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

www.gutenberg.org
by Marcello Perathoner 25 Dec '05

25 Dec '05

As of my request ibiblio has changed our apache virtual host ServerName from gutenberg.net to www.gutenberg.org. What? Nothing changes in web site operation except one little particular (if you hit a non-existing url you get redirected to www.gutenberg.org instead of gutenberg.net) Why? The .org top-level domain is meant for non-profit organizations while the .net domain is meant for network infrastructure such as providers, backbones etc. We own both gutenberg.net and gutenberg.org, but using the latter one is just more standard-compliant. Although both urls www.gutenberg.net and www.gutenberg.org give exactly the same results, you should start using www.gutenberg.org in all publications, papers etc. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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More PG spam being spread around
by N Wolcott 09 Apr '05

09 Apr '05

Resellers of PG books have taken on a new target, Lulu.com. Lulu offers POD publishing at zero up front cost, thus luring those who find free advertising for their spam. The postings I have seen so far both imply PG and Lulu are supporting thier spam. They advertise the quality of their texts as being from PG. One ofthem admits there may be errors. There is probably nothing for PG to do except to get Lulu to take the PG off their customer's postings. If they want to host 15000 books on their computers for free that is their business. I quote my post to the LuLu foruml I have posted 2 books to Lulu at 15 cent royalty with added content to the PG text and I do not mention PG in the blurb. My "quality" book may soon be submerged in a flood of lulu spam. Posting follows: ------------------------- Lulu offers a good service for self publishers who provide "content added" material. This offers the publisher to continually upgrade the product until it is in final form then market it through Lulu's various mechanisms. However recently public domain texts lifted from project gutenberg have been appearing on Lulu. The accomopanying blurb states that www.lulu.com and Project gutenberg have joined forces to offer you these long out of print books. The implication is that somehow Lulu and PG are supporting this effort. PG is trademarked and there is no right to use the name in advertising; enforcing the trademark is another thin however for an all volunteer organization. Software exists to move PG texts to a number of formats, ipod, ebook, etc including Lulu. So there is a real possibillity that most of the 15000 pg books could end up being hosted on Lulu. No review copy would ever be required, so the posting for the converter would be free. Lulu could end up hosting the entire pg corpus for free in a kind of publishing spam. The books are listed with a royalty of $1 to $2. One is published with a $1.59 royalty, and claims that $1 will be contriputed to PG of every book sold. This leaves only 27 cents for the seller. Iin one case the publisher had re-copyrighted the book and in the other had listed it as Public Domain. Nothing wrong with this, but the copyright only applies to "new material" and certainly not the entire book. In one case a ISBN number was listed, so Lulu might have gotten some revenue from that if the ISBN is real. One of the books was listed as 5000 in sales, so I imagine that is how many Lulu has in its archive. It may soon get 14,999 more! Another feature with Lulu is you never know who is selling the book. Lulu distributes it, but the real seller is someone else, unknown. This may raise legal issues about ultimate responsibilitiy. People like myself who provide added content at no or minimal royalty will be unhappy to see our listing efforts buried in an avalanche of Lulu spam. At the very least Lulu should require permission before violating trademark laws. To see the books in this post, search for "Verne" on Lulu. The additional cost of hosting all these books could end up in forcing up front charges on Lulu providers or radically restructuring the way Lulu operates, neither of which is desirable in my humble opinion. I mention this as a discussion topic, as I feel it is an emerging problem. --------------------- N Wolcott nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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Re: Scanner vs. digital camera
by Juhana Sadeharju 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

>From: "Felix E. Klee" <felix.klee(a)inka.de> > >How did OCR'ing go? I wonder because the resolution of cheap digital >cameras is quite low for scanning. Well, I did not test OCR'ing at all. :-) I store digitizations only as images which also are used for reading. Please test it yourself and tell the results in the list. ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/audio/devel/books/ A few first images are various testings. The digitization sequence test starts at the image 1438. Remember, it is a tourist camera with lens distortions and with poor focus control. I used a plain ceiling light, not better movable lights. The book is on a chair and the photographed page points directly to up -- which is wrong. Yes, one page per image is better because the page bends when the book is laid wide open. The book and camera stand could be designed so that the book rests in V shape holder and that the camera is facing perpendicular to the book page. That is, camera would not be above the book and would not face down. (The scanner, which allows the book rest on the edge of the scanning glass, solves the same bending-pages problem. So does the scanning glass-wedge.) Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software

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Enlightened self-interst
by Ron Aitchison 04 Apr '05

04 Apr '05

Having discovered Jane Austen regrettably late in life I have down-loaded a couple of novels and since I find the raw text format unpleasant to read I have reformatted for my own use. It seems to me since I have the ability to produce PDFs and OpenOffice formats and even - heaven forfend - MS doc format should they be wanted, it would be churlish not to make such an offer. If you can point me at a standard for PDF, page width, font size etc, etc., and let me know what formats you do want I would be happy to undertake the small additional work for the two novels I have currently downloaded. I cannot supply DocBook at this time but hope to have that available shortly. Regards -- Ron Aitchison

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DP Down?
by Kevin Handy 01 Apr '05

01 Apr '05

Is it just me, or is DP down today? All I get is a forbidden message. Any news on when it will be available again?

