bruce said:
> It's a shame that they are able to hide a PD
> book behind a copyrighted cover.
major publishing houses do it all the time with p-books.
and there's nothing wrong with it legally. or even "morally".
most especially if they're delivering hardcopy.
paper doesn't grow on trees. (ha ha, i funny!)
(i would agree that it would be kind of sleazy to
charge people for an electronic-copy, especially
if all they got was a download, not an actual c.d.
then again, if p.g. wasn't getting free hosting from
ibiblio, and they had to pay for all the bandwidth...)
***
again, there is nothing to "report". what they're doing
is (a) perfectly legal, and (b) a service to their customers.
if we want to give people an unrestricted view of the pages,
we need to submit the book to the program and specify that.
i'll get around to doing it myself sooner or later, providing
google doesn't charge publishers to get their titles listed...
but it's really something i think p.g. should do, systematically.
not that anyone gives a flying burrito what i think p.g. should do.
***
greg said:
> If the books are in there because the publisher added them
> and the publisher claims they are under copyright
> there is nothing you can do to change it.
i don't think you have to claim the text is under copyright
to restrict viewing access on any or even all of your pages.
like i said, our job is to submit books to the program that
have _no_ restrictions on their viewing. that will serve to
drive some of the parasites from the scene, but have little
negative effect on the people who are offering a _service_
to end-users by giving them a hard-copy option. (indeed,
visibility might have a positive effect on those businesses.)
another question is whether project gutenberg wants to
get in the hard-copy business itself. p.g. could probably
make a little bit of money doing it, or maybe lose a little,
because it ain't always easy to satisfy the general public,
but either way, i don't see any volunteers for the task...
(as branko will tell you, it can take a few hours of work to
get an e-text into the shape where you could feel good
offering it for sale, and that means a heckuva lot of work
for a library that stands at 18,000+ e-texts and growing.
of course, if the e-texts had been formatted consistently,
it'd be a piece of cake to get them into publication shape.
that's one reason i've hollered so long about consistency.)
you wouldn't _have_to_ get into the hard-copy business
in order to _list_ the titles so that people could view your
pages without restriction. you could just specify a cost of
$8,000 per title, and probably drive away any customers.
(and if you did get a customer, it would be worth it, not?)
but meanwhile, the pages would be sitting there, viewable.
-bowerbird
