January 2006 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Please help archive the Katrina disaster
by Jon Noring 03 Apr '06

03 Apr '06

[I'm forwarding this for Brewster Kahle at the Internet Archive. If you have any Katrina-related links, please submit them as detailed below. As Brewster requests, please forward the following message to other relevant mailing lists and online forums. Jon Noring, TeBC Administrator] The Internet Archive, a non-profit digital library, needs help in finding URL's of sites and blogs that contain documents of this major disaster. Please email links to sites and pages that should be saved for future research to katrina(a)archive.org. We have worked to archive events such as 9/11 and the tsunami with the generous help of volunteers finding and sending in links. We then save these digital works for the long term and create research tools (for example: http://www.loc.gov/minerva/collect/sept11/ index.html and http://web.archive.org ). As a library, we provide free access to those wanting to learn from these events-- we can only hope that we learn some lessons from disasters such as these. Again, please send email to katrina(a)archive.org with lists of URL's you suggest should be archived relevant to the Katrina Disaster. We are also looking for a couple of volunteers that can help orchestrate the crawl. If you are interested, please send a note to katrina(a)archive.org with "volunteer" in the subject line. Please forward this message to any appropriate lists or people. Thank you. -Brewster Kahle Digital Librarian Internet Archive ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get Bzzzy! (real tools to help you find a job). Welcome to the Sweet Life. http://us.click.yahoo.com/A77XvD/vlQLAA/TtwFAA/89EolB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/archivists-talk/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: archivists-talk-unsubscribe(a)yahoogroups.com <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

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36,000 and counting
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Mar '06

25 Mar '06

distributed proofreaders just hit 36,000 registered users. congratulations! -bowerbird

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Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar Bush; Asimov
by Jon Noring 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

Everyone, In doing some research on ebook history, which naturally will prominently include Project Gutenberg because of the obvious impact PG and Michael Hart has had on etexts and ebooks, I'm trying to reconstruct a fact database which includes the who, what, when, where, why and how of the various seminal events. So, I've just created a specialized Yahoo Group to collect/archive the snippets of facts that come up: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-history/ You're welcome to join and post any information you know on ebook history. Especially wanted is the pre-1990 period: commercial, academic, and public (free). We should collect this information before it is lost to the mists of time. ***** Anyway, in doing research on what is found in the early Google Groups archive on PG, Bowerbird recommended that I dig through textfiles.com, which appears to have archived a large number of ASCII texts that existed on various BBS systems of the 1980's and early 1990's (its coverage/completeness is unknown, however.) So, focusing on the first "modern" classic book that PG issued, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (text #11, officially released 01 Jan 1991), I dug through textfiles.com to see what they had. The oldest copy I found there was "alice11.txt", Millenium Fulcrum Edition 1.1, dated 1990 (by copyright claim.) See: http://www.textfiles.com/etext/FICTION/alice11.txt That was issued in the very early era when PG was still affiliated with Duncan Research. As an aside, it is interesting to note the huge differences in that early text's boilerplate compared with the present boilerplate. PG has evolved quite a bit in handling the legal aspects (particularly copyright) of its texts, which is to be fully expected. So this text is a nice historical reminder of how far PG has come in the last 16 years. I was hoping, though, to find a much older text version of "Alice". Bowerbird stated his belief that Michael Hart keypunched Alice a lot earlier than 1990/91, but so far I have not found that version, assuming it was distributed and ended up in some BBS or online archive. So, Michael, if you're reading this, did you keypunch "Alice" well before 1990, where did you distribute it, and does a copy exist somewhere? That would truly be a historical work, especially if it was "digiscribed" in the 1970's or early 80's (BBS systems began maturing in the mid- to late-1980's.) A question for others reading this: where else should I search for information on digitized books placed on BBS in the 1980's? Were there others besides Michael who "digiscribed" public domain books and texts in the 1980's and placed them online? (I plan to dig through more of the textfiles area to see what book texts are dated in the 1980's, if any, and who did them.) ***** Another interesting thing I discovered in my research -- and which some of you undoubtedly know about -- is the "Brown Corpus": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus In the late-1960's, the partial/full texts of a variety of 500 works published in 1961 were keypunched for computer use (a maximum of 2000 words for each work), totalling a little over 1,000,000 words. The purpose was solely for lexicostatistics and not for direct reading. For this purpose the Brown Corpus is quite famous (enough to rate its own wikipedia article.) Only a few years later, in 1971 Michael Hart keypunched into a computer "The Declaration of Independence" for the purpose of electronic "distribution" and direct reading by others, so Michael is, as far as is now known, the first person documented to experiment with electronic distribution of readable, published digital texts. (I plan to contact the Brown Corpus people, if any are still alive, to see if there were experiments at Brown, or elsewhere, on this in the 1960's.) But nevertheless, to see major portions of published texts and books being keypunched and processed by computers in the 1960's is truly remarkable. ***** Another really cool thing, I found a Usenet message from 1987 which, in turn, is a fairly comprehensive description of an Atlantic Monthly article written by Vannevar Bush in July 1945, entitled "As We May Think". It is beyond amazing the insights Vannevar Bush had relevant to ebooks, to elibraries (like PG's) and the role of individuals and volunteers. Again, some of you have probably read Vannevar Bush's article, but for those who haven't... Usenet summary: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hypercard/msg/660f72a6e3b5f7a2?… And the actual article is reproduced here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush ***** Finally, Mark Bernstein, the founder of Eastgate, which in 1987 issued several contemporary hypertext fiction ebooks on floppy disk and CD-ROM, mentioned to me Asimov's mid-50's book "Foundation" where ebooks are implicit. Has anyone read this book and can comment on Asimov's 1950's vision for ebooks? Thanks! Jon Noring

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Re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Dave Fawthrop 18 Feb '06

