November 2010 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: number one favorite thing ever
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Nov '10

28 Nov '10

keith said: > Ahh, the 13" iPad planned for next year! ;-))) yes. exactly. :+) my stance -- for many years now -- has been that we will have machines running the entire range of form-factors... every single size from index-card to tabloid (and bigger). consider standard photo-sizes: 4*6, 5*7, 6*9, 8*10, etc. cad/cam makes this range of sizes easy to manufacture... but the 9-inch*12-inch form-factor will be the one that gives the most opportunistic synergy with the real world, since we can map all our 8.5*11 paper in its actual size... once we grok the utility of this one-to-one correspondence, you'll wonder why this wasn't obvious to all of you all along. and i'll be sitting off all my myself, saying "i told you so..." like usual... -bowerbird

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number one favorite thing ever
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Nov '10

26 Nov '10

oprah has said that the ipad is her "number one favorite thing ever". (her "favorite things" are what she gives away at her holiday show.) she added that "words cannot describe how i feel about this device." pretty hard to deny handheld general-purpose devices have arrived. -bowerbird

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the 4th-quarter of 2010 trifecta of "i told you so"
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Nov '10

23 Nov '10

ok, so i did the "i told you so" post about roger frank. 1. and i did the "i told you so" post about light markup. 2. which means there's just one more post in this year-end trifecta of "i told you so", with the culmination this month of a 5-year bet back in '05 with the teleread idiot rothman about e-book hardware development from 2005 to 2010... basically, rothman had predicted a $50 e-book-machine, -- wrong! -- and i said it won't happen for 5 years, if then, and that if it did, i'd buy him a tofu turkey for thanksgiving. if you'd like to refresh yourself on the original exchange and my revisitation to the post at the one-year mark, see: > http://www.teleread.com/2005/11/29/you-can-buy-the-mit-100-laptop-for-200/ the teleread post was november 29th of 2005, so i will make my 5th anniversary posting (haven't missed a year!) that day, as my final entry in that series, as i nailed things conclusively. the bottom line is that rothman lost the bet. completely! there is no $50 e-book reader-machine at all, let alone in sufficiently high volume to produce such a low price... you might pick up an off-brand unit on black friday for $99, or for $69. but no guarantee even of that, we'll have to see. and even if so, don't you forget that 2010 was _my_ guess... rothman had the cheap machines arriving _much_earlier_... indeed, he's had $50 machines as "right around the corner" for about a decade now; it was just downright embarrassing. meanwhile, there are all kinds of e-book-machines in stores this holiday season at the kinds of prices that we should have been expecting all along, realistic prices, which would not give "sticker-shock" because we had believed a cracked crystal ball. have a happy thanksgiving, folks! -bowerbird

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Hathi Trust
by Marc D'Hooghe 21 Nov '10

21 Nov '10

Free Literature.org <http://www.freeliterature.org> needs help getting two books from Hathi Trust (Michigan University) for doing PG e-texts. Anyone around having full access via affiliated organizations? - let me know ( marcdh(a)freeliterature.org) - many thanks! -- Marc Freeliterature.org <http://www.freeliterature.org>

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Re: the best book is the one that's always with you
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Nov '10

19 Nov '10

if you're not reading kottke, you should be... > http://kottke.org seriously. the guy has amazing range, daily. here's part of a post of his from yesterday... > http://kottke.org/10/11/kindle-and-kinect-christmas > The cheapest Kindle is now only $139 > (and the one with free 3G is $50 more). > They are going to sell a metric crapload > of these things this Christmas. And > even if they don't, they're going to sell > 50 million metric shitloads of Kindle books > because you don't even need a Kindle > to read Kindle books...Amazon has > readers for the iPad (which is way better > than Apple's iBooks app IMO), iPhone, > Android devices, Blackberry, WinPhone 7, > Windows, and OS X. I never would have > predicted it, but I am a firm convert to > Kindle books...and I don't even have a Kindle. > The killer feature here is Amazon's > multi-platform support. I *love* > reading books on the iPad at home but > when I'm out and about, if I've got my > iPhone in my pocket, I can read a book. > The best book is the one that's always with you. that last line pretty much sums it up. but remember when "the killer feature" for the kindle was instant-download, then the sheer number of books? i love that amazon keeps iterating the process. yes, sir, i'm a big fan of what amazon is doing... -bowerbird p.s. the line traditionally goes: "the best camera is the one that's with you." kottke improved it. twice.

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it's groundhog day in november 2010
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Nov '10

