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

re: [gutvol-d] the newest d.p. iteration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

i said: > p.s. plus, as voice recognition improves over the next 5 years or so, > i expect that o.c.r. will take a back seat to voice-transcribed books... then brad said: > ROFL !!! then kevin said: > Ewe no, he mite bee rite. Wee maybe waisting oar thyme. ya know, i never know what i'm gonna say that's gonna set people off. (but i should have learned by now that it'll probably be a throwaway line in the p.s. rather than the meat of the substance in the body of the message.) but hey, i don't mind the challenge. it helps me develop some logic that i might not have bothered with otherwise. obviously kevin here has never used voice-recognition, because no system would give us the line he gives us. that's _not_ to say voice-recognition is problem-free. there are a lot of problems with it. a ton of problems. but there used to be a ton of problems with o.c.r. too. and people still slogged through it anyway, didn't they? the reason people will slog through the problems anyway with voice recognition is because it will be a lot more _fun_ and _easy_ to just _read_ a book through rather than to sit inside an editing system, and that will make the difference. over the past 5 years, some 35,000 people signed up at d.p. roughly 10% -- about 3,500 -- were around when d.p. reset its subscription base a while back. those were the top 10%, so that wasn't a bad thing, but it does go to show that the o.c.r. route is just a little bit too trying for the average bear. even when you distribute out the work. but hey, if that other 90% could do their part to help out by simply recording a book -- they _did_ once express enough interest in the cause to sign up, remember -- then maybe they could have been retained as helpers... and maybe a whole order of magnitude of more helpers could be _recruited_ if the means of helping were so fun. with libre vox, people are already recording old books. audiobooks, always popular, are getting even more so. podcasting is growing the base of recording experience (and audience) in the user-population at a _huge_ rate. and, for those of us keeping track, there has already been a message posted on the distributed proofing forums from a person who reported using voice-recognition software _within_the_current_d.p._system_. now that's dedication. and as the form-factors of our machines continue to shrink, voice-recognition will become more and more important, and more ingrained, and some people will rely on it entirely. and speaking of libre vox, it's important to keep in mind that a _recording_ retains value even _after_ it has been turned into digital text. heck, many people will prefer the .mp3 to the .txt. there's sure a lot more player-hardware out here for the .mp3. moreover, when a person creates a recording, that product is _seeped_ with their contribution. with their own _voice_, for crying out loud. can it get much more personal than that? to some people, that will surely be more satisfying than the simple credit-line at the top of a project gutenberg e-text... and hey, it might mean a lot more to the _end-user_ as well! i can tell you that i've looked at a lot of texts from jon ingram. lots and lots of them. and they almost always look very nice. but none of them has had the impact of the bit he recorded for libre vox, where his accent had me muttering to myself, "hey, i forgot, that bloody bloke is from _england_, isn't he?" there's something very endearing and personal about a voice. even one with a heavy english accent. ;+) so a person who records a book is giving us _two_ products; one is a route to obtaining digital text via voice-recognition, and the other is a recording of that book in a human voice. it might be that down the line, the second dwarfs the first. it's also quite important to remind ourselves that these two products are complementary, not competing with each other. and it's not hard to imagine that the recording will become _especially_ useful when it gets combined with page-scans. a recording of each page playing when the scan is displayed might become the most typical kind of "book" in the future! likewise, it does _not_ have to be either/or between o.c.r. and voice-recognition; we can instead make the two work together. we could do o.c.r. on the scans, and then cross-check the o.c.r. against the voice-recognition results, then concentrate on the differences to intelligently remove errors from _both_ versions. we would expect homonym problems in the voice-recognition, for instance, and scannos in the o.c.r., so could control for that. anytime you combine two different methods for the same result, they can serve as a useful cross-check on each other. bingo. in case you didn't know, some of the people who are obtaining the highest accuracy in their e-texts use text-to-speech to get it. what i'm talking about here can be viewed as the flip-side of that. so, in summary, if you're "rolling on the floor laughing" about voice-recognition and the possibilities it offers to digitizers, you show your lack of vision. there's no other way to say it... of course, your loss is the lurkers' gain, because it gave me a reason to explain. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] the newest d.p. iteration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

marcello said: > Why don't you start your own distributed proofing project because i anticipate that with further research on my part, combined with ever-increasing o.c.r. progress from abbyy, we won't even need much human proofreading in the future. besides, i've already prototyped my "continuous proofreading", and i'll be putting that into place when google hands me their full pre-1923 library of page-scans, which i recently requested. and, to be honest with you, i've become more and more bored with these old books, which -- face it -- we focus on _mostly_ because their copyright has expired. i'd say that 4 out of 5 of the e-texts that are being posted these days are _not_ "classics". (not that nonclassics don't deserve to be preserved as well, but...) further, much of the copyright-constrained stuff of recent decades is merely pap the publishing industry thought might make money. much of it, i couldn't give a shit if it makes it to cyberspace or not... what really excites me now is our new possibility to let _everything_ that _anyone_ might write see the light of day and find its audience. we are finally free of the shackles of the past, meaning that we can free ourselves of the corporate mindset that's blinded us up to now. (and the government one before it, and the religious one before it.) we can now travel far past the edge of the envelope; that's exciting. so rather than converting old books from paper to electronic form, i want to help new born-digital works find their place in cyberspace. i want to encourage writers to see our imaginations can now be free, in a way that has _never_ been true before in all of our long history. in other words, the human race now has a truly unique opportunity! don't get me wrong, i am _really_happy_ old works are being rescued. it's just that, for my own self, the relevance of new works is more juicy. -bowerbird p.s. plus, as voice recognition improves over the next 5 years or so, i expect that o.c.r. will take a back seat to voice-transcribed books...

