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

More copyright
by Norm Wolcott 30 Sep '06

30 Sep '06

What is the copyright status of a book published in England post 1923 (say 1925) and 2 years later in the US. The US copyright was not renewed. a. No US copyright b. 75 years from author's death c. 2019 nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

2 3

re: [gutvol-d] oh geez, part 2
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 Sep '06

30 Sep '06

jon said: > Am I the only one to see who > is really slinging the mud here? i did not resort to anything ad hominem. i said unflattering things, yep i sure did!, but if any of them do not jibe with reality, then by all means feel free to express that. if i agree that i overstepped appropriateness, i will be more than happy to issue an apology. while i talk about the issues, david attacks me _personally_, (and strays from the truth too), instead of addressing my points. that's my definition of mudslinging. anyway, i rarely mention david at all, and probably shouldn't have gone on after that initial post, but somebody _did_ ask. (and i think that i was fair by advising him to read david's blog and make up his own mind about it.) -bowerbird

1 0

re: [gutvol-d] oh geez, part 2
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 Sep '06

30 Sep '06

it wouldn't be easy for me to describe david rothman, considering how badly he's treated me over the years -- but hey, i've managed to keep my sense of humor! -- so i'll just refer you to his blog, which you can find here: > http://www.teleread.org/blog/ it's probably best if you read it yourself, and come to your own conclusions, rather than rely on mine, but since you asked, the following is what i will tell you... david works hard on his blog, and it is an excellent source of news from the world of electronic-books, widely defined -- how's that for a kind review from someone he detests? -- but he has to be one of the world's biggest suckers for vapor (hardware and software). he is also one of the "ringleaders" for openreader.com, which he is absolutely convinced will be "the one format to rule them all", so he has been hyping it for _years_, while spewing venom against perceived challengers (which range from little old me all the way up to sony and microsoft and adobe). he sometimes has a very _tenuous_ hold on reality -- he wants adobe to abandon .pdf in favor of _his_ format, to give you an idea -- yet manages to hoodwink a whole lot of people who _should_ be a lot smarter than that. oh, and he'll probably be along here any minute to throw mud on me, because that's what he likes to do to people like me, who have the courage to shake our heads at his stupidities... not that he contributes to the conversation here otherwise -- he strongly prefers to stay on his blog where he is "the expert" -- so i always enjoy when he appears here or anywhere else where i can actually go against him head to head, post to post, because he isn't capable of arguing his way out of a paper-bag, and has to resort to some very low-level ad hominem tactics. anyway, as the _world-leader_ in e-book hype, it made me smile to hear _him_ advise people to take someone's else's hype with a grain of salt. indeed, it was likely my widest smile of the week. besides, with dotreader (the first viewer-program that will be able to actual _use_ his precious format) slipping its dates on a regular basis -- which, as a programmer, i understand, totally, i've slipped a bunch of delivery dates myself, yes sir -- i would expect david to be a bit more forgiving when others (like sony with their hardware and irex with their hardware) find themselves behind on their promises... anyway, more than you wanted to know, i'm sure, and -- like i said -- david will be along any minute now with his bucket of mud, so the fun has just begun, but hey, you asked! ;+) -bowerbird

4 3

oh geez, part 2
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Sep '06

29 Sep '06

david rothman is advising people not to get caught up in the hype over the "forthcoming" sony reader. your lesson is irony is over for today. -bowerbird

2 1

re: [gutvol-d] oh geez
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Sep '06

29 Sep '06

keith said: > I doubt that very much!! > Mark-up is a necessity of > language and communication > wether you see it or not. zen markup language _is_ a form of "markup", but it's the "light" kind -- not that _heavy_ stuff -- so it doesn't take much time or money or energy to "apply" it where needed. as to "whether you see it or not", z.m.l. generally tries to be invisible. this is in sharp contrast to the "heavy" kind of markup, which is intrusive to the maximum, with all those angle-brackets and ampersand characters and tags and stylesheet information and javascript and table-markup and lord knows what else is in there, such that the actual _content_ is more or less buried in all of it... do a "view source" on most web-pages these days, and you'll see exactly what i mean. that x.m.l. crap is _definitely_ visible, and it's a visual horror. otherwise, the matter of "visibility" can be kind of a philosophical one, not? can you see the spaces that i have put in-between these words? or how about the line-endings that create a new line under the previous? or the double-line-breaks that put an empty line between paragraphs? can you see an empty line? or not? can you hear silence? i don't know! some people call these spaces and line-breaks "markup", which strikes me as a lame attempt to rescue the concept. but i don't argue with them. i just smile... :+) -bowerbird

