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

PG Wiki
by Aaron Cannon 01 Sep '06

01 Sep '06

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi Marcello and all. Any word on when the static content on Gutenberg.org will be done away with and replaced by the wiki? Also, congratulations Italy! That was an intense game. :) Sincerely Aaron Cannon - -- Skype: cannona MSN/Windows Messenger: cannona(a)hotmail.com (don't send email to the hotmail address.) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (MingW32) - GPGrelay v0.959 Comment: Key available from all major key servers. iD8DBQFEsXr7I7J99hVZuJcRAi4SAJ9VGglvtmHeHrqaq8xGjtDgyKTckwCgo2Ow eWxF9+N2OTZk7QHmv6Qof7Y= =/56y -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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re: [gutvol-d] Categorizing PG content
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Aug '06

06 Aug '06

karen said: > Suggestion: have a competition to design > an open-source cataloging system for e-books, > where there are no physical constraints on "shelving." > Publicize it in library schools. Major ego-boo for the > teacher/graduate student whose scheme is accepted, > free design for PG. um, i don't know that i'm seeing much quality thinking coming out of the library schools, i am chagrined to say. besides, it's not so much the "design" that is so difficult, but rather the _implementation_, and the grunt work of assigning e-texts within the system. so it'd be far better to have the competition at the _programming_ level... and again, much of the design work has already been done, when this thread had an earlier incantation on this listserve. if no one is willing to check the archives, what's the point?... finally, i'm not sure that y'all understand the major need here. and i'm quite certain that library-school students will miss it. answer this question: why should we categorize the e-texts? i'm serious. formulate an answer. i'll wait... got one? ok, great... if your response runs along the lines of "so end-users can find the book they want, and download it", you're on the wrong path. that's the function catalogs used to serve, in the dead-tree world. after all, since a person had made a trip to a library to get a book, and would have to be making another trip to bring it back, it made a lot of sense for that person to find a book that they would enjoy. in that scenario, the catalog helped avoid the cost of a wrong choice. the physical nature of bound pages creates a situation of obligation. but in our new era of high-bandwidth and terrabyte hard-drives, it's silly for a person to spend even mere seconds trying to decide _whether_or_not_ to download a book. it's _far_ more convenient to download vast portions of the library, since they can have their computer do it automatically while they are partying, or sleeping... even the dial-up people can request the d.v.d., for free, and have the entire p.g. library sitting on their hard-disk in a week or so... not only is it not wise to make people spend any time "choosing", it's at odds with the important concept of _unlimited_distribution_. and that's why the library-school people don't understand this. because unlike them, we _want_ people to take a whole bunch! it's not just that there's "no shortage of shelf-space" with e-books, it's that we have an endless source of production. so take 'em all! we are all still trapped, to a large degree, by our history of scarcity, so it's difficult for us to realize how deeply it pervades our thinking. (especially since we all live in the real world too, where scarcity still is a hard fact of life.) but this is one place where we can shed that... these implications of unlimited-production-and-distribution turn our thinking on its head. instead of helping users choose what to _pick_ in the library, we have to help 'em choose what to _discard_. in many ways, this is a much easier task. human genome project files? ya, you probably won't want 'em. e-texts in a language that you cannot read? you can skip those. text-to-speech files? videos? magazines? maybe yes, maybe no. they start with 20,000 "possibles", weeding 'em out to their taste, thanks to our handy-dandy program, which then auto-downloads the ones that are left, in the background, with zero input needed. at that point, the cost of selecting a book is double-clicking it and starting to read it. and if it doesn't appeal to you, just stop reading and go on to the next one. you don't have much need for a catalog. oh sure, it might still be kind of handy to have be guided to e-texts, so some means of categorizing an e-text as being "similar to" others would be nice. but that's how we need to _approach_ this project, from the get-go, and not from our implicit notions about "a catalog", because those are outdated and irrelevant to the task now at hand. you're barking up the wrong tree if you don't rearrange that thinking. but anyway, as i said, a system of categorization would be handy, and i'll have some work to show in that regard in a separate post. i believe it's important to start out with the philosophical point... -bowerbird

