January 2005 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks, mostly OT
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

In a message dated 1/4/2005 2:24:00 PM Mountain Standard Time, shalesller(a)writeme.com writes: >There are huge differences between some editions, >including major >plot changes between the two editions of Frankenstein, >and major >bowlerdization in editions of other books. Yes, non->scholars care. >I personally don't demand typo for typo, but I don't want >a portmanteau >of texts that the author never saw and no editor ever >wrote. Are both Frankensteins posted now? I'd love to compare the two. Whoever, whenever, gets to do T. H. White's Arthur cycle is going to go nuts--the books exist in at least five extremely different versions. I did a paper on it in grad school. I am devoutly thankful that I'll be dead before anybody has to do that task. The rest of this is partly OT: Recently someone accused me of reading Tom Swift, so out of sheer orneriness I went and did it. I DISTINCTLY remember, when I was twelve and my brother Bill was nine, Bill throwing a fit about all the things that were being blamed on the confederates, and I had to explain to him the difference between the Confederates and the confederates. Almost all of those references are gone now. In fact, the book that upset him the most--the one in which Tom Swift is hunting platinum in Siberia--the word does not appear once. I haven't read them for about 45 years (except for three that I read a few years ago when I was too ill to do anything at all requiring thought and had not yet discovered that The Shadow and Doc Savage were online), so I was amazed at how greedy and unsavvy Tom Swift is. His second-best friend, Mr. Damon, has been kidnapped, Our Hero has promised Mrs. Damon that he will get him back, and then Our Hero placidly goes back to work on his new invention. He almost never reports a crime to the police. And no matter what country he's in, he sees nothing wrong with taking gold, platinum, artifacts, and whatever the heck he wants. I don't know whether the author was that ignorant or just plain didn't care. Maybe that was legal in some countries about WWI era, but I doubt it. It certainly was illegal in Egypt. Joke of the day: Yesterday we were walking home from the grocery store and my husband, seeing a line of birds perched on an electric cable, said, "See, even the birds are online!" Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] PG-50/70?
by Joshua Hutchinson 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

I'm confused. Is there a problem with PG-Australia (life+50) or PG-Europe (life+70)? PG-Australia: http://gutenberg.net.au/ PG-Europe: http://www.gutenberg.nl/ Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Wallace J.McLean" <ag737(a)freenet.carleton.ca> To: gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org Subject: [gutvol-d] PG-50/70? Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:05:23 -0500 > > OK, once I again I issue the call: when are we -- the collective we -- > going to set up Project Gutenbergs, or similar, to take advantage of > (and suffer the disadvantage of) life+ copyright rules? > > Especially WRT life+50, time is of the essence... > > Anyone? Buehler? > > I don't have the technical or financial resources to do this. Someone > in a life+50 country must, though. Where are you? > > Can we get something, even if only a shell, up and running by month's > end? > > At least insofar as Canadian life+50 law is concerned, I will GLADLY > offer to volunteer to do copyright clearances. I'll discuss my > qualifications privately with anyone who may need to know them. > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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Google Search/PG Header Suggestion
by Dennis McCarthy 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

A thought just occured to me concerning Google searches and PG texts... It was mentioned in a previous thread that Google has set up a way to prioritize a search, such that "book" plus your term will give added priority to your search with its Google Print database. One searches Google Print through its normal search engine. The Print results (if any) come up first, followed by external internet site results. The current PG header does not actually have the word "book" in it. The term "ebook" is used a couple times. If the header could be rewritten to include the word "book" somewhere, then PG texts may come up higher in search results, when browers are searching for on-line texts by title or author. Obviously the PG book would not come up as a Google Print result, but may be more visible in the other results. --------------------------- Dennis McCarthy nihil_obstat(a)mindspring.com

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Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
by D. Starner 04 Jan '05

04 Jan '05

Michael Hart writes: > > eBooks often have multiple paper sources. PG eBooks verifiably do not often have multiple paper sources. They sometimes, occasionally, have multiple paper sources. It is the exception that they have multiple paper sources, and even more the exception that they come from multiple paper editions. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
by Joshua Hutchinson 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Ingram" <jonathan_ingram(a)yahoo.com> To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 14:00:29 -0800 (PST) > > Several of DP's content providers, myself included, intend over the new few > years to find decent editions of works already in PG, but which are not in a > state that we would find acceptable if we were proofreading it ourselves (this > includes most of the first few thousand texts). Hopefully over time we can > update all PG's content to a standard we're happy with. > > -- > Jon Ingram > > As one of the other big content providers over at DP, I can say that Jon's word speak for me perfectly. There is NO reason to exclude the information, but PLENTY of reason to keep it. It was pretty much a no brainer for me. Josh

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'CDDB' for Gutenberg texts
by Jonathan Hendry 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

Hi, I'm new here. I hope this isn't out of place. I'm working on a Mac OS X program for reading Gutenberg e-texts. It occurs to me that it would be useful if there were something for Gutenberg e-texts akin to the CDDB database for MP3s. It would hold information about e-texts, keyed to the Gutenberg filename. The sort of information stored would be things like long-format titles, author's name, information about the Gutenberg file if it's a revision, information about the original source text, etc. This would all be useful for developers of ebook readers, or web interfaces to the Gutenberg texts. This information is often available in the files themselves, but it would be difficult to extract it through software. It might be extended to include character lists for novels or plays, synopses, summaries, connections to other works, byte offsets to chapter starts, file-specific aids to parsing, and other useful bits of information. The information would be supplied by users, piece by piece, similar to the way people submit track listings to CDDB. Ideally, etext reader apps would have a UI for entering and uploading new information. There'd be no change to the Gutenberg files themselves. The meta-info would all be kept apart from the e-texts. So the format need not change, old texts wouldn't need updating, and the files would remain universally compatible. If the user has an etext program which supports it, then after downloading a text, they would have the option download the meta-info from a separate 'gtdb' server. The program could then use the meta-info to enhance the user interface. Naturally, the "gtdb" database would be non-commercial, and in some non-proprietary format, and/or available as SQL dumps. So, my questions. 1) Is anyone working on such a thing already? 2) Has such a thing been discussed? 3) Does anyone else think it'd be a good thing? Thanks, Jon

