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

Re: a question for dkretz about twisted
by Morasch＠aol.com 11 Mar '10

11 Mar '10

don said: > Close, but I don't think close enough. ok, cool. thank you. just thought i'd ask. i'd be interested in playing with it, though, if you've got it up and available somewhere, or if i can install it on my own site, just to see exactly how "close" it comes... > I appreciate what Steve Jobs said recently i've hated adobe for a long, long, long time... but yeah, at one time, i did respect their work. now it just seems shoddy. bloated and shoddy. > What I'd recommend you consider is > building on the WordPress blog engine. sounds like too much overhead cruft to me... i like to be close to the metal. > Another reasonable alternative > might te Google Docs/Google Apps. sounds like more cruft. i'll stick with perl... thanks again. -bowerbird

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the comparison method does indeed work, and work well
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Mar '10

09 Mar '10

a little while back, i pointed out that a person can compare two independent digitizations to find errors in both of them, and that this method works very well. carel said: > That depends on a lot of factors including the assumption > that two OCR programs would not make the same mistake that's a good point. if the two digitizations have errors in common, then the comparison method won't be able to find them, and thus its effectiveness will be lessened somewhat. there's no argument with that. what's surprising to me, however, is how many people are completely defeated by this _possible_ shortcoming. upon learning that there _might_ be a problem with the comparison method, they dismiss it with no other thought. not me. i set out to actually _test_ the assumption. i documented the results in a thread in the d.p. forums. you can search for "revolutionary o.c.r. proofing". it's at: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=24008 as i note there, i presented the data earlier elsewhere, at: > http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/bparchive?year=2005& post=2005-10-03,3 so yeah, that's right, my findings are over 4 years old now. *** what my research found is that there were virtually _no_ errors-found-in-common between the two digitizations. and this finding was replicated, and replicated once again. in other words, the effectiveness of the comparison method is _not_ lessened by this possible shortcoming. no indeed, the evidence says it is not even affected in the slightest way. the clarity of the results was striking; they are unforgettable. if you doubt the data, i encourage you to repeat the research. because repeating the possible problem, without any data, won't get anyone very far in the future, not if i'm listening... *** here's a quick-and-dirty experiment, for anyone willing... i just used the comparison method on gardner's e-text, and found 159 differences between his work and mine... i then resolved the differences by consulting the scans... 79 differences were due to errors in his work. 77 were due to errors in mine. 3 were due to errors in _both_ his and mine. now, of course, any errors-in-common will still reside in both his and mine. why don't you see if you can find any? > http://z-m-l.com/go/gardn/gardn.zml > http://z-m-l.com/go/gardn/gardnp123.html i'll be waiting. but i won't be holding my breath... *** carel said: > I feel that a human looking at > a smaller subset of a large document > is a good thing in the error finding process. > You apparently do not think it is. if the comparison method has already found all the errors, why waste the time and energy of a human rechecking that? > Neither of us is right or wrong: > It is a matter of perspective and opinion. unless i get a good answer to the question that i just asked, my opinion will continue to be that i am _absolutely_right_, and you're wrong because you're wasting human resources. that's my perspective, and i'm not changing it... :+) -bowerbird

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roundlessness -- 013
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Mar '10