18 Feb '06

On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 20:19:33 -0500, Jim Tinsley <jtinsley(a)pobox.com> wrote: |On Wed, 18 Jan 2006 11:44:46 +0000, Dave Fawthrop <hyphen(a)hyphenologist.co.uk> wrote: | |>On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 15:54:37 -0500, Jim Tinsley <jtinsley(a)pobox.com> |>wrote: |> |>|On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:13:12 +0000, Dave Fawthrop <hyphen(a)hyphenologist.co.uk> wrote: |>| |>| |>|>I am told by the whitewashers that it is *essential* that all text for PG |>|>pass guiguts. Because this assumes that the language scanned is American |>|>it gives 90% plus false positive errors, on my books, which is totally |>|>unsatisfactory for any piece of test software. |>|> |>|>Is there a language free version of Guiguts? |>| |>|I'm not quite sure which question you're asking, and about which |>|checking tool, but I think there is some confusion somewhere, of |>|emphasis if not of fact, and I'm continually surprised by people who |>|don't know the origins of really quite recent procedures I remember |>|vividly, and I've had several threads recently about this general |>|subject of checking, so please bear with me while I regurgitate |>|history. I hope you'll find a satisfactory answer in here somewhere. |> |>I could only find one tool which shows on my Win XP computer that is |>guiguts. This as far as I can ascertain has various subroutines which |>are very badly tied together, and in no way at all follow the Windoze |>interface. |> |>|Anybody can use any programs they like to make texts, and different |>|people do use different tools, according to their own needs or the |>|needs of the individual texts. Considering that we get French and |>|German and Esperanto and Chinese texts, not to mention older English, |>|there is no one-size-fits-all solution for language. |> |>To get things past whitewashers one apparently must use this, or things get |>rejected. Your assertion is therefore clearly theoretically correct, but |>in reality absolutely wrong | |Now, this I can flatly deny. There is no such thing as a standard without a test to show that the test has been passed. Schools teach to the exam, which some think wrong, but it happened to me and judging by the media Brouhaha still happens in the UK. I was an Engineer, and there a draughtsman who failed to put a test (tolerance) on anything in a drawing, was exposed to public ridicule. If such a drawing got onto the shop floor the production departments would deliberately fail to follow any reasonable tolerance. | I can think of half-a-dozen people |offhand, regular producers, who don't use gutcheck in any form. |They don't need to. Their quality standards are high enough that |it won't find any real errors. I do run it on their texts, as a |matter of form, but I know in advance what the result will be. |For all I know, there are others, equally good, but I don't know |that they don't use gutcheck because the subject never comes up. |Most of us, of course, are not that good. You have just admitted that gutcheck is the standard on PG. | |Bill Flis, who wrote the GutWrench package, uses his own checkers |exclusively, and I know equally well that I won't find any errors |that can sanely be caught by automation in his texts either. You can |find them, if you're interested, at http://www.pgdp.net/tools/GW.zip | |>|Once, there were no checking tools at all, except for spellcheckers |>|built into Word Perfect and Word, which is what most people used, and |>|I could tell you some stories about having to convert those! |>| |>|David Price and Martin Ward and I made checkers that we used for |>|ourselves. There may have been others, but those are the ones I'm |>|aware of. Everything else was Mark One Eyeball. |>| |>|I had done a lot of cleaning-up work on a lot of texts for various |>|people, and I would then send those on to Michael for posting. They |>|would commonly take hours of work each. In self-defense, I wrote a |>|checker I (later) renamed to gutcheck. When the WWs were formed in |>|2001, I brought gutcheck with me, and we all used it to find errors |>|quickly in incoming texts. |> |>But gutcheck gives 90% plus false positive errors, many hundreds on my |>texts in Yorkshire Dialect, mostly poems. It enforces the American |>language, and American punctuation conventions. It objects to most |>Yorkshire abbreviated words such as t' which occur dozens of times |>in the poems I work on. It also objects to non standard punctuation |>which occur in my texts as an example "? whereas American convention |>apparently is ?" . |> |>Writing as one who has designed, written and sold language software for |>some 20 years (see my web site). The *first* stage in the design of any |>software involving language is how other languages will be treated. This |>is usually done by putting all the features of one language, in a specific |>data structure(s) and/or subroutine(s) which can be used or not as |>required. |> |>All I asked for was a copy of gutcheck with the features specific to |>American removed which should be a very short editing and recompiling job. | |I'm not sure how you define "American", but ALL gutcheck features are |language-specific, one way or another. You really appreciate this when |checking Hebrew or Tagalog! Even the relatively familiar French, |German and Spanish have various punctuation features quite |incompatible with gutcheck's assumptions. I'm talking with various |LOTE producers about language-specific versions, but have not yet |decided to take any action. Then gutcheck should be modified to have versions for many languages. If you read the Subject of this thread, you will find: "Language free version of guiguts?" | |>Worse the only way to view output is on a screen. Copy does not work so it |>is impossible to copy the output to a text file and edit the repeated false |>positives out of the list. It is totally unacceptable to distribute a GUI |>program where the standard Copy and Paste functions do not work |> |>Worse still and absolutely ***unforgivable*** in any GUI program the |>settings places the settings file on ***THE DESKTOP***. Deleting it loses |>all settings. |> | |I can't comment on GuiGuts. As a command-line guy, I don't use it all |that much, except sometimes, when I find some specific feature |invaluable. If you want to comment, the appropriate place is in the |GuiGuts thread of the Tool Development forum at DP, which Steve reads |and answers questions and requests in. |http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=13 I have asked the question here. I do not do forums. |>|Up till then, there was really no difference between DP and Other |>|texts, though because the people who mostly submitted from DP were |>|experienced, and because DP favored simple texts |> |>DP is by its nature not suitable for my texts, because the language is as |>different from American as say French. A non Tyke (yorkshireman) as has |>been shown in the past, has extreme difficulty understanding the text. | |Well, considering that they regularly do several languages, I doubt if |Yorkshire dialect would stand out much. Right now, in round 1, I find: |English, German (math, with LaTeX), Finnish, French with Scots, Middle |English, Middle French, Portuguese, English with Ancient Greek, |Spanish, Italian, Dutch, German, English with Breton, French, Tagalog, |Latin, and I just know there's some Esperanto around somewhere. I know |they've also done Irish (sean-litriú), because I had a hell of a time |finding all the correct characters for the UTF-8 version (and I'm |still not convinced about Tironian-et). Of course, if you want real |variety, you need to hit the European DP. | |>|And GuiGuts and gutcheck have accreted features ever since. If you |>|have GuiGuts, then you have gutcheck, since Steve bundles it with |>|GuiGuts -- and you also have a large number of other tools that may |>|or may not be useful for the particular text you're working on. |>| |>|There are many other checkers available as well, and I'd love to |>|ramble on about them, but this is too long already, and it doesn't |>|bear on your question. |> |>|This is how it comes -- by evolution, not by fiat -- |> |>Untrue! |>I am *forced* to use guiguts/gutcheck by the Whitewashers. | |I say again: not everyone does. Just eradicate all mistakes and nobody |will ever know what you used. | |>Gutcheck does not work on Windoze. | |It runs in a Win32 command prompt, but it doesn't have a GUI on any |platform. "You have to be joking MAN" | |>| that incoming |>|texts are checked with _several_ tools, according to what seems |>|appropriate for the text, but most commonly with gutcheck and/or |>|GuiGuts. |> |> |>Finally guiguts is as it stands unusable on my texts. No doubt I will find |>other equally drastic problems |> |>As all my work goes on my own web site, and gets copied from there onto |>many other sites, PG is just a nice add on and could be ditched if it were |>to take too much effort. |> |>The text which WW objected to so strongly has been on my site for a couple |>of years, and absolutely *nobody* has noticed the ?errors? People read it |>for the dialect, not the punctuation. I have however had several |>appreciative emails. | |Well, I'm very familiar with that condition, but that's a whole |'nother argument. A text does not have to be perfect to be valuable. |We have many older texts, especially, that have many errors. That |doesn't make them useless. I handle most of the errata reports for PG, |and nearly all of then express appreciation for the availability of |the text, along with their handful of reported errors. I may find |another hundred or so problems when I check the text out, but these |readers never noticed them. Two million downloads a month, with (I |estimate) about one million errors among 17,000 books, and we get |about one errata report per day. | |And there are many people who do want to make etexts but don't want |to live within the constraints of PG -- some don't want the |quality-checking, some complain that we don't quality-check enough, |some don't want to work in plain text, some don't want to go through |the clearance procedures, and so on. | |We have 40 to 60 submitted texts in the average week, and three WWs |active to take them at the moment. If everything in an incoming text |is perfect, one of us will spend about an hour on it. Plus a load of |time on other activities. We can't accommodate everyone on everything, |and there is no doubt that the quality gets higher as time goes on, |because of the processing that we do. This is what we have to do, |to keep the operation moving and the quality high. Not everyone is |going to be happy with the process. Some will choose not to send their |texts to PG. I'm sorry about that. | |>|(Now tell me that all you wanted was the -t switch. :-) |> |>I am not going back to the bad old Unix days, when each program had to be |>learned individually. Come back Bill Gates. All is forgiven. | |Well, I say again, if you don't want to use it, you don't have to; |not everyone does, and especially not everyone does for all texts. |It's essentially a collection of regexes, selected to give, on |average, the best results for the most common type of PG files. |Many |DPers who work on other types of texts just put together their own set |of regexes, and run them through GuiGuts or GutWrench or from a *nix |command line, whichever they prefer. I do not do windoze programming. You are essentially saying that a non programmer can work for PG. :-( Did you really mean that? You have agreed with me above that gutcheck is the standard which must be passed to get. I am just trying to find a version of that standard which will run on my machine, with the text As I understand it that answer to a perfectly reasonable request see Subject from PG was: ****************** ***GET STUFFED.*** ****************** I will look for a workaround. -- Dave Fawthrop <dave hyphenologist co uk> 17,000 free e-books at Project Gutenberg! http://www.gutenberg.net For Yorkshire Dialect go to www.hyphenologist.co.uk/songs/

