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

Clearance question - Mein Kampf
by N Wolcott 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

Why is it that PG maintains the fiction that MK is still in copyright when Fredonia is publishing a PD version? Obviously they know something we don't or haven't bothered to find out. Fredonia books are printed and distriibuted in the US. Fredonia has 1770 PD books listed on Amazon.com and University Press of the Pacific (Honolulu) have 3407, many of these post 1923. Fredonia in fact lists the source they are copying in their books. I have not examined any Pacific Press books yet. It would seem that PG would not be treading in dangerous waters by following the lead of these publishers. I agree that the fact that numerous copies of MK survive on the Internet is no reason to assume PD status, but hard copy books in quantity in the US are another matter which should bear some study. I have yet to see a book by these publishers where research does not show a presumption of PD status Perhaps PG if not "pushing " the envelope, should at least crawl inside it. N Wolcott nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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re: [gutvol-d] question for DPers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

michael said: > I have some supercomputer time > reserved for testing various compressions, > so if anyone wants to send me any DVDs or their images, > I can try to see how much we can pack onto a single $1 DVD. actually, you can just take a look at richard seltzer's work and see. his d.v.d. (which costs $99, not $1) holds 9,536 plain-text e-books. since a very good majority of those books are public-domain, you could spring for the $99 once, then re-sell copies for $1. (or give 'em away, absorbing the $1 cost of the d.v.d yourself.) for most of us, though legal, that might verge on the unethical; but for you, michael, i think it would be quite proper, because richard got many of those e-texts _from_ project gutenberg... i'll chip in $10 to a fund to buy you a copy... -bowerbird ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------- We are making books available on CD and DVD, at very low cost, selected and organized in an easy-to-use, well-indexed format. These CDs and DVDs contain text, not audio or video; they are designed for PCs, not Macs, that have CD and/or DVD drives. Our mission is to use technology to make books extremely inexpensive and easy to use. Our CDs and DVDs are hand-crafted. The selection and organization are based on our judgment, not automated programs. These are the complete, unabridged books, in plain text format, with no compression and no encryption, to make them easy for anyone without computer skills to read, using Word, a Web browser or any other application that takes plain ASCII texts. You can move a copy of a book from the CD to your hard drive to edit and add notes. You can use the capabilities of Word or whatever other application you use to increase the type size, to copy-and-paste, to print. And the blind can use these books with their screen readers (which convert text to voice). Our best bargains are: The Complete Book DVD -- 9356 books for just $99. This DVD includes all the plain-text books from our Classic Collection CDs, plus more. The Complete Classic Collection -- over 9055 books on 9 CDs, all for $149, including American Literature, British Literature (2-CD set), World Literature, Non-Fiction (2-CD set), Religion, Children's Books, and Books about Classical Music We also provide CDs organized by time period (Ancient World, Medieval/Renaissance, etc.), by geography (Middle East, East Asia, etc.), by author (Shakespeare, Mark Twain, etc.), by theme (US History, Black Americans, Native Americans, Women, etc.), and by genre (drama, humor, philosophy, short stories, travel, etc.) You can see details (including the tables of contents) of all the CDs at our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

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Re: [gutvol-d] What happened to the newsletter?
by Tony Baechler 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

Hello. I am not going to discuss politics here, but I think such an organization described below already exists and PG is already working with them. They are the Internet Archive. They are active in trying to change copyright law and according to them have got some temporary exceptions in a few areas. I could be misunderstanding this but there obviously is a close relationship with PG and IA. Perhaps a group of people from both PG and IA could combine to found their own political organization which would lobby to have copyright laws in general changed. I could see something like that happening one of these days. Also such a group could appeal to arts groups such as NPR, etc. Yes, NPR is in itself not an arts group but they would probably run stories on how the copyright law is hurting the public and that could help. Of course there are also sites like slashdot who have helped carry the PG idea before with various announcements. Finally there are various grants which could be sought to support the lobbying efforts after such an organization is formed. At 05:02 PM 9/14/2005 -0500, you wrote: >>What is really needed is to setup a separate organization devoted to the >>defense and rebuilding of the public domain -- somewhat like the NRA, >>it would be an "in your face" organization. It would seek the particular >>IRS non-profit status allowing political lobbying, which is not 501(c)3. > >I'm not sure we have the funds to do so. Still, it is a good idea, >although it might be easier to simply support a previously established >organization who share the same goals, if such a group in fact exists.

