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

letter from blind PG user in Thailand RE: .txt vs. anything else
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

I just got an extremely distressed snailmail letter from a retired professor of Oriental and Buddhist studies, who is blind and lives in Thailand. I quote him: "Now as far as I can tell there are no more e-books available in "txt" format but only in "HTM" format. I am blind as I stated at the outset. I use an Apple computer with a screen reading programme called "OutSpoken" which conflicts with many document formats. It also conflicts with many common programmes, but that's another story which has nothing to do with you. "My problem with the Project Gutenberg Archive in its present form is that when I download a book, the file on my computer includes many rubbish characters which make it virtually impossible to read." <<a couple of paragraphs omitted>> "So in conclusion I thank you for services rendered me in the past and regret that they are no longer available to me because of the remarkable technological advances that you are incorporating into your archive. Yours, frustrated and regretful, Dr. Peter Della SAntina." I have told him that most books still are in .txt as well as other things, and that when they aren't, the problem usually is that they are prohibitively long and/or contain characters which we cannot use to post in .txt. I then told him that whenever he runs into this problem, he is to email me and I personally will send him a copy of the book in .txt; if I don't get it to him within 3 days, he is to assume I'm ill and send the request to Aaron Cannon. I know what he's talking about because I downloaded a copy of Kipling's story "The Brushwood Boy" a couple of weeks ago in .htm form and found a lot of rubbish characters in it, but I just read around them despite feeling rather exasperated. I had been seized with an acute wish to read the story at three AM, and after getting up, booting my computer etc., downloading it, putting it on my ebook reader, shutting everything down again, and going back to bed, my desire to redownload it at that time was nonexistent. Anyway, that could not possibly have been a recent post, though for all I know it might be a recent REpost. Most .htm files work just fine on that ebook reader. I told Dr. Santina that I appreciated his letting me know, and asked him to notify us if he ran into such problems in the future. I think this is a strong argument for continuing Michael's practice of posting everything in English in .txt AND whatever else rather than in whatever else by itself. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] Moving and Removing eBooks
by D. Starner 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

"Michael Dyck" writes: > By the way, I'm curious as to why D. Starner would like to get rid of > those editions. Are they particularly bad/questionable for some reason? They're copyrighted, and PG has generally discouraged, for good reason, copyrighted editions of public domain works. From what Michael Hart said, I got the impression that it was an early 1930s edition; hence it does the other thing that annoys PGers to no end, adding a new copyright to material with no new copyrightable material. And if the edition really is so much better than the public domain ones, there should be something on the files talking about the edition, instead of it just looking like someone else digitalized a public domain edition and decided to give PG a copyright with a new copyright on it. > > Would someone be willing to do all the work to donate a Britannica 11th > > to Project Gutenberg this year if they thought it would be removed from > > Project Gutenberg a decade after it was first included? > > Yes, I would. And if you ask "Why would you go to all that effort, only > to have the results deleted in 10 years?", I would point out that it > would only be PG's copy that's deleted; the results of my work would > live on, elsewhere on the web. /* 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. */ Any person's actions are ultimately ephemeral. Most effort in the real world goes to the completely ephemeral; most of the rest, blogs and garage bands and writers trying to create the Great American Novel, will be disappear not long after it was created without even creating a ripple on the sea of life. Kubla Khan, the work of a couple hours spent as high as a kite, is interesting; the poetry of most college students, even stuff labored over for months, isn't. It doesn't matter how much work went into it; what matters is useful results. Speaking personally, I've got scans of several books on my hard drive that turned out to already be in progress. I shrug my shoulders and go on; that some part of my work will turn out to be for naught is inevitable. In the process of producing a German translation of Alice in Wonderland, I have scanned new versions of the Tenniel illustrations, as the previous ones are too small to capture the detail, and we can afford larger file sizes nowadays. If someone in ten years decides to produce the definitive version of the Tenniel illustrations and push aside my edition, then so be it; I certainly won't take it personally. If something of mine has to be redone or deleted, then it has to be redone or deleted. I certainly don't advocate the widescale wasting of work that's already done, but I don't agree with the argument that we should keep something of no value because someone put work into. But I certainly seem to be a minority voice here. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Re: [gutvol-d] letter from blind PG user in Thailand RE: .txt vs.anything else
by Joshua Hutchinson 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

----- Original Message ----- From: Gutenberg9443(a)aol.com > > I think this is a strong argument for continuing Michael's practice of > posting everything in English in .txt AND whatever else rather than in whatever > else by itself. > No one has advocated doing away with .txt as a posted format. The closest I can recall is a suggestion to do away with 7-bit ASCII text files. Deleted accents never made much sense to me anyway, so I certainly wouldn't cry over the loss of 7-bit ASCII. The only books that should be unavailable in text are ones that physically CAN'T be done in text, such as the complex mathematical works that requires TeX and PDF work. If anyone finds a book that does not have a text version posted should contact the bugs email address at PG to get that fixed ASAP. Josh

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DP crisis?
by N Wolcott 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Does DP have a post-processing crisis? With thousands of volunteers texts flow regularly through the OCR and first phase quickly. However there are several thousand books that have been in post processing over a year. Many of these are hard, but many are plain text. Is it appropriate to re-scan a book to start the process over again hoping for better luck? One could clear another edition, etc. N Wolcott nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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Nightly feed of clearance information--Possible?
by D Garcia 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

It would be excellent to have a nightly-updated feed of appropriately anonymized Cleared clearances published by PG in the same or similar format as the Catalog feed. Granted, this is not the same as David Price's list, but it would be beneficial to would-be content providers and take some of the load off of him. There is the drawback that the old 'gbn' clearances would not be in the new database, but it should be possible if there is a willing volunteer able to convert those appropriately to the new format, and I will mention that I have appropriate experience in this area. I can forsee some difficulty in tying old clearances to current PG usernames, though many should be mappable via email address. Thoughts?