17 Nov '10

i only look in on the d.p. forums intermittently these days so i had no idea there was huge amusement there this weekend. a thread started up discussing the generation of .epub files: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=45548 amazingly, it's as if it was their first time through this topic. thus, it strongly reminded me of the movie "groundhog day". among a plentitude of amusing and strange things going on, greg newby is over there saying "p.g. has no _resistance_ to d.p. doing .epub files, i don't know where you got that..." or consider that rfrank added this on page 2 of the thread: > In my opinion the real solution is, > as it has always been, > one source, many outputs > with a generator that both DP and PG can use. > That way, both DP and PG users are > working with one file for now and for always. > A generator would have a back-end > for text, HTML and epub and for whatever > is the next big thing when the time comes. > Importantly, the single source file wouldn't change. > The post-processor's job and the whitewasher's job > would be greatly simplified. Errata handling would be > merely editing one file and regenerating. User-requested > formats could even be generated on-demand. that's right. it's as if you were reading the gutvol-d archives. for 2003... or 2005... or 2007... or 2009... or last february... i kept expecting bill murray and andie macdowell to pop up... but you wanna know what's the funniest part of this scene? it's the _very_next_post,_ where marcello reports that -- for the e-books he makes for his personal use -- he uses restructuredtext, and then converts from that to a number of other formats, including .epub, .pdf, etc. to understand why this is so funny, you need to know that restructuredtext is a form of light markup much like z.m.l. so marcello has come over to my side of the fence. try to wrap your head around that. after insisting for years that i was crazy, to the point that he even put up a "fansite" that makes fun of all my quotes, marcello now uses the approach that i advocated all along. he was wrong. i was right. his own actions scream the truth. so now he's having the same arguments with the d.p. folks that i used to have with them, except where i used to plead to their rationality, he just outright calls them stupid, in his special inimitable marcello way. so there is a certain justice, stemming from that old saying about people who forget their history being doomed to repeat it. you doomed yourself, d.p. *** ah, but my role is also being played by roger frank, the part where it goes, "i believe i can make a master-format work". of course, i have since gone on to _make_it_work_, but that is but a mere technicality, right? if _roger_ says it can work... *** anyway, here's a bit more about restructuredtext... unlike z.m.l., it wasn't developed specifically for e-books, nor was it based on the pg-text-format in its extant form, so it would need to be extended to handle the p.g. library. neither does restructuredtext have the currency or the reach of _markdown_, the most popular light markup these days... but restructuredtext is a solid contender nonetheless... it is used as the master-format for official python documentation, so it has shown its range and versatility during that workout... > http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html (observant observers will notice that light markup and python share the convention that whitespace is considered significant, which is a radical departure from most other forms of markup.) again, once you hack restructuredtext so that it works for p.g., you will end up with something that's strikingly similar to z.m.l. for instance, here's the restructuredtext version of headers: > Section Header > ============== > > Subsection Header > ----------------- not bad. but not necessarily any better than the 4-1-2 style that has been employed by p.g. for well over a decade now... which is why i decided to keep the p.g. convention for z.m.l. *** of course, i always said that it would eventually come to this. once you grok the superiority of light markup for this task, it's _inevitable_... thus i always told you that i'd be here to snort "i told you so". so here i am, folks, listen up: "i told you so." *** by the way, i'm releasing _my_ conversion tool very soon. finally went and bought the domain name for it last week. i'll let you know when it drops... -bowerbird

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a new era has emerged
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Nov '10

15 Nov '10

for those who are interested in what roger frank is doing, a new era has emerged over at http://www.fadedpage.net. gone is the proofing interface -- poof! -- replaced by this: > We are working on a software program > to be used for distributed proofreading. > All known interfaces to distributed > proofreading sites are browser-based. > As envisioned, this one is not. > Instead, it is an application that > runs as a program on the user's machine > and communicates to the server > only for page texts and images, as required. sometimes it amuses me what roger pretends not to know. he has said that he reads my posts here, so he does indeed know that i have programmed such an offline proofing tool. to jog all your memories, my app is called "banana cream"... oh, and based on my experience, i can tell you that it's much more intelligent to download the text and images in a batch, rather than one-by-one "as required" by an individual proofer. (which means roger's model is flawed, but what else is new?) > The client-side application is working. It has > been developed as a proofing/formatting tool. > However with a local copy of text and images for a project, > it has proven effective for post-processing. > In fact, it seems so thorough, > it appears to be very useful as a preprocessing tool. i've been demonstrating for years now that roger should be making changes in _preprocessing_, rather than expecting proofers to do it, or doing checks during _postprocessing_... so i'm glad the message has _finally_ been received... better late than never, that's what they say. roger goes on to show some screenshots, like this one: > http://www.fadedpage.net/c/images/fppromo.png compare that to one of my screenshots from earlier this year, which just happened to be using a book from fadedpage.net: > http://z-m-l.com/go/triple2010.jpg or, if you prefer, go look at the version dating back to 2007: > http://z-m-l.com/go/triple.jpg it's fine to reprogram the wheel. doesn't mean you invented it. -bowerbird

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Newbie questions about clearances, author attribution and header texts
by Paul Flo Williams 10 Nov '10

10 Nov '10

I've just submitted my first copyright clearance request and have mostly completed proofing my first submission (in advance of clearance, despite the warnings), and I have a few questions. The book I've submitted the request for, "Antigua and the Antiguans", dating from 1844, is, at first appearance, anonymous. There is no author listed on the title page, and the preface is signed "The Author". The clearance request form says that an author should be supplied, so I typed in "Mrs Lanaghan", as that is how the book is attributed in a later work on Antigua, V.L. Oliver's 1894 work. A bad luck would have it, two days after submission, I find that the question of authorship for this work has been resolved, and that the author is Amelia Flannigan. 1. How do I go about changing the authorship information in the clearance request, or is that something that can be fixed later? I can provide evidence from newer works of the authorship, and it seems a shame for this work to be either perpetually marked as "Anonymous" or with a name that was once thought to be correct. The second question concerns a header text that is already on the scans and OCRed text I've started from. This book has been scanned by Google Books, and their header asks that they be credited for doing the scanning. Should I just submit their entire header as the start of the document, or do we have some other way of crediting them? If I've missed answers to either of these questions in the existing documentation on the wiki, I apologise, and pointers will be gratefully received. -- Paul Williams

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