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

re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

brad- the post you quoted, from me, was an errant send. it was actually a message posted by someone else. in general, i don't think much about how existing software will treat my files, because i consider it my job to deliver software that does what i want. non-programmers have to live within their apps, but as a programmer, i create the worlds i want... the question of how to "mark up" line-breaks is a non-starter for me. the plain-ascii p.g. e-texts already have hard line-endings in them indicating line-breaks. those are the ones inserted by p.g. my suggestion was that the original line-breaks should be used instead. i think the discussion has run its course this time. maybe it will come up again. or maybe it will not. and maybe there will be demand from users for e-texts that mimic their hard-copy counterparts, or maybe there will not be. maybe jeroen will work up a template i can use. or maybe he won't. time will tell on all these things. or maybe it won't. -bowerbird

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Daily progress reports missing from [posted]?
by John Hagerson 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

I have not received a daily progress report through [posted] since 22-JUN. Have they been temporarily suspended or discontinued? Have they been moved to another list? Thank you.

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Re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

Line-breaks are mark-up. They don't add anything whatsoever to the text itself and are completely arbitrarily decided, usually based on the technology that is used to display the actual content. You can deny the difference between structure, content and presentation all you want, but it is perfectly possible to reformat a book using columns instead of lines without changing the actual content. And where will your precious line-breaks go in that case?

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ebooks libre et gratuits
by Norm Wolcott 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

Ebooks libre et gratuits had an arrangement with MH apparently where their books would appear on PG eventually. Now that the ebooks web site is no more, what will happen to the ebooksgratuits which did not make it to PG? Will all of this work have to be repeated by someone else? Is there an archive anywhere of this enormous quantitiiy of work? Why did ebooksgratuits disappear? Pressure from Canadian publishers/ government? Is there an unknown story here? nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