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re: 19 million
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jul '06

27 Jul '06

greg said: > The download total as of right now is just over 19 million. 19 million downloads out of that measly p.r.? i'm impressed! i wouldn't have been surprised if nobody even heard about it. these days, if you don't have a multi-million-dollar ad budget, the big boys will usually drown you out with all their big noise. but i guess that word "free" still hasn't lost its magic touch, eh? people are sheep. so good job on the hype, michael! but now get back to work. :+) -bowerbird p.s. i think to become a discussion topic on one certain listserve and another certain blog, you have to be promoting some vapor, and make grandiose promises that e-books will soon cure cancer. reality -- especially .pdf reality -- is too humdrum for some people.

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World eBook Fair: 12 million downloads. Anyone notice?
by Jon Noring 27 Jul '06

27 Jul '06

Everyone, I just posted a TeleRead blog article, which in turn links to the blog article posted by Catherine Hodge at DPP Store, about the World eBook Fair (WeBF). My blog article: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=5230 Catherine's blog article: http://dppebookstore.blogspot.com/2006/07/world-ebook-fair-12-million-downl… Both Catherine and I are perplexed by the lack of public discussion about the WeBF on the various ebook-related forums such as this one. What are your thoughts? Jon Noring

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re: 1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Jul '06

24 Jul '06

well, obviously, in prototyping a system, you use just part of the data, not all of it. especially on something like this. :+) i subset the content so i can _examine_ it, molding it into shape manually if necessary. in the process of that, i gain an understanding of what needs to be done, so i can program it, and i develop the first pass at those routines... for instance, as i said, one of the first tasks is whipping the catalog into the shape i want it... that job has already taken me a number of hours, and it's not done yet. the catalog was quite a mess -- and hey, it's just titles and author-names! -- so all told, it'll probably take me some 20 hours, and maybe 30, just for this 1:5 subset... you can see the current state of my clean-up work here: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/mcl/-catalog there's still work that needs to be done on subtitles, and on the "mirror" titles (which were a total disaster), but other than that, this data is now very consistent... by the time i'm done with this, i'll have good routines to clean it up automatically, to the extent it's possible. so i expect the next 1/5 of the catalog to be cleaned in half the time -- 10-15 hours. during each phase, i'll pick up more information on how to automate it. so the next 1/5 of the catalog will take half the time, about 6-8 hours. and the next 1/5 will take half that, about 3-4 hours. and the last 1/5 will take 1-2 hours. and by then, i'll have some very well-polished routines. so if i decided to do the whole job over, from scratch, for maximal consistency, it'd take about 4-10 hours... this time-savings, via automation, is what you want. that's why you just do a subset of the data in a model. -bowerbird

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1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Jul '06

24 Jul '06

i'm doing a 1:5 scale reworking of the p.g. library. i have selected e-texts 10000-14000 to work on. one early step is a massive clean-up of the catalog. this might involve serious breakage of compatibility with the existing library. (in other words, you won't necessarily be able to easily import my corrections.) if there is anyone out there who would like me to maintain a limited compatibility, so as to dovetail with their work, please do inform me immediately, and we can have a discussion about cooperation... thank you. -bowerbird p.s. if anyone would like to design the user interface for a program for end-users to access this reworking, feel free to share that too, frontchannel or backchannel.

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re: [gutvol-d] 1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Jul '06

23 Jul '06

dave said: > What on earth is one fifth of a library? first and foremost, it means porta-potties instead of rest-rooms. other than that, it means we have all the books, but just up through page 18 with each one, because statistics tell us that that's only how far most people read in a book that they buy... > Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased. > http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm many of you might know dan poynter, who collected all these statistics from various places, as the guru of self-publishing... michael, once you get past the frustration of poynter's statistics, i'm positive you will find his web-page to be utterly fascinating... here are a few samples, on publishers: > 18. On average, they pay $465.17 for a simple cover design > to as much as $3,533.26 for a complex cover design. > Typical cover costs range $450 to $3,000. ... > 24. An average of 10 to 15 hours are spent designing a book cover. > 25. On average, 61 hours are spent in the editing process. > 26. On average, 29 hours are spent producing a news release for a new book. really, michael, i look forward to a ton of new posts from you based on the motivation you'll get from all of these statistics... :+) -bowerbird p.s. dave, actually it just means that i started out with 4,000 out of the (roughly) 20,000 e-texts in the p.g. library, so 1/5. for some reason (i'm not sure why), model-builders have always been fond of the 1/5 scale. it's big enough to be "realistic", yet still small enough to be a "model". it makes things very cute, too.