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re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blog
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

michael said: > I read the PG eBooks with all sorts of plain text viewers > and have no problems with inconsistencies, much less in > the various browsers that have a wider range of options. the inconsistencies are ones that a person "wouldn't notice", but which trip up any automated processing by a program... an obvious example would be that most section-headings (e.g., chapter headings) are preceded by four blank lines, but the occasional one might have three, or five, instead... nobody would claim that, in terms of a human reader, this inconsistency is meaningful -- it's not -- but when it comes to a program analyzing the file, it might make a difference... if there's only one level of header, then 3 or 4 or 5 blank lines might be equally good at signaling that there is a new section. but if a book has three different levels of headers, as some do, then you could use 5 blank lines to indicate the major sections, 4 to indicate regular sections, and 3 to indicate the subsections. if the number of blank lines isn't consistent, the program has to become much more sophisticated (and thus prone to failure) to try and determine the _actual_ level of each header. another example involves lines which should not be rewrapped, such as the lines in a table, or the lines in a letter's address-block. if these are consistently prefaced with one or more leading spaces, then a rewrap routine is easy to _write_ and easy to _comprehend_, and a programmer can spend time on more productive pursuits that add value and functionality, not ones that just resolve inconsistencies. lots of programmers have _started_ programs for the p.g. library. the vast majority of them have given up before long, in frustration. the inconsistencies in the formatting are the main source of difficulty. someday someone will set up a shadow version of the p.g. library where all the inconsistencies are resolved, and you will see then how much value is added by the ingenuity of programmers who are able to take consistent formatting of the e-texts for granted... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

ian said: > Fair enough - then the iRex device > might be a better bet. And less proprietry. might be. except i heard it will be $300-$500. with no deep pockets to subsidize and back it. way too much for a dumb terminal in this age... next? -bowerbird

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Anyone recomend a good free wisywig html editor to PG standards
by Dave Fawthrop 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