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Re: [gutvol-d] Nightly feed of clearance information--Possible?
by D. Starner 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

"Greg Newby" writes: > Is this style enough, from two recent clearances: > > OK 20050104154143pergaud Le roman de Miraut, chien de chasse Louis Pergaud 1913:c > > OK 20050104152050malot En famille Hector Malot 1895:c OK, based on library > stamp.--Juliet As one of the people who wants this, that would fine. It'd be nice to have all the authors names, though, especially translators. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Looking for text editor which does ...
by Jon Noring 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

Everyone, A basic question... I'd like to get the recommendations of the long-timers here for a Windows-based GUI text editor or utility which cleans up *selected* paragraphs of text (in plain text documents) to create uniform line lengths with hard line breaks. The situation is that I have a large marked-up text document where many paragraphs have varying and (many times) quite long line lengths. For example, a paragraph may consist of three lines, the first may be 250 characters long, the second 50 characters long, and the third 120 characters long -- and I'd like to "regularize" the paragraph with lines exactly 70 characters or less in length (this paragraph is an example of such "regularization".) I'd like to simply select those three lines in the utility, click a button or something, and the text is automagically "regularized" (no hyphenation, one space between words, etc.) It gets quite laborious doing this by hand with my text editor of choice, vi (I use Lemmy, a Windows vi-clone, for most of my text editing needs.) I do NOT want a tool which only globally does this to the whole document (i.e. there are longer lines in the document which I wish to keep unbroken.) And I do NOT want a tool requiring typing in a long command line -- by the time I do that I could regularize the paragraph by hand in my editor. I just want to select and regularize. So, what's out there? Obviously Project Gutenbergers must use various tools to "regularize" paragraphs. (There's no doubt a different word most everyone here uses to describe this process, but I don't know what it is, thus the use of the word "regularize".) Thanks. Jon Noring

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Nightly feed of clearance information--Possible?
by Wallace J.McLean 17 Jan '05

17 Jan '05

This has been discussed at PGDP as well. I'm all for it... but I'd go for semi-anonymized: there should be a mechanism whereby people with similar interests can find one another, collaborate, and minimize duplication of effort, after bumping into each other in the virtual stacks. ----- Original Message ----- >From D Garcia <donovan(a)abs.net> Date Sun, 16 Jan 2005 17:10:39 -0500 To gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org Subject [gutvol-d] Nightly feed of clearance information--Possible? It would be excellent to have a nightly-updated feed of appropriately anonymized Cleared clearances published by PG in the same or similar format as the Catalog feed.

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Dead, down, broken, missing, empty Gutenberg mirrors
by David A. Desrosiers 17 Jan '05

17 Jan '05

I just took a few minutes to check the mirror list (mostly because the ibiblio rsync mirror is now so slow, a 9600 modem would be faster at sending bits across). Here's what I found: d == domain down/dead a == access required r == connection refused e == empty collection w == wrong path (for ftp mirrors) 4 == 404 (for http mirrors) l == limit reached [d] ftp://ftpbook.dhs.org/mirrors/gutenberg/ [a] ftp://elib.phil.pku.edu.cn/pub/gutenberg/ [r] ftp://dlib.eramisp.com/gut/ [e] http://gutenberg.kk.dk/ [w] ftp://www.artfiles.org/gutenberg.org/ [e] ftp://ftp.iif.hu/pub/gutenberg/ [4] http://gutenberg.unipmn.it/mirror/ [l] ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/metalab.unc.edu/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/ [w] ftp://ftp.samurai.com/pub/gutenberg/ [d] http://www.atexiansattic.com/www2/gutenberg/ [e] http://www.spiritdancers.org/pg/ Maybe this will be useful to others who maintain that SQL dump list. David A. Desrosiers desrod(a)gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com

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Top 1000 collection list and suggestion
by Steve Herber 16 Jan '05

16 Jan '05

I found this list recently: TECH BIT: Top 1000 Most Widely Held Library Books OCLC Research, a division of the international Online Computer Library Center, has compiled a list of the top 1000 titles owned by its 50,000+ member libraries. View the top 10 (which includes the Bible, Mother Goose, and The Lord of the Rings) or all 1000 titles online. http://www.oclc.org/research/top1000/ http://www.oclc.org/research/top1000/complete.htm An annotated version of this list with two extra pieces of data would make an interesting Project Gutenberg web page. I would like to see a link to the Gutenberg edition and the date the item went into or will go into the public domain. I think some people will start to see the negative aspect of the long copyright times at the same time discovering how many documents are available from the Project. I am not currently on the mail list, so you may have already discussed this list. Cheers, -- Steve Herber herber(a)thing.com work: 206-221-7262 Security Engineer, UW Medicine, IT Services home: 425-454-2399

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