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re: 1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Jul '06

22 Jul '06

speaking of interfaces, wow, a whole shitload of librarians just got their asses kicked bad... > http://www.amitgupta.info/E41ST/ -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] first pass at a p.g. categorization scheme
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Jul '06

21 Jul '06

joey said: > Really, the only difference I can see between your model and mine > is that mine is a server-side, collaborative effort, while yours > builds destkop-oriented data islands. well, you've done some semantic loading there, contrasting "collaborative" with "data-islands". i could counter with "nonpersonalized" versus "individualized", but i don't see much purpose. ultimately, the catalog should work both online and offline. and either approach is capable of it. the real difference is shown when you contrast your system with the wiki system marcello made, which operates in a fashion similar to my system. in your system, tags are applied toward e-texts. in marcello's system (or mine), the e-texts are applied toward categories. that's the difference. again, whether we want to consider that to be a "significant" difference doesn't really matter, as long as we understand that _is_ the difference. all this boils down to the catalogers: would they rather start with a _category_, and apply e-texts, or would they rather start with an e-text and then apply categories. i tend to think it'd be the former. (and certainly, from my standpoint of programmatic cataloging, rather than human-enacted, the former approach is far more easy for me to write code for.) there are still some things you haven't shown us with your example. the first is how nimble it is, once you have scaled it up to the 20,000 e-texts. so i multiplied your 1000-set by 20 times. it's here: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/misc/joeytags.html at 3.1 megs, it'll be a bit of a pain for dial-up users. the second is the back-end work that you will do to assign tags automatically. (for instance, although i recognize you were just using it for your example, language tags are unnecessary, because that info is already available in the current catalog, and just needs to be converted.) the third is how you're gonna let your catalogers add new tags to your standard set. the fourth -- a big one -- is how the catalog will be made into a public-facing entity end-users navigate. but none of these are especially _difficult_ challenges, so i'm sure you can manage them, and i look forward to experimenting with your system when it's finished. > And I don't see why they would need to be > mutually exclusive, either. sure, the data can be munged to work either way; as usual, it is just a question of _doing_ that work. and giving cataloger volunteers a choice of models would seem to me to be the best way to proceed... but my mission is not to work with volunteers at all, but rather to build a system myself and then put it directly into the hands of end-users. that's my focus. my gut feeling is that a wiki-style approach will be more successful at attracting volunteers than your tag model, but i wouldn't be surprised if i'm wrong. marcello's wiki has an inordinate level of difficulty; i'd allow people to simply enter the e-text number, and then automatically generate all the other info. having them enter that info (and then formatting all the links in wiki-markup) is a recipe for errors, plus it raises the cost of contributing to the point where i think you would have very few volunteers... > Perhaps you could populate your client-side app > with a list of "folders" and "alias files" generated by > polling my server-side app, and perhaps people could > publish their data island back to the world as a set of tags. you are welcome to collect data from my model if you want. and just as i'll be getting info from samizdat and blackmask, i'll also collect data from your server-side approach if i can... except i expect to be finished with my effort (limited as it is) before you even get fully started with your (unlimited) one... -bowerbird

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20, 000 e-texts versus 300 billion dollars (a rather remarkable ant)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Jul '06

19 Jul '06

juxtaposition with p.g. hitting 20,000 e-texts... the cost of the war will soon hit $300 _billion_. (very soon. it just crossed the $297 billion mark, and a billion dollars just ain't what it used to be.) the power to create, the power to destroy. the human is a rather remarkable ant, eh? -bowerbird

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