Just turning my Hartley books into html. The generate html function of guiguts did not do a bad job of generating html, but the poetry needs a lot of tweaking. But it expects me to insert flags by hand :-( I gave up doing that in the bad old nroff days. <shudder> way back in OMG 1986. Anyone recommend a good free windoze html editor to PG standards? I normally use an old copy of M$ Front page for html. -- Dave Fawthrop <dave hyphenologist co uk> "Intelligent Design?" my knees say *not*. "Intelligent Design?" my back says *not*. More like "Incompetent design". Sig (C) Copyright Public Domain

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!@!Re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blog
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

mikey said: > Please keep comments on issues > raised in bowerbird's "blah blah blog" > off this list. sorry to disturb your sleep, mikey. but you can go back to bed now... *** bastien said: > Can we see the code? no. > Can we use/test/improve it? i'll release an app sooner or later that you can use. as far as the routines themselves, creating them took a _persistent_ application of common-sense and a lot of elbow-grease. that's all. which means you can generate them yourself, if you really want. i'll also be willing to give you some pointers if you should happen to hit a wall at any point, once you have shown me you are willing to take on the job. or, if you prefer, you can take the shortcut, and buy my source code. the price is in the 6 figures. i can't afford to give away something that valuable. if you can, i suggest you buy it and give it away... but really, what i want you to take away is that you _can_ do this, and it's really not even all that _hard_. for instance, i've talked about using the number of preceding blank lines as an indicator of heading level. assuming that such consistency has been maintained, even a beginning programmer could write the code to ascertain the structure of a book. care to try it? write it in pseudo-code first, and then in a language, any language with which you are comfortable, be it perl or python or ruby or basic or whatever you like. it might be better to take it over to gutvol-p, so we don't put a coding session in all the gutvol-d boxes, but if you show me you're willing to do some work, i'll be more than happy to show you what will pay off. if you're not, then i'll refer you to the fables of aesop, specifically the one about the little red hen... *** michael said: > There's nothing wrong with > what such people are asking, > other than that they are asking > someone else to do it for them, > free of charge. i know that michael is talking about "such people" as a general class, and i'm fairly confident he doesn't lump me in that class. but other people here might. so let me be absolutely clear here for them... i'm not asking anyone to do anything "for" me. and i am more than willing to do the job myself. i said so, directly, on my blog, and i repeat it here. what i am doing is suggesting you make these changes for _yourselves_ and for _your_readers_, simply because consistency in the e-texts leads to greater functionality... my experience is that this greater functionality would benefit you with increased efficiency in the preparation of the e-texts, and benefit your readers in greater total usability of the e-texts. > Those of us who have been on this list, and others, > for very long these days have no trouble remember > any number of people who have had variety upon variety > of requests that Project Gutenberg should be run in > such a fashion as to meet with their demands. again, i make no "demands". just giving you tips. for your own good. > The response is always to invite the creation of some examples, > along a suggested pathway for future efforts, to be accompanied by > your request for others to assist you in making such future efforts. it is also the case that i _am_ putting examples online. i've already pointed to some, and more will come soon. > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01.zml > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01.html > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01.pdf > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/alice01/alice01/alice01b.pdf other examples will be "my antonia", "books and culture", "free culture", "the universe or nothing", "the secret garden", and a handful of books by cory doctorow, for starters. as z.m.l. requires just a smattering of changes to the markup-free version of an e-text, hundreds of examples will follow before long, and thousands once my processes are refined... if i don't lose interest, i might have most of the library converted in a year. from these plain-text .zml "masters" will emerge automatic .html versions -- from which a plethora of other formats will be able to be generated -- and automatic creation of .pdf versions according to user specifications... other sweetnesses might follow too, like ipod versions and p.s.p. versions. and last but not least, the z.m.l. viewer-app will create a kick-ass powerful high-functionality electronic-book experience using these .zml "masters". enough so that you'll wonder why you ever thought you needed "markup". (there's more -- scansets and banana-cream -- but that's enough for now.) > Describe how these examples are better than previous examples have done, and will continue to do, as appropriate times arrive... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Dave Fawthrop 01 Feb '06

01 Feb '06

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006 19:30:55 +0000, Cori <hiddengreen(a)gmail.com> wrote: |On 1/31/06, Dave Fawthrop <hyphen(a)hyphenologist.co.uk> wrote: |> |Indeed :) Catching a dozen real errors is a definite win! |> |> 12 in 500plus is a resounding failure. | |I think there might be a misunderstanding about the purpose of the |Gutcheck ... if a text checking tool was provided that never gave me |any false errors, I'd be convinced that it wasn't catching all it |should be. Spellcheckers, or the barrage of regex checks that DP has |developed, all flag up false positives on my books, but they couldn't |be made much more effective without personalising them to each and |every text -- which would take more time than just clicking through |the false alarms..? The point of all these checks is to (hopefully) |be over-sensitive to problems, rather than under-sensitive (thus |leaving errors.) | |Or have I missed something in turn..? Do you have text checking tools |that only ever signal real errors..? Can they be shared..? With my other hat on I write "intelligent" language software, Low 90% correct is very bad, above 99% correct is acceptable. For a voluntary organisation I would be accept 50% correct. -- Dave Fawthrop <dave hyphenologist co uk> "Intelligent Design?" my knees say *not*. "Intelligent Design?" my back says *not*. More like "Incompetent design". Sig (C) Copyright Public Domain

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coold nothav e
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

mihceal siad: > So, what you are telling me hre, ist hat > while a human can muddle through ok, > it takes a computer to really maess things up. i coold nothav esaidit bettter myyyself. :+) -bowrebrid