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Re: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
by Dennis McCarthy 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

Clarification: My point below was that _a few pages_ of a common work is not particularly useful in the grand scheme of things. (A few pages is all Google Print would offer for most books). An _entire text_ everyone has individual access to is a different matter entirely, and why many of us contribute to PG. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Hart <hart(a)pglaf.org> Sent: Jan 3, 2005 10:57 AM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject: Re: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks > (How important, really, is it to look at just a few pages of a book that is > in most public libraries and many book stores?) Well. . .this brings us to the entire point of why have Project Gutenberg? Why give people an entire home library of eBooks that are "in most public libraries and many book stores?" * I say the answer is simply individual access rather than public access. Of course, Ray Bradbury VIOLENTLY disagrees with me here, and I understand why he does. . .he believes in the social experience of libraries. --------------------------- Dennis McCarthy nihil_obstat(a)mindspring.com

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Re: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
by Dennis McCarthy 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

Of particular concern to PG voluteers will be the clarity of the page scans of Google Print's public domain works, which will mainly come from the academic libraries' rare books archives. As far as I am concerned this is the best potential of Google Print--to make works available that 99.999% of the population never had access to. (How important, really, is it to look at just a few pages of a book that is in most public libraries and many book stores?) I doubt those libraries will allow Google to cut up the books--and rightly so--therefore the quality of the images may not be as good. Although Google makes it difficult to download these pages images, we all know that where there is a will, there is a way. And perhaps some PG volunteers will use these page scans for a real e-book. Better scans would make for easier transcriptions. >From the Google Print side, worse scan would probably cause more errors in their behind-the-scenes OCR database linked to each page scan--making searches of these pages less accurate. Hopefully for researches, this increase in error rate will be a fraction of a percent, but who knows? -----Original Message----- From: juliet.sutherland(a)verizon.net Sent: Dec 31, 2004 11:09 PM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject: Re: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks > 3. Google cut the pages ('cos the scans are just _beautiful_!) and scan > the pages of the books into images. As I've previously noted, destructive scanning of modern reprints is easy and usually results in good images and good OCR. --------------------------- Dennis McCarthy nihil_obstat(a)mindspring.com

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Re: [gutenberg] Re: [gutvol-d] Re: barriers to XML posting
by D. Starner 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

"Bruce Albrecht" <bruce(a)zuhause.org> writes: > It's nice that it can output it in some sort of XML, but I wouldn't > want it in Microsoft Word XML format. Microsoft file formats are > proprietary and have a tendency to change at every release. We don't have to worry about Microsoft, we have to worry about what the OCR program puts out. Which will most likely be a subset of the stable, well-documented part of Word XML. In any case, XML is just a storage format. This discussion is much like asking if the OCR program will output zip files; what matters is what's in the files. There's no reason to switch from the current use of RTF unless there's more information available through another format, be it an XML based one or not. We're going to have to switch it into our formats, anyway. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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re: Re: [gutvol-d] Re: barriers to XML posting
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 03 Jan '05

03 Jan '05

joshua said: > Honestly, I see an easy compromise here. oh-oh, something smells bad here... :+) > As long as a conformant TEXT file > and a conformant HTML file > show up with the XML file, > I say post all three. well then i'm sure glad you don't _have_ a say... > Granted, right now we don't have a method > for the WW'ers to verify the XML file is valid all these minor details, eh? > so if you want to put a disclaimer to that effect in the file ... fine. a disclaimer? that's your "compromise". yeah, right. for those on the outside, who wonder why this fuss is being made whether an .xml file can be "posted", it's because the x.m.l. people want the imprimatur of being "official". why is that so important? because that's how the x.m.l. ponzi game is being played these days. people are adopting x.m.l. not because they think it's the best route, but rather because they've been "convinced" that it is "inevitable". even though -- in too many situations -- it just plain doesn't work, this "inevitability" makes people shrug and say, "ok, give me some." after all, you don't want to miss out on the ground floor, do you? they will tell you time and time again how there are "so many tools" for dealing with x.m.l., how x.m.l. is gonna be able to do conversions for whatever format anyone wants, but they can't even demonstrate a simple ability to convert out a text file and an .html version now. and when you call them on that, they whine about how unreasonable you are being, and how unfair it is to expect "150% perfection". bull. it is _far_ more sensible -- especially in, as jim delicately put it, a "production environment rather than an experimental one" -- to make the process _work_ before you put it in play, the x.m.l. people don't want to be bothered with that "technicality" before the fact. that's something that someone will figure out "later". yeah, right. if x.m.l. gets the stamp of approval here, what's the motivation for x.m.l. experts to come make it work? after all, there's no money in it for them here. they're off being high-paid consultants, telling the next mark, "look, even project gutenberg is using x.m.l. now too." as marcello puts it: > At this point we need to set a signal that the TEI era has started. he's not interested in actually making t.e.i. _work_ in reality -- he tried, and got a grand total of two simple e-texts done -- he just wants to "set a signal" that the "era has started" here... -bowerbird

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