jeroen said: > Although I agree with Michael that there is no need > to preserve things as linebreaks in most texts -- ok, well you and michael agree. that's good. :+) but what do you say to end-users who want that info? somehow, "tough luck, kid, _we_ don't think it's necessary" doesn't sound like the kind of thing _i_ want to tell people. because that's the type of statement that makes people go off to a different cyberlibrary. that's my whole point. (and to all of the other people who responded on similar "theoretical" grounds, i'm truly sorry you missed the point.) > if you really need to go to that level of detail, there > is always the original or the scans to fall back upon well, neither of those gives you the flexibility of digital text. but yes, a tight coupling of the two forms is the best method. you will note that those "digital reprints" from jose menendez allow a reader to summon the scan of the page with one click. (since the page already looks like the scan anyway, there might be little reason to do it, though, except to verify that similarity. but this constant willingness to demonstrate the verisimilitude will be the proof that makes people comfortable with the use of the smaller-sized digital reprint, with its expanded functionality, as opposed to the bigger, slower, dumber collection of scans. anyone who has proofread a scan against reflowed text knows the reflowing makes that task immensely more difficult though, so you'll never attain the same confidence in the text's accuracy.) > I want to make a case for preserving page numbers, > if not at least as recognisable anchors in text, and only for > those books being referenced to regularly by other books. page-numbers are retained in many e-texts these days... but i'm sure you remember we all had this same argument about page-numbers. i'm confident that -- down the line -- sentiment will similarly change to be in favor of line-breaks. in general, i've just been content to wait it out until the change; but seeing all the e-texts as they cross my screen downloading made me realize again the sadness of the discarded line-breaks. > This excludes most fiction, but is particularly important for > scientific works, which have constructed a kind of paper web > with cross references mainly based on page numbers. there are plenty of cross-references made to works of fiction. and the concept of "books reading each other" would require that _all_ of our books are brought under the same umbrella... > In long term, such references of course should give way to proper > references to the actual paragraph or sentence being referenced good! you recognize the need for a finer-grained pointer than the page. because that's the kind of thinking that leads to line-break retention. you can narrow things down rather specifically when you point to the range that's represented from page-19-line-7 to page-21-line-14, or from page-87-line-6 to page-87-line-8, can't you? not only that, this kind of reference also works for the person who only has the paper copy of the book, not the e-book, if the two are duplicates of each other. and that's precisely the type of capability i'll have in my viewer-program. even in a traditional browser, it wouldn't be hard to implement something roughly equivalent, though. the user could specify some text with a link, and after going to the precise point of the link, the browser could then execute a "find" command for the specified text. it wouldn't be hard at all, and would seem to give a rather exact form of pointing to a specific place. it has the benefit of being implemented entirely outside of the document, as well, which i see as being tremendously important. if all our links need markup in the original document to be implemented, as is the present case, we're _never_ going to be able to quickly get to a point of profuse interlinks. we'll get thoroughly bogged down in the quicksand of heavy markup first... (for an example of that, take a look at the markup which jon noring posted, and then read through that particular diversion of this thread. the horrors!) > but as a practical ad-interim solution, staying with page numbers will > increase the number of texts we can digitize with our limited means. it doesn't cost anything to retain the line-break information. > I would however, like to see the collection be incorporated in a kind of > wiki-like system, where people can add -- without tampering with the static > source texts -- annotations, add tagging and create live cross references i've had a demo up for some time now showing "continuous proofreading". > http://users.aol.com/bowerbird/proof_wiki.html i also used a similar template in these demo-books: > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/myant/myantc001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/ahmmw/ahmmwc001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbc001.html this system could easily be elaborated upon to build what you requested here. indeed, i will be pouring all of the p.g. texts that i'll be handling -- perhaps some 5000-6000, as near as i can tell -- into just this type of system, within the next 6 months, and i would be open to any ideas that you might have... heck, design a webpage to do what you want, and i will use it as the template. you know me, i don't even care if it "validates", as long as it's easy and it works. *** andrew said: > There are places such as wikisource.org, where you could add the texts > and start providing links such as you mention here immediately. i'll check out wikisource.org to see what kind of capabilities they offer. in the past, when i've looked at existing sites, it has seemed that wikis aren't geared to do things -- like populate pages -- on a massive scale. even rather fundamental things like batch f.t.p. are sometimes missing. and when you're dealing with thousands, or tens of thousands, of files, it becomes absolutely necessary to deal with them in a template fashion. i also think there's a good reason jeroen asked for a "wiki-like system", and not a wiki per se, as indicated by his concern about "tampering" with the static source texts. the thought is that the original source -- and indeed, the string of comments as well -- must be inviolate. that's because the idea is to build a body of thought around a text, of which links -- intrasystem, and outgoing and incoming -- are a very crucial aspect. and it's not possible to link into a wiki proper, because what was there yesterday might well be gone today, only to reappear in different form tomorrow. you can't link into a pile of sand. oh sure, you could instruct users to leave link markup untouched. and they might even follow your instructions. (yeah, right.) still, that will interfere with refactoring, and get very crufty before long. besides, a good part of the give-and-take of this kind of conversation involves letting all of the arguments stand, rather than editing them. (and especially rather than "editing them by deletion".) let the future examine all the arguments, and see which ones stand the test of time. so you need to have stability for the process itself, not just for the links. -bowerbird p.s. jeroen, if you want to provide me a template, i could use it sooner rather than later, the better to architect it into my overall work-flow...

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EbooksGratuits online
by pat 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

Hi, I am Patrick from ebooksgratuits 1/ As Carlo told you, thank you very much for being concerned by what happened to us. Now, we have moved www.ebooksgratuits.com to a very robust provider, and we will have a mirror soon at www.ebooksgratuits.org , so that it does not happen again. We have now collected some funds through a paypal button and can afford to secure our website. Such a predicament is indeed quite painful. 2/ Moreover,as our clearance process (to use a PG word) is quite light, we are not in a position to justify the life +50 rule on some of our books (some translators especially are hard to find out), which is not something that PG would not want, to mirror help 3/ We have now transferred around 160 books to PG thanks to huge recent help (Chuck Greif) and the enduring patience of Tonya. We are now going on more slowly, as the problem is to find out the sources that can be cleared. 4/ Should we disappear again, be aware that you can also have access plenty of our files through P2P (edonkey/emule), search on "ebooksgratuits". --------------------------------- Yahoo! Mail réinvente le mail ! Découvrez le nouveau Yahoo! Mail et son interface révolutionnaire.