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re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blog
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

a concrete example might help... here's the table of contents from "free culture" by lawrence lessig, in zen markup language format, generated automatically from a simple straightforward analysis in about one-half of a second... even though there are 3 levels of headers, they are very clear, indicated by varying indentation (which represents, at the headers themselves, a varying number of preceding blank lines, of course.) text-structures even more complex than the one shown in this outline can be communicated easily by the number of preceding blank lines -- _if_ the rule is followed _consistently_ -- and grokked by routines consisting of just a few lines of dirt-simple code... by the way, just to say something "obvious" that lee probably had not considered before, one of the many ways my routines determine the headers in a digitized text is to look for a "table of contents" section -- usually toward the start of the file, and usually marked with "contents" or "table of contents" as a header -- and then examine that section quite carefully. ends up it does a very good job of telling you what specific phrases "might be" header-lines. and if you're cleaning up the o.c.r. of a p-book, for instance, there are usually _page-numbers_ there too, telling what _page_ each header is on. pretty handy, eh? indeed, in the .pdf of this book, which you can download at http://www.lessig.org, you will see that the page-numbers _are_ there, and chapter 11, chimera, for instance, starts on page 177. like i said, if you know what a header is likely to be, and on what page it is located, it's fairly easy to find. indeed, people have been using the "table of contents" for precisely that reason for several hundred years now. this is just one of the reasons why it ain't that hard to write routines to ascertain the headers in a book. like i said, it sounds very obvious when you hear it. but have you ever heard anyone say it here before? -bowerbird --------------------------------------------- TABLE OF CONTENTS Free Culture Table of Contents License Publisher Page Library of Congress Cataloging Dedication Preface Introduction 'Piracy' Chapter 1: Creators Chapter 2: "Mere Copyists" Chapter 3: Catalogs Chapter 4: "Pirates" Film Recorded Music Radio Cable TV Chapter 5: "Piracy" Piracy I Piracy II 'Property' Chapter 6: Founders Chapter 7: Recorders Chapter 8: Transformers Chapter 9: Collectors Chapter 10: "Property" Why Hollywood Is Right Beginnings Law: Duration Law: Scope Law and Architecture: Reach Architecture and Law: Force Market: Concentration Together Puzzles Chapter 11: Chimera Chapter 12: Harms Constraining Creators Constraining Innovators Corrupting Citizens Balances Chapter 13: Eldred I Chapter 14: Eldred II Conclusion Afterword Us, Now Rebuilding Freedoms Previously Presumed: Examples Rebuilding Free Culture: One Idea Them, Soon More Formalities Shorter Terms Free Use Vs. Fair Use Liberate the Music -- Again Fire Lots of Lawyers Footnotes Hyperlinks Acknowledgments Index About the Author Jacket Typos Corrected Permissions The Dead-Tree Hardback Version of this Work zero markup language -- z.m.l. -- the future of electronic-books --------------------------------------------- p.s. extra points for everyone who realized that -- since the lines in the table of contents section are not to be rewrapped -- that is the reason that all are prefaced with at least one leading space...

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re: [gutvol-d] blah blah blog
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

lee said: > I believe that at some point in the future computers will be > capable of resolving all the ambiguities inherent in PG e-texts, > but that day is not yet here, and until then the software is > going to require some human help. well, my computer routines can already resolve _most_ ambiguities, as i pointed out in the blog entry. i've even offered to do this for p.g., providing p.g. makes a commitment to stay consistent in the future... but there seemed to me no recognition for the need for consistency, let alone any desire to make a commitment to attain it... *** michael said: > Can't it just lay there, out of the process, and just let me read? sure, it could. but sometimes -- in the course of reading, and even outside of it -- there are things you want to know, or find out, or have the computer do for you, or figure out for you. take my headings example, for instance. it's nice if the computer can figure out the headings for you, because then it can produce a nice "table of contents" menu, which you can look at to get a quick overview on the e-text, or use to jump directly to the "dance of the quadrille" chapter (even if you hadn't yet known that there was such a chapter)... or, as lee has remarked, if the program knows the headers, it can do nice things like start a chapter on a new screen, and make the header big and bold. these nice touches are... nice. or take my text-wrapping example, as yet another instance. sometimes you want to reflow the text to a narrow window. if the non-rewrap lines have been clearly indicated -- e.g., with the leading space that i suggested -- then the computer can do the rewrap for you quickly and easily, with no errors... (and this goes beyond "a nice touch" into basic functionality.) consistency also goes a _long_ way in making _conversions_. surely you must realize that many of your e-texts are finding their highest popularity as a result of some sort of conversion, whether over at blackmask.com or manytexts.com or wherever. i think it behooves you to groom your texts for such conversions, whether you do those conversions or someone else does them... (heck, the time that has been spent doing .html conversions alone could have been reduced _significantly_ by improving consistency and then depending upon automatic .html generation by computer. and then all of the .html versions would have been consistent too!) unless you have a _commitment_ to removing the inconsistencies, though, you won't understand the depth of the processes required. for instance, staying with the rewrap example, you wouldn't realize that if you're creating a book of poetry, where _none_ of the lines should be rewrapped, you should preface _all_ lines with a space. other examples abound. if footnotes are marked consistently, the computer can be programmed to treat them appropriately. a "table of illustrations" can become a more-useful hotlinked list, or the launching point for a slideshow of all the book's pictures... basically, it means thinking in terms of the _library_, not the _book_. consistency is the foundation that can allow _all_kinds_ of neat new features, limited only by the imaginations of programmers. the reason you haven't seen this exhibited already is because programmers have been flustered by massive inconsistencies. even your own p.g. people can't produce the best possible tools to help them do their jobs because of all the parsing difficulties. *** so yeah, the computer could just lay there. but why not put it to work? -bowerbird

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"Lady Chatterly's Lover" public domain in the U.S.?
by Jon Noring 31 Jan '06

31 Jan '06

Everyone, Even though D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterly's Lover" was published in 1928, some of the publishing details in the following web site indicate the possibility it may be public domain in the U.S.: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/rananim/lawrence/lcl.html Anyone have more knowledge on the U.S. public domain status of this work? Jon

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blah blah blog
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jan '06

28 Jan '06

as promised, i'm morphing myself to my blah blah blog. don't want to talk about you behind your back, though... > http://journals.aol.com/bowerbird/bowerbirdseyeview -bowerbird