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html header-stuff, doctype and content-type
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

i'm preparing an e-text for submission, and need some info. here's the stuff i've got at the top of my .html file right now. [html] [head] [title]the title [/title] [/head] [body] [il] [ul] what do i need, in the form of a doctype and content-type lines, to run it through the validator? my .html throughout is minimal, and the text is all 7-bit, so i prefer to use the most basic doctype/content-type possible. thanks. -bowerbird p.s. here is the full total of the markup i'm using: [a href="#b01"][/a] ... [a href="#c56"][/a] [a href="#toc"][/a] [br /] [center][/center] [em][/em] [h1][/h1] [h2][/h2] [head][/head] [hr /] [html][/html] [il] [p id="b01"] ... [p id="c56"] [p id="toc"] [p][/p] [small][/small] [title][/title] [ul]

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Re: [gutvol-d] question for DPers
by Tony Baechler 15 Sep '05

15 Sep '05

Hello. I second the below opinion. I am used to Linux so I know about tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, etc. However it is still a pain to manipulate tar files under Windows. The bzip2 format isn't too bad but it is not easily installed or supported. It would turn many people off if they had to try to guess at how to use it. You could put the bzip2 package on the DVD but that defeats the purpose. Also I don't think using a compressed loop filesystem is a good idea. First, you have the overhead of the program which has to uncompress the loop. Second, you would have to run it on a separate OS like Linux so it would have to be bootable. People would have to boot the DVD to access the books and that would shut them out of their regular Windows systems unless you want to build that into the kernel and then you might as well just give them Knoppix and forget it. Also this keeps the blind out because there would be no easy way to add support for speach synthesizers. At 03:55 PM 9/14/2005 -0500, you wrote: >At 03:58 PM 9/14/2005, you wrote: > >>bzip2 is freely available for windows: > >That's correct. However, I think that the better question to ask would be >is it worth the added level of complexity for most users? For most of the >people on this list, it is almost certainly no problem at all. However, >for many others, it can be.

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re: [gutvol-d] question for DPers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

sebastien said: > Samely, for XML books > (let's assume in the end all books will be XML'ed) i'd rather not, if you don't mind... :+) > just consider the source XML version (bzipped); > XML to other format tools can be included on the DVD too. that would be great! where are these tools? -bowerbird

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re: compression
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Sep '05

14 Sep '05

um, go with zip. tools handle it well, and the masses know what it means... i have also done a lot of work making a compressed format, one that my tools use seamlessly; they will also convert it to the other compressed formats (like zip, gzip, bzip, tar) if you (or the end-users) want it to. (except why would you?) in addition, because of how my compression format is structured, an app doesn't even need to "uncompress" it in order to display it. therefore, it blows away other compression formats in timed tests concerning the tasks that are most relevant to e-book performance (these include _searching_, pagination, jumping to a random page, formulating a full-on concordance, dictionary lookup, and so on...) so compression is pretty much a done deal. you can stop worrying about it, and just go do more books. when you can give me 25,000 english e-texts in plain-text files -- using however many d.v.d.'s it might take you at the time -- i'll be able to hand them all back to you on a single d.v.d. -bowerbird

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Looking for help from German speaker
by Andrew Sly 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

I have found two author records in the PG catalog that should probably be combined, but I'd like a German speaker to help confirm that. Is the author of PG#15891, Velimirovitch, Nicola, the same person as Velimirovic, Nikolai? Description of this author can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Velimirovi%C4%87 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolaj_Velimirovi%C4%87 Thanks, Andrew

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Re: [gutvol-d] What the Hack?! and other conferences next week
by Tony Baechler 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

Hello. Thank you very much for putting that file up for download. I got it. For anyone else who wants it, I suggest using the following url instead. It will save bandwidth on the server and hopefully provide faster download speeds. It's transparent to the web browser but this method won't work well with streaming in an mp3 player. You can add .nyud.net:8090 to any url and this method will work. For more information, look at http://coralcdn.org/. http://www.aaronandgabby.com.nyud.net:8090/pg.mp3 At 08:29 PM 9/12/2005 -0500, you wrote: >I don't know about PG adding more audio files. I'll let the people who are >smarter than me decide that one. However, you can snag the mp3 file at >http://www.aaronandgabby.com/pg.mp3 . If you want to stream it, then just >drop that link directly into your mp3 player, assuming it supports >streaming mp3 files. Whatever you're going to do though, do it soon. I >don't plan on leaving the file up there for more than a week. > > >Sincerely >Aaron Cannon

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Nikolai Velimirović
by Wallace J.McLean 13 Sep '05

13 Sep '05

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