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PG text in library catalog
by Andrew Sly 16 Jun '06

16 Jun '06

Well! I've had my first experience of running into a Project Gutenberg citation in a major "traditional" library catalog. This was through Amicus, a collection of records from Canadian libraries. The only unfortunate thing is that it is presented via NetLibrary, which limits and controls access to its texts. NAME(S):*Burroughs, Edgar Rice, 1875-1950 NetLibrary, Inc TITLE(S): The mucker [electronic resource] / Edgar Rice Burroughs PUBLISHER: Champaign, Ill. (P.O. Box 2782, Champaign 61825) : Project Gutenberg, [199u]. E-LOCATIONS: http://www.netLibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summary&v=1 &bookid=1085499 *McMaster only NOTES: Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://www.netLibrary.com/urlapi.asp?action=summary&v= 1&bookid=1085499 Electronic reproduction. Boulder, Colo. : NetLibrary, 2001. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to NetLibrary affiliated libraries. NUMBERS: ISBN: 0585016860 (electronic bk.) : ISBN: 0585016860 (electronic bk.) CLASSIFICATION: LC Call no.: PS3503.U687 .M83 SUBJECTS: Electronic books Science fiction

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the newest d.p. iteration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

the newest iteration over at distributed proofreaders will be _3_ proofing rounds and 2 formatting rounds, with provisions for skipping some of these rounds... with this new change, i think we can safely say that d.p. has wasted a lot of time studying its workflow and _still_ not come to the point of perfecting it... so it's time for me to once again interject my opinion. 1. pre-proofing clean-up programs could handle _many_ of the problems that are found in your o.c.r. (careful image handling could solve most of the rest.) 2. if d.p. used zen markup, it could save itself from the drudgery of those "formatting rounds". conversion from plain-ascii to html is now routine. (pushing out each page to check its formatting is a tremendous waste of bandwidth. but who cares?) 3. no matter how many rounds you add, it will _still_ be the case that some pages will have needed more. (some _pages_, *not* some _books_; it's silly to treat all of the pages in a book as being of equal difficulty.) d.p. needs to go "roundless", treat pages individually. 4. duplicate proofings by independent proofers can be crosschecked to quickly and easily spot any differences, which can then be dispatched with a minimum of effort. this double-key strategy can be used on individual pages. again, these are all things that i've been saying for years. if all the energy that's been spent on "research" would've been used to implement these recommendations instead, it would've been a lot less work, and d.p. would now have a good workflow. as it is, it will probably take a year or so for the problems in the newest system to reveal themselves, and then more work after that to install all of my suggestions. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] PG text in library catalog
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

andrew said: > The only unfortunate thing is that it is presented via > NetLibrary, which limits and controls access to its texts. to my eyes, this is starting to look like an i.q. test for librarians. ironic, isn't it? for me, a library is a place where books that normally cost money can be borrowed for free. but with this, a library is becoming a place that pays for books that are free. -bowerbird

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annotating the movies
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 14 Jun '06

14 Jun '06

wanna create your own version of mystery science theater 3000, complete with smart-ass comments coming from the audience members pictured in silhouette down front? then get a mac and run "peanut gallery". > http://peanutgallery.kaisakura.com/ and you can be such an audience-member, meaning that "it's ok to talk during the film". as the website says: > Interact with each other via Maya-rendered 30fps* > animated characters, inline real-time text chat, and voice. > Peanut Gallery isn't just a video player – it's a Shared Media Experience! -bowerbird

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dan poynter and e-books
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Jun '06

13 Jun '06

on another listserve, dan poynter -- the guru of self-publishing -- says this: > I have been reading (many) books > on my Pocket PC for years. -bowerbird

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viewer-program for p.g. e-texts
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Jun '06

13 Jun '06

one of the best viewer-programs around -- for those of you on the p.c. platform -- is "ybook", by simon hayes. and it's free... it even has a hookup with the p.g. catalog, so you can download e-texts from inside it. ybook also lets you wrap a book you've written in a standalone executable .exe, which is nifty... http://members.iinet.net.au/~simonh/spacejock/yBook.html -bowerbird

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Re: translucent windows
by Mjit Raindancer-Stahl 12 Jun '06

12 Jun '06

> > can anyone think of _any_ possible > e-book use for transparent windows? Anatomy books. My favorite anatomy books allow the reader to view the human body system by system, with each system on a clear overlay. M'jit AIM/Yahoo!IM/Ebay: Realmjit realmjit(a)yahoo.com | answerwitch(a)gundo.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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translucent windows
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 12 Jun '06

12 Jun '06

the mac allows windows to have varying background opacity, from totally opaque through translucent to fully transparent... can anyone think of _any_ possible e-book use for transparent windows? because it looks really cool, and even though it's not cross-plat, i'd _love_ to be able to find _some_ reason to implement it... any reason. but alas, i'm coming up empty... ;+) -bowerbird

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