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Re: Ebook reading devices
by Juhana Sadeharju 26 Jan '06

26 Jan '06

Most important property of such a reader would be that there is no need to install any upload-software to the computer. Only then I could go to public library, browse and download free ebooks to the reader. If the device has the USB cable, then the device should be seen in the computer as an usb/portable disk. The books saved to this usb/portable disk then must also be readable in the reader. Note, some mp3 players are seen as a usb/portable disk, but the music files saved to the disk are not playable. Some proprietary formats may have been reverse engineered but that is illegal in USA and Europe. In Europe, one is not even allowed to tell what unofficial software could be used to convert the text to the proprietary format. And reverse engineering would not help at all, because one cannot install anything in public libraries. Does eBookWise require a software installation? Sony devices are known for requiring a software installation. Note, the requirement for the software installation hits harder the digital camera. Most popular cameras require the software installation, and therefore one is not able, e.g., to transfer the photos to safe, to home, via a public library, an internet cafe, or a hotel. Think about travelling and a possibility that your camera gets stolen or otherwise damaged, or that you're short of the memory cards. Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software

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re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Jan '06

22 Jan '06

anyway, it's a good thing command-line programs are back "in" these days... thus gutcheck was able to just "skip over" that messy graphical-user-interface period, thank heaven... -bowerbird p.s. and no, i am _not_ suggesting that it was anyone's _individual_ responsibility or failure.

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Re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 21 Jan '06

21 Jan '06

In a message dated 1/12/2006 12:15:48 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, robsuth(a)robsuth.plus.com writes: enquiries as far as I could, but found no product among the DVD portable readers that would deal with text, nor was any of the manufacturers interested in producing one. Apart from the French reader Cybook (which I think is too expensive for the task and market although otherwise for the most part ideal) there seems still to be no special ebook reading device available in UK or the EU generally: laptops are still too big and heavy, and PDAs still have far too small a screen My enquiries confirmed my strong impression that there are protectionist interests holding this back, presumably in the interests of proprietary issues of ebooks. I suggest you go to eBookWise and FictionWise. Although they do not deal with DVD portable readers, they are seeking input into what people need and want, and would be very glad to hear from you. My husband, two of my daughters, several of my friends, and I all use the eBookWise reader which you can find for sale for about $100 at eBookWise.com. By using extra memory cards, you can build immense libraries, or you can use only the memory built into the device and build an immense library on your computer, realizing that you'll have to download often. I have six memory cards and would like to have about sixty more, but they aren't free. Anne Wingate

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Re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 21 Jan '06

21 Jan '06

In a message dated 1/13/2006 10:07:27 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, imaclean(a)gmail.com writes: It directly supports PDF, XHTML and Text (Unicode?) formats. An ebook that will support PDF is a good thing, but I wouldn't want it if it will support ONLY these formats.

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Re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Joshua Hutchinson 19 Jan '06

19 Jan '06

> > I do not do windoze programming. > You are essentially saying that a non programmer can work for PG. :-( > Did you really mean that? > > You have agreed with me above that gutcheck is the standard which must be > passed to get. I am just trying to find a version of that standard which > will run on my machine, with the text > Well, I'll try to be nice even though you are being very confrontational... No one but you ever said any of the above. 1 - GutCheck is *not* required. Jim, who is probably the end-all on the subject since he wrote the thing, flat out said it is not required. 2 - GuiGuts and GutCheck are *not* the same thing. GuiGuts is a text editor written in PERL. GutCheck is a text checker written in C. You can run GutCheck from GuiGuts (among many, many other things). 3 - Asking for GuiGuts support here is a waste of time. The developer of GuiGuts isn't here, he is on the DP forums. Which you've flat out refused to go to. Fine, just don't expect help for a Dell laptop when you call HP tech support, either. 4 - No one said you had to work/create tools for PG. But if you want a tool for something that doesn't currently exist, you either create it yourself or do without (or wait until someone else needs it and decides to do the work you don't want to do). Personally, I've done all three over the years. 5 - *AND MOST IMPORTANT!* GutCheck is not a test that must be passed. It is better thought of as a checker that will flag things that are wrong more often than right. You should run it, because it *will* help you find mistakes that exist in your text. You, as an intelligent, thinking human being, must check each item and verify whether it is correct. Sometimes it is right. Sometimes it is wrong. If the system was 100% infalliable, we wouldn't need humans anywhere in the process. Josh

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re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Jan '06

19 Jan '06

seems like you should welcome new tools... anyway, when are scans going to go online? until the general public can compare e-texts to the page-scans, you simply aren't using the best "checker" at your disposal -- all of their eyeballs. "debugging is parallelizable" (a.k.a. distributable), but hey, _only_ if you actually _set_it_up_ that way... of course, if you _want_ to do all the checking yourself... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Language free version of guiguts?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jan '06

17 Jan '06

dave said: > If they work on my projects ... > When I get tools which work half way OK, and can > get the submission process sorted to my satisfaction. actually, dave, my post was directed at project gutenberg. :+) but i'm glad you're thinking along similar lines... -bowerbird

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Yorkshire Dialect
by Darren Burnhill 17 Jan '06

17 Jan '06

Hi, > There never was and never will be grammar or dictionaries for Yorkshire > dialect, Forgive me for pointing you toward things you already know; There are a few others (A grammar of the dialect of Windhill by Joseph Wright, etc.), but Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire by Richard Blakeborough is probably right up your street as it contains a substantial glossary. I do have a (reprint) copy that I will get round to OCRing, but i'm working my way through the 'Old Yorkshire' series first. Meanwhile there are a few copies in the Bradford system; http://www.biskit.yorks.com/ This may also be of interest: http://www.yorksj.ac.uk/dialect/ IME the dialectical variants still exist to this day. >From sunny Shipley ;)

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PG Website Report for 2005
by Marcello Perathoner 15 Jan '06