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Re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] ebooks libre et gratuits (fwd)
by Greg Newby 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

We could probably run a mirror of this... is anyone in touch with the folks (perhaps in French)? It would take some cooperation from their end (such as an rsync server) to run a good mirror. -- Greg > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2006 10:25:19 -0400 > From: Janet Kegg <jmk(a)his.com> > To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d(a)pglaf.org> > Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] ebooks libre et gratuits > > > The site is now available again: http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ > > See the front page of the Web site for what I believe (my French is > almost nonexistent) is an explanation of what happened. > > On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 09:58:58 -0400, you wrote: > > >Ebooks libre et gratuits had an arrangement with MH apparently where their > >books would appear on PG eventually. Now that the ebooks web site is no > >more, what will happen to the ebooksgratuits which did not make it to PG? > >Will all of this work have to be repeated by someone else? Is there an > >archive anywhere of this enormous quantitiiy of work? Why did > >ebooksgratuits disappear? Pressure from Canadian publishers/ government? > >Is there an unknown story here? > > > >nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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Re: [gutvol-d] Automated readability scores for PG eBooks
by David Starner 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

On 6/26/06, Scott Lawton <scott_bulkmail(a)productarchitect.com> wrote: > While I agree that it would not be worth adding readability score if it had much > impact on these and other worthy goals, But if it doesn't, then those goals aren't reasons _for_ adding it. > There are lots and lots of cool things that could be done with the catalog. We could start with the results of stripping the header and running wc on it. That strikes me at least as useful as this result. Also, the ten or twelve most common words in the book after stripping the ten or twelve most common words in the English language. > Even in the context of the above, the scores would provide a great starting point for > being improved with manual cataloging and literacy labeling. I don't think so. It's downright useless for manual cataloging, as it only handles that one dimension. I don't think it will help literacy labeling much, either, which is best done manually. > Don't let the perfect stand in the way of the good. But I don't think having these numbers anywhere prominent is good. Right now our pages only have a few pieces of important information; minutia like this should go to a page linked to a page linked only from the book page, which we can fill with various stats to our hearts content. It also seems a little weird to have some proprietary reading level numbers on the system, instead of the Fog index or the Flesch-Kincaid Readability tests. It feels like an advertisement.

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re: [gutvol-d] Automated readability scores for PG eBooks
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

david said: > We could start with the results of stripping the header and the "footer", where most of the legalese is these days. does anyone here know the best way to strip both of them? > Also, the ten or twelve most common words in the book after > stripping the ten or twelve most common words in the English language. you'd need to strip more than a dozen. below is a list from wikipedia. there's a strong power-law in word usage. unless you strip 200-500 common words, it probably won't reveal anything very interesting... -bowerbird > http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists Here are the top 100 words (from Project Gutenberg texts) in alphabetical order: a about after all an and any are as at be been before but by can could did do down first for from good great had has have he her him his I if in into is it its know like little made man may me men more mr much must my no not now of on one only or other our out over said see she should so some such than that the their them then there these they this time to two up upon us very was we were what when which who will with would you your

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re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Jun '06

26 Jun '06

jon said: > Well, since I sort of initiated this sub-thread um, you mean since you _hijacked_ the thread... just had to talk about your shiny markup, didn't you? what a debilitating distraction... the need to retain line-breaks has nothing to do with markup. (and your example, which shows the absurd lengths to which a markup mentality will drive a person, was very illuminating, as is all the technoid jargon-jabbering in this "sub-thread".) p.g. introduces its own linebreaks into its plain-ascii e-texts, all without ever entering the markup arena. and i put in my own line-breaks, right here in these posts to this listserve, again without using any markup at all, just the return key. i'll bring this thread back to relevance starting tomorrow... -bowerbird

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