1 0

re: [gutvol-d] oh geez
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 29 Sep '06

29 Sep '06

gardner said: > I know your bent is to prefer a > non-standard lightweight markup by "lightweight", gardner, i hope you don't mean to imply "deficient in capability", so i'd hope no one will infer that... :+) as for the term "non-standard", i suppose some people have a knee-jerk positive reaction to a "standard", but i'm here with the guy who said that standards are nice "because there are so many to choose from..." someday someone will make z.m.l. a "standard", i suppose. in the meantime, it's just a nifty trick. > I know your bent is to prefer a > non-standard lightweight markup > for texts, but for those of us > considering adding full-on markup, > what's the simplest way to handle this? well, gee, my first recommendation would be to _keep_on_considering_ the adding of full-on markup until you figure out why it is a bad idea... :+) but that's probably not what you thought your question was asking... > The idea of grovelling through the text > in vi and adding tags all over doesn't appeal. it certainly doesn't appeal to me either. fortunately, that shouldn't be necessary. the answer: write a program to apply tags. if the underlying text is consistent enough, it is relatively simply to write routines that can recognize its structure and then tag it. indeed, that's the whole foundation of z.m.l. and it is precisely because the p.g. e-texts are _not_ consistent enough, at their base, to allow this auto-tagging that i've been a constant critic here of e-text inconsistency, even while i love the p.g. library as a whole... but you should take heart when i tell you that -- even despite their danged inconsistency -- it _is_ possible to write routines that decode it, and _could_ tag p.g. e-texts with heavy markup. of course, once you understand on a deep level that it's fully possible for a computer program to ascertain the structure of a text well enough that it can apply markup to permit good presentation by another computer program (e.g., a browser), you will also come to understand on a deep level that there is absolutely no need for the markup, since the structure-ascertaining routines can be included in the browser itself, and thereby avoid the markup middleman. ergo, _zen_markup_... future generations will laugh at us for believing that markup was even necessary in the first place, let alone that we'd codify it into "a standard", and waste our time, money, and energy to "apply" it... -bowerbird

2 1

want to rsync all PG books
by Jared Buck 28 Sep '06

28 Sep '06

4 6

oh geez
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Sep '06

27 Sep '06

boy, it's a good thing branko provoked a confrontation with me by _editing_ my comments over on the teleblog a while back, which led me to abandon that hell-hole. because he's doing a series about how to transform p.g. e-texts into e-books. his tack is to create an .html version (if necessary) which then gets imported into office, which then creates a .pdf... man, you do all that work, and then you end up with a _pdf_? oh geez. oh please. if i was still over there on the teleblah-blah blog, i would be raking this series over the coals, that's for sure. i'm sure glad that i have much better things to do with my time these days... -bowerbird

2 1

stealth scannos
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Sep '06

25 Sep '06

i'll be addressing the issue of stealth scannos soon, and would like to give p.g./d.p. full credit for the work you've done on it, if someone would write up a summary this week... thank you. -bowerbird

1 0

Re: [PG-EU] INTERNET FOUNDER SAYS eBOOKS NEXT BIG THING
by Karl Eichwalder 24 Sep '06

24 Sep '06

Michael Hart <hart(a)pglaf.org> writes: > Vint Cerf, known as the creator of the Internet said, [...] > The result is that Project Gutenberg and its fellow supporters > of The World eBook Fair have added more books for The Second > World eBook Fair in the just about two months since the first of > the World eBook Fairs than Google has been able to add in the > just about two years since it announced The Google Print Library > in the Fall of 2004. Do you believe your own or his statements? With every new day I find new books in PDF format with Google Book Search, books not available somewhere else. > The Second World eBook Fair will open October 1, 2006, > in honor of World Book Fair Month at > > http://worldebookfair.com How is this site meant to work? I do not find a single book there. I directs me a searchportal with "sponsored links" and "top sites". If I search for, say, "Goethe", no single Goethe item seems to be available. > 100,000+ Free eBooks Available from Project Gutenberg Approx. 20,000 books are available from PG, that's very good--it will take several years until we can offer 100,000 books. -- http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | ,__o | _-\_<, | (*)/'(*) Key fingerprint = F138 B28F B7ED E0AC 1AB4 AA7F C90A 35C3 E9D0 5D1C

3 2