15 Jan '06

User base and server load The PG website is ranked at position 3,842 by Alexa (Dec 31, 2005). Note that Alexa is an Amazon company and thus bookish people are overrepresented in the Alexa user base. While the absolute Alexa rank value is skewed in our favor, the trend Alexa gives is quite objective. Since Jan 1, 2005: - 2.5 times as many people are using PG and - PG is serving 2 times as many web pages. To accomodate the increased load at better response times the site was redesigned for more static pages and better caching. Rarely used features like skins were dropped in favor of better performance. Where do new users come from? Most visitors find us thru search engines. But 10% come from wikipedia. The catalog team has been active in editing appropriate wikipedia articles to point to our ebooks. If you want more people to come to PG, help us editing more wikipedia articles. Dec 2005 Visitors % Referrer URL 236011 24.20% www.google.com/ 97795 10.03% en.wikipedia.org/ 78527 8.05% search.yahoo.com/ 34796 3.57% www.promo.net/ 28997 2.97% www.google.co.uk/ 24810 2.54% www.stumbleupon.com/ 20355 2.09% www.google.ca/ 16598 1.70% search.msn.com/ 15289 1.57% www.google.de/ 13714 1.41% www.google.co.in/ Search Terms Visitors found us searching for these terms: Dec 2005 Visitors Search Term 24923 project gutenberg 18297 gutenberg 9391 gutenberg project 9176 free ebooks 6964 ebooks 4303 e books 4059 free e books 3807 free books 3489 online books 3348 project gutenburg While most of these people knew beforehand what they were looking for, some of them found us by searching for "free ebooks" or similar generic terms. I have rewritten our main page to push our ranking for the "free ebooks" search term. We are also well positioned in google for following generic search terms: Dec 2005 Pos. Search Term 2 free ebooks 2 free books 5 ebooks 15 books Some other sites rank better than PG because they have "ebook" in the domain name. This way all links to those sites must contain the target word "ebook". If you want to help pushing our rank, set links in your web pages pointing to the PG main page with the link text "free ebooks" like this: My favorite <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org">free ebooks</a> site. Pretty Pictures Snapshots of Alexa statistics on Dec 31, 2005: Pageviews: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/reports/2005/alexa.6yp.png Reach: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/reports/2005/alexa.6yr.png Rank: http://www.gutenberg.org/internal/reports/2005/alexa.6yt.png User: internal Pass: books -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jan '06

14 Jan '06

michael said: > Where can I look up things like that? i think it was in the recent report on reading out of the n.e.a. which was a hatchet job, so i'm not sure how trustworthy it is, so... but i think it's no longer a major secret that americans don't really read a lot... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jan '06

14 Jan '06

ian said: > hmm iRex is a spin off of Phillips - thats fairly deep pockets. oh, right. why do you think they didn't put the big name on it? ian said: > And besides - an ipod is $300 and it only plays music ... "only"? i'd guess people are willing to pay a lot more for music than for books. i don't have figures on music, but the number of books read annually by the average american is _one_. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jan '06

14 Jan '06

ian said: > Have you seen the just announced ebook reader > from Sony using a high res e-ink display ? i might pay $350 for a handheld with web access. but for a machine that's isolated from cyberspace? um, no thanks. next? -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices
by Joshua Hutchinson 13 Jan '06

13 Jan '06

Anyone heard if the BBeB format is open/documented? And even better, if anyone has created an open source converter? If these things take off, it would be nice to have the ability to generate files for them from our collection. If there is an open source converter, there is a chance we could do such a thing right on the server. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ian MacLean" <imaclean(a)gmail.com> To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] Ebook reading devices Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 17:54:27 +0900 > > Have you seen the just announced ebook reader from Sony using a high > res e-ink display ?: > > http://blogs.reuters.com/2006/01/04/glimpse-at-new-sony-reader/ > http://products.sel.sony.com/pa/prs/reader_features.html > > They claim to have done away with the ridculous restrictions built > into their previous reader ( the libre ) and it *should* be able to > ready txt and pdf, html although these will need to be converted into > Sony's proprietry BBeB format before being transferred to the device. > > Another product out soon that will use the same e-ink technology is > the irex ER0100 : > http://www.epaper.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemi… > > which apparently will be able to display PDF, XHTML, or TXT without conversion. > > Both these devices will probably be as expensive as the Cybook but > with much higher readability of e-ink displays. > > Ian > > > On 1/13/06, Robert Sutherland <robsuth(a)robsuth.plus.com> wrote: > > Just to bring my enquiry of 8 June 05 uptodate, I continued my > > email/online enquiries as far as I could, but found no product among the DVD > > portable readers that would deal with text, nor was any of the manufacturers > > interested in producing one. Apart from the French reader Cybook (which I > > think is too expensive for the task and market although otherwise for the > > most part ideal) there seems still to be no special ebook reading device > > available in UK or the EU generally: laptops are still too big and heavy, > > and PDAs still have far too small a screen My enquiries confirmed my strong > > impression that there are protectionist interests holding this back, > > presumably in the interests of proprietary issues of ebooks. That is really > > rather to bury the head in the sand, especially now that Google are to set > > up their Library - if PG and Google are going to be fully useful a new > > device is inevitable. Can PG and Google not take a hand themselves to enable > > production of something they undoubtedly will need? > > > > Robert Sutherland > > ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ > > _______________________________________________ > > gutvol-d mailing list > > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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Ebook reading devices
by Robert Sutherland 13 Jan '06

13 Jan '06

Just to bring my enquiry of 8 June 05 uptodate, I continued my email/online enquiries as far as I could, but found no product among the DVD portable readers that would deal with text, nor was any of the manufacturers interested in producing one. Apart from the French reader Cybook (which I think is too expensive for the task and market although otherwise for the most part ideal) there seems still to be no special ebook reading device available in UK or the EU generally: laptops are still too big and heavy, and PDAs still have far too small a screen My enquiries confirmed my strong impression that there are protectionist interests holding this back, presumably in the interests of proprietary issues of ebooks. That is really rather to bury the head in the sand, especially now that Google are to set up their Library - if PG and Google are going to be fully useful a new device is inevitable. Can PG and Google not take a hand themselves to enable production of something they undoubtedly will need? Robert Sutherland ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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Re: [gutvol-d] Early ebook history info wanted
by Dick Adicks 12 Jan '06

