

24 Dec '04

In a message dated 12/23/2004 5:42:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, hacker(a)gnu-designs.com writes: First and foremost, when composing email, the best place for your text is in the the _body_ of the email, not sent as an attachment (a non-RFC-compliant attachment at that). Please don't do that. Where was the attachment? What was the attachment? I ask because I didn't remember an attachment and when I went back and looked at my "send" list I didn't find an attachment. Therefore, if there was an attachment, somebody else attached it and I'd like to know who, when, how, and why. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Project Googleberg
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 24 Dec '04

24 Dec '04

In a message dated 12/23/2004 5:42:07 PM Mountain Standard Time, hacker(a)gnu-designs.com writes: Second, when you wish to post to a mailing list about a particular subject, it is best to read the archives first, in full, so you can see if the subject or question you were about to ask has been discussed before, as this one has. Please go back and re-read the archives of the last few weeks to bring yourself up to speed on the issues, concerns, support, and other items related to "Google Print". Thank you for your suggestions. Now I am going to ignore them completely, as I have far too much to do to go back and reread all the archives. I prefer to risk being redundant than to risk leaving a question unanswered. A question was asked. I looked into the matter. I answered the question. Period. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Re: E-DOCS: Google Print Questions [J. Roland]
by Joshua Hutchinson 23 Dec '04

23 Dec '04

----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Hart" <hart(a)pglaf.org> > > As one who works from a lot of older works to not only scan and OCR but > > correct them, I know how much human labor is involved. There are volunteer > > efforts like Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php , > > but I have concluded that it takes me more time to set up a project for them > > than it would take for me to do the proofreading myself, and my work would > > likely be more accurate, since I would understand the underlying content and > > know how to render obscure text. > > While it does take a little time to set up one's first project with the > Distributed Proofreaders, it is usually quite a bit easier the second time, > not to mention that we have volunteers who will walk you through processes > the first few times around, which seems to do the trick for nearly everyone. > I just want to make a quick comment on this part (since I somehow missed the initial e-mail). Setting up projects at DP is not time consuming (well, the upload of the image files can be, depending on your internet connection), especially once you've done it a few times. As one of the larger DP project managers (currently at 687 projects created for DP), I can tell you that there is NO WAY to proof even an easy text in the amount of time it takes to create and upload the project to DP. Even if I take into account OCR time (which I batch up and run overnight), it is still less time than I would take to proof the work. I can also reiterated Michael's comment that there are plenty of folks ready to help out new content providers on their first few projects. It can be a little daunting the first time, but it gets easier once you've done a couple times. Also, for folks that don't want to get heavily involved, we can usually work something out with someone that just wants to provide the image scans. We can usually take it from there (assuming they are public domain scans, of course). Josh PS I also haven't created any new projects in many months because of the backlog we've got in the system. I wanted to help clear out some more work before sending more into the queue. So those 687 were done in a much shorter frame of time than my login statistics at DP might otherwise imply.

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