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Re: [gutvol-d] Re: Scanner vs. digital camera
by Joshua Hutchinson 30 Mar '05

30 Mar '05

I think the original poster was sarcastically making fun of the notion that "invention" is simply a matter of coming up with an original idea. While current patent practice seems to support that view, it is ridiculous to most people. Hence the saying, "Invention is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration." In other words, just coming up with an idea is the easy part. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Juhana Sadeharju" <kouhia(a)nic.funet.fi> To: gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Scanner vs. digital camera Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 19:38:17 +0300 > > > > From: "David A. Desrosiers" <hacker(a)gnu-designs.com> > > > > You've "invented" camera features? What hardware did you use when building > > these features into your camera? What camera model did you use as a base > > unit? > > Inventions nor patentions require physical hardware because the > inventions can be readily described in the text. Patent office > does not require inventors to send the hardware to them, anymore. > I invented, but I have not patented. It basically does not matter > which camera gets the features first, but I favor Canon EOS 300D, > Nikon D70, and equivalent competitors. > > I'm curious why you were not interested in the features itself. > They are basically public domain, but manufacturers could be > interested in them more, if such features appears first in > their camera. The competition is now on the camera features. > > Juhana > -- > http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev > for developers of open source graphics software > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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Re: Scanner vs. digital camera
by Juhana Sadeharju 29 Mar '05

29 Mar '05

>From: "David A. Desrosiers" <hacker(a)gnu-designs.com> > > You've "invented" camera features? What hardware did you use >when building these features into your camera? What camera model did >you use as a base unit? Inventions nor patentions require physical hardware because the inventions can be readily described in the text. Patent office does not require inventors to send the hardware to them, anymore. I invented, but I have not patented. It basically does not matter which camera gets the features first, but I favor Canon EOS 300D, Nikon D70, and equivalent competitors. I'm curious why you were not interested in the features itself. They are basically public domain, but manufacturers could be interested in them more, if such features appears first in their camera. The competition is now on the camera features. Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software

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[Fwd: Thought on http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/C-18.php]
by Marcello Perathoner 27 Mar '05

27 Mar '05

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Thought on http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/C-18.php Date: Sun, 27 Mar 2005 17:24:47 +0100 (BST) From: Nick Burch <nick(a)gagravarr.org> To: webmaster(a)gutenberg.org Hi I'm not sure if you're the right person on the guttenberg team to send this to, but hopefully if not you're close. I happened across http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/C-18.php from a discussion on slashdot, and I had a thought that there is something you can try. It should be possible to use a copyright repository to prove a book is out of copyright, without having to use the old (and hard to find) edition. I live in Oxford, and we have one of the UK's three copyright repositories, in the form of the Bodleian library. Most people can get temporary access to it for research, and I believe the same is true of the other two libraries. These libraries hold most books published in the UK. So, the steps for a book which you think is out of copyright would be: 1) Get a copy of the new version of the book 2) Find your nearest copyright library 3) Check to see if they have a copy of an older version - the search of the collection should be available online, eg http://library.ox.ac.uk/ 4) Arrange temporary membership of the library 5) Turn up, request the book, and go away for a few hours while someone retrieves it from the stack (most books aren't on open shelves) 6) Compare lots of pages to ensure the text is the same 7) Photocopy a few pages (including the copyright info to be sure) 8) Head home, and set to work on the new version I hope the above makes some sense, and might be of use Nick -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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Humanities Computing conference
by Andrew Sly 24 Mar '05

24 Mar '05

I'm looking for feedback from other PG volunteers. There will be a four-day "humanities computing Summer Institute" taking place in my city in June, as described here: http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/institute/ It looks as if its main focus will be on digitizing texts using the tei dtd. Any ideas on how worthwhile it would be participating in this? Andrew

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Scanner vs. digital camera
by Juhana Sadeharju 24 Mar '05

24 Mar '05

[ Continuing the thread under subject "wiki...". ] Scanners have pros but because they are dangerous to use, I would prefer digital camera. At least I got fed up to lifting up the book for changing pages. A 600 pages book is quite weighty. Another annoyance was that the scanner collected dust (both from book and from room). Scanner was also slow. A couple of days ago I borrowed a tourist range digital camera. I could digitize 8 pages per minute. It was as fast and easy as I had predicted. The digitization speed was limited only by image transfer technology, not by speed of my fingers. "Easy" is the keyword here. I have invented a couple of camera features which would help in book digitization. Anyone would know how to contact camera manufacturers? Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software

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