12 Jan '06

When I was teaching at Georgia Tech from 1965 to 1968, Professor William Mullen in the English department there was transferring the Episcopal psalter to IBM cards, using ALGOL. Bill inspired me to take an introductory course in that computer language so that I could initiate a similar project, but I went no further with it. I don't know what become of his work, but he had accumulated many boxes of cards, with one line to every card. Dick Adicks A small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.--Margaret Mead . . . if vicious people are united and form a power, honest people must do the same. --Leo Tolstoy

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re: [gutvol-d] Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar Bush; Asimov
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 11 Jan '06

11 Jan '06

andrew said: > a few other early PG texts, from the Walnut Creek CD ROM. > Any chance of finding one of those still floating around somewhere? i did some searching for a walnut-creek c.d. a long time back, but got nowhere. but maybe an ebay expert could help you... however, mr. noring already has solid evidence that predates that cd-rom. what he's looking for is even _earlier_ evidence... -bowerbird

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RE: [gutvol-d] my impression
by Dick Adicks 11 Jan '06

11 Jan '06

See the introduction to PG etext #26, Paradise Lost, identified there as "the oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg (ca. 1964-1965)" Dick Adicks

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Further comments by the Atari "Project Gutenberg" team leader
by Jon Noring 10 Jan '06

10 Jan '06

Everyone, In a prior message this afternoon I noted that the first mention of the phrase "Project Gutenberg" in Google Groups appeared in 1987, and had nothing to do with the PG we know. It was used internally by the Atari Corporation to describe a new laser printer. I asked Art Morgan, who headed up that project, and whose name is associated with the 1987 message, to clarify what he wrote, and why he chose the name "Project Gutenberg", which I know everyone here will relate to. With his permission, he said: "Yes, I personally came up with the name since I was team lead on the SLM804 project. We didn't assign the product a model number until fairly late in its development. I had to give a "sneak peek" talk on it, so I dubbed it Project Gutenberg. In 1987, Apple had the only true desktop publishing system around, way before HP started selling laser printers for PCs and commoditized them. Unfortunately, Apple's laser printer was a computer in itself, and they had to charge a premium for this redundancy. "Atari's CEO, Jack Tramiel, gave us the edict to create a laser printer "for the masses, not the classes". I came up with the idea to have the host system perform all the RIP (raster image processing) functions of the printer, and just "pump" the final bitmap image of the page to the printer. This would require only a "dumb" laser printer engine to get the job done. The Atari ST was the perfect printer host - it was based on the Motorola 68000 and had gobs of memory - exactly the platform found in Apple's laser printers. "It was easy to talk to Adobe to port their code to the ST since it was developed on the same 68000 platform. But, to lower the costs further, we went with a PostScript clone from Imagen, and a printer engine from TEC (not Canon). Anyway, we should have patented the whole lot because NeXT later used the host-based laser printer idea for their system, and now Dell offers one for PCs. "Why did I pick Gutenberg? Gutenberg's moveable type technology enabled the printing of low-cost bibles and brought the word of God to everyone, just as Atari's unique RIP technology brought desktop publishing to the masses ..." (In a followup reply, Art mentioned:) "Sorry to admit it, but I didn't know about Michael Hart until you told me about him. He sounds like quite a visionary fellow - like Ted Nelson or Alan Kay. "Feel free to use my text - I'm honored and flattered! Take care!" For those interested... Jon

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my impression
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 10 Jan '06

10 Jan '06

my impression is that mr. noring would like to knock michael hart down a few notches, and that's why he's doing his "historical research"... still, those of us who were promoting e-books back in the '80s know who was leading the pack. it was michael hart. and not only was he not getting any _credit_ then, he was actually derided as something of a kook... which he _is_, of course, but the kooks are often the people who end up transforming our world... :+) so to try and strip him of his credit here, now that we finally have come to realize his genius, well... it is downright cruel. small-minded and cruel... with due respect to the dreamers who came before and handed to us the _idea_ of electronic-books, including alan kaye, h.g. wells, and douglas adams, there is no question who _invented_ the e-book, by virtue of sitting down and actually entering one: it's michael hart... as one of the greatest inventors who ever lived said, only 1% is inspiration, the other 99% is perspiration. plus michael hart gave us something even better -- the concept of "unlimited distribution" of e-books... compared to the _commercial_ e-book efforts, which somehow noring wants on equal footing, look how many more riches _that_ idea gave us. -bowerbird p.s. along these lines, consider this from alan kaye: > "We're running on fumes technologically today," > he says. "The sad truth is that 20 years or so of > commercialization have almost completely missed > the point of what personal computing is about."

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Re: [gutvol-d] Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar
by Joshua Hutchinson 09 Jan '06

09 Jan '06

----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Noring" <jon(a)noring.name> > > Finally, Mark Bernstein, the founder of Eastgate, which in 1987 issued > several contemporary hypertext fiction ebooks on floppy disk and > CD-ROM, mentioned to me Asimov's mid-50's book "Foundation" where > ebooks are implicit. Has anyone read this book and can comment on > Asimov's 1950's vision for ebooks? > > Thanks! > > Jon Noring > Asimov mentions "film-books" in many of his works, but it is unclear if they are film strips of text running through a special reader or some kind of interactive medium or perhaps a "moving pictures" version of books. I think he leaves it deliberately vague. NOTE: I'm pulling this from memory as I don't have any of my Asimov books here at work to flip through. Josh

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re: [gutvol-d] 36,000 and counting
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Jan '06

06 Jan '06

charles said: > Thanks though! no, thank _you_. it is a remarkable achievement to have motivated so many to enlist in the cause, with a good number (in the hundreds!) devoting _significant_ time and energy -- 10-40 hours a week! -- from busy lives... -bowerbird

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