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

re: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

aaron said: > No! Of course we don't! But I'm sure we can look forward to > a long string of randomly punctuated messages where you > tell us how completely stupid we are, followed by > several messages which say something along the lines of, > "I've had enough of this list. I'm going to unsubscribe soon." > Proceeding this will come one or more ads for your blog, > followed by some more "no really, I'm leaving this time, really!" > messages. Then, finally, if we're extremely lucky, we'll get about > 60 days of peace until you come back and start the whole thing over > again. randomly punctuated messages? -bowerbird

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do you realize what this means?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

last week, amazon bought booksurge, a p.o.d. company. yesterday, amazon bought mobipocket, a viewer-app. (franklin, who owned a lot of mobipocket stock, is going to make a couple million bucks from the deal.) do you people here realize what all this means? no, of course you don't. -bowerbird

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Removal of /public/html/gutenberg
by Marcello Perathoner 11 Apr '05

11 Apr '05

The old directory /public/html/gutenberg on ibiblio will be removed on April 14. If you did edit files in the old directory after Feb 23 you may have to copy them to the new directory /public/vhost/g/gutenberg/html . -- 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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Scanners vs. Cameras
by Geoff Horton 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

I've posted a couple photographed books to DP, and while the results aren't perfect, they were legible. I used nothing fancy--a 4MP camera, hand-held (though I'm looking at ways to brace it, since shaky images are my biggest problem), a table lamp for light, manual exposure, auto-focus (set on close-up mode). I'm taking notes of what works and what doesn't, with an eye toward assembling a guide to photographing books for OCR (if such a thing doesn't already exist). I'll say up front that I've not been able to get flash photography to work. The page washes out completely. Geoff

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

05 Apr '05

144dpi is only going to work well with larger print books with very clean pages (read: modern fiction will usually work well at this DPI). You get into some of the older, smaller print stuff and 144 dpi is going to fail miserably and at times spectacularly. 300 dpi is the happy medium in most cases. Above that, stray marks on the paper can be misinterpreted at times by the OCR process. However, on some fairly small print books, 600dpi has been necessary. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith J . Schultz" <schultzk(a)uni-trier.de> > > Hi, > > I have to see what my canon 20D will do in BW-mode. > But far as resolution goes and OCR, you do not want to go any higher > than 300 Dpi, because above 300 dpi the OCR starts to see the > structure of the paper and makes mistakes. This is even more > important with older books. Try just using 144 dpi this should > give you the same results as 300 dpi. > > Keith.

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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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Braille files
by Tony Baechler 05 Apr '05

05 Apr '05

Hi. This is probably mostly for the webmaster, but I would like to get input from others on this list. Also, if you think this is off topic, I can move this discussion to the gutvol-p list instead. Has any progress been made with regards to making PG books available in Braille formatted files? There is at least one free Braille translator for *nix that I know of. I haven't seen this on the recode or bibrec pages. I would be willing to test the Braille output. I know of others who would probably also be interested. Probably a link on the recode page would be best, but it would be nice to see a link as part of the standard download links on the bibrec pages. That link could probably be a cgi program which would call the translator, NFBTrans, which would convert the file. I believe that it can be set to write to stdout, but it might be more convenient to have it create a separate file with the .brf extension for downloading. Here are a couple of issues to keep in mind. First, Braille only works with 7-bit, upper case files. NFBTrans will convert from mixed case just fine, but it is important that they are not 8-bit files. Braille does not support international accented characters. There are different Braille codes for other languages such as Spanish or German, but I don't know how well NFBTrans supports them. Besides it would be difficult to have an automated way of passing this information on the command line at the time of translation. Second, it will work only on plain text. It does not convert from html at all. Third, it might be best to have two links, one for a single file and one for multiple volumes. The reason why is that one printed page is about 3-6 Braille pages, depending on the size of the print and any illustrations. Many blind people now use special PDAs which can handle big files, but large files are bad for embossers. If someone downloads and tries to emboss a 300 page print book, it could easily be 900-1,000 pages in Braille. So, it is best to also make smaller files available. This is known as volumes. that same book could be downloaded in three Braille Volumes of 100-250 Braille pages each. That is much better for binding etc. I think the best way to do this is with the standard split utility. You can set it for X lines and that would be perfect. It would not indicate at the top of each new file that it is a subsequent volume in a set, but that can be added by the person doing the embossing if desired. I don't know exactly what the correct number of lines per file is, but I can check into that. Finally, after the translation to Braille options are set up and working, it would be nice if PG could have an official press release announcing this service. I know of several groups for the blind and many blind individuals who would be very interested. This is not as good of a solution as making books available in the new DAISY format, but I am not aware of a free html to DAISY converter, and I don't think that DAISY works on plain text at all. Once a master xml format is in place, conversion to DAISY would be even simpler, but I don't think there are any free tools. Really all that needs to be done is to integrate a script into the PG site that calls nfbtrans and generates the .brf file. The .brf can be sent to the browser for downloading. Windows users would probably have to right-click on the Braille links and save the files manually. It would not be much harder for the multiple volumes, just use a split utility on the .brf file and create a temporary page with each piece of the file linked so they can also be downloaded and saved. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I don't mind testing or finding others to test, but I admit that my knowledge of cgi scripting is almost zero. I can compile nfbtrans easily enough, but I don't know how to integrate it into the recode facility or the PG site in general.

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Re: Scanner vs. digital camera
by Juhana Sadeharju 04 Apr '05

04 Apr '05

>From: Carlo Traverso <traverso(a)dm.unipi.it> > > Juhana> ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/audio/devel/books/ > >Please, instead of putting there a big tar.gz file of 72MB, can you >put some individual images? Now there is, sorry. The images at the end of list are good for OCR testing. The images at the begin are test images: with/without flash, with normal/with "flower" focus. >Indeed, my attempts with a good digital camera (5Mpixels, manual >focus, uncompressed tiff output, a special mode for text, a >professional tripod, etc) have been poor. Canon EOS 300D, or perhaps newer EOS 350D would do the same. Nikon D70. Minolta Dynax 7D (european model name, US has different name). At least Canon and Nikon raw images have been converted with an open source software. See gphoto webpages for links and details. I'm not sure about the proper Linux interfacing. I should have it, because I would like to write a special software for digitization. (Canon has a proper SDK only for Windows.) 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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