09 Mar '10

ok, i talked about the positive parts of rfrank's roundless experiment. now it's time to review the "bad news" -- the not-so-positive parts... many of the _negative_ parts are quibbles about the implementation of the positive aspects, so i will discuss them at the end of this post... there are, however, a few points that are almost fully negative, still. *** the very first thing i do with a set of files that i start working with is to make sure that they're named _correctly_and_intelligently_... that is, a filename must explain, all by itself, the file's _contents_, and the filename must contain the pagenumber from the p-book. moreover, every file must have a _unique_ filename, and every file associated with the same page should share a similar name (e.g., the name will be the same, but with a different extension.) i've done extensive work with datasets that follow these rules and with datasets that do not, and i can say without any hesitation that the datasets which do not follow these rules are much more clumsy, and waste bits of my time that are small but cumulate to significance. and that's why i now no longer will even work with badly-named files. it's just unnecessary frustration. people who use badly-named files will tell you they have "adapted" to the naming. that's pure and simple crap. they don't know better because they haven't worked long and hard with both kinds of data. they are handicapped, and they just don't know they are handicapped. rfrank names his files incorrectly. maybe someday he will learn... *** rfrank does a lot of things right. his scans are extremely well-done, which indicates that he is very careful and meticulous when scanning. it's quite likely he also does some refinements on the scans, such as straightening them, centering them, and perhaps despeckling them. they look quite nice, and they are generally a pleasure to work with... however, all this care seems to be dropped once he's done the o.c.r. his preprocessing routines used to be abysmal. they're better now, but they still have considerable room for improvement. i'm hopeful that he's learned the lesson. he has pushed many of his checks back, from postprocessing to the proofing stage. so now he just needs to push them back from the proofing stage to the preprocessing stage. it would perhaps be very helpful in this regard if _somebody_ who is working at the fadedpage.com site would _volunteer_ to do the step of nondistributed preprocessing, thus freeing rfrank from doing it... he's probably feeling very overwhelmed at the moment, so an offer like that would probably be something that he would accept readily, and it would make a remarkable difference in evolving his progress. *** we've already discussed recently that rfrank should submit his scans along with his postings to p.g. alas, he's picked up the bad habit of failing to do that from his distributed proofreader upbringing. pity. *** it would also be good if rfrank kept the linebreaks and pagebreaks of the original p-book when he submitted the book to project gutenberg. but hey, that's unlikely, isn't it? what _is_ more likely, however, is that he would keep the linebreaks _consistent_ between the various versions that he submits to p.g. but on one file i checked, the 7-bit version was wrapped differently than the 8-bit version, which was wrapped differently than the .html. this is madness, if/when it comes to doing long-term version-control. *** rfrank also picked up the bad habit from d.p. of "clothing" em-dashes. of all the stupid things d.p. does, this is among the most stupid of all. and yet rfrank, who showed the ability to rethink proofing/formatting and roundlessness per se, failed to grasp the basic stupidity of this... *** ditto with unhyphenating the end-of-line hyphenates. i take it all back about "clothing hyphens" being the most stupid thing... dehyphenating has to be the _most_ stupid, because when the proofers do this, they actually destroy the evidence that a computerized routine would use to do the job _properly_, which is _on_a_book-wide_basis_... again, the failure of rfrank to rethink such an obvious stupidity is sad... (kudos, however, to one of his members, for spelling it out in a post. let's just hope that that reasoning will soak in to rfrank's busy brain.) *** again, repeating a d.p. flaw, rfrank strips runheads and pagenumbers from his o.c.r. and perhaps fate is trying to teach him a lesson on this, because he has had several problems where text on a page was deleted, or replaced with text from some other page. these types of problems can be detected and prevented when each page contains its pagenumber. in general, you want to _retain_ this information because it "earmarks" each page of text, making it clear what book it comes from, and where. it also serves as the "suspenders" in a "belt and suspenders approach" along with the filename, which will contain the very same information, and thus the two make it very easy to crosscheck and confirm each other. the silliness of naming all your scansets "001.png" through "999.png" and expecting their subdirectory name to distinguish them is _stark_... (and it has caused all kinds of grief for people in the past, i assure you.) *** rfrank hasn't really installed any instructions of his own, just letting his members rely on their d.p. training, so he has no policy of his own on ellipses, at least that i've been able to detect. but it would be refreshing if he decided to avoid the merry-go-round of never-ending changes that sometimes happens at d.p., and went _exclusively_ with the 3-dot ellipse. (it's funny, because many of his books don't even seem to _have_ ellipses!) *** rfrank is putting a lot of stock in "c.i.p." except, to confuse _everyone_, to him, "c.i.p." means "confidence in proofer", not "confidence in page", which is how everyone else defined the term, up to this point in time... now, me?, i don't think you can put much stock in "confidence in proofer". even the best proofers miss errors, and they don't know when they miss, so i don't think that you can trust their judgment and get perfect pages. rfrank's big mistake here is that he's not necessarily looking for "perfect", since he sees himself, as the postprocessor, as the last line of correction, and he's willing to take a non-perfect page if he can get it a little faster... even if that's fine for him, i don't think it's a good way to build a system. but even then, i just don't think "confidence in proofer" will actually work. or, to be more accurate, i think it'll work just well enough that rfrank will put lots of energy into it before he finds out it doesn't work well enough. or, worst case scenario, he'll convince himself that it really _is_ working, and other people believe him, and we all end up with non-perfect pages. on the other hand, rfrank has shown in some cases that he _can_ learn from the data, and change his mind on something he held dearly, so... *** ok, now we're down to the implementation quibbles... *** first, i'll repeat that it's sad that rfrank is "archiving" his finished projects. it would help all of us learn more about roundlessness if he left them up. i offer webspace if rfrank needs it. and project gutenberg has offered too. *** it's still "in-process", so i expect that it might improve, but the spellcheck display that rfrank is offering would benefit by retaining the linebreaks, so the search for "unresolved words" on the pagescan was much easier to do. i'd also like to see each unresolved word in _clickable-button_ form, for both the good-word and bad-word lists, so a button-push would do that. (in the current form, a person has to copy-and-paste each of the words.) i must add, though, that the ability to include these words immediately is a _tremendous_improvement_ over the d.p. method, one that shows its value to the proofer right away, and is thus very robust and valuable. empowering the proofers to benefit themselves is a remarkable asset... *** in this regard, an ability for a _proofer_ to execute a global change would be a mind-blowing step, and thus a very brave thing to try... of course, bear in mind that i believe that all global changes should have every occurrence verified, so take the suggestion appropriately. and i believe that any global changes that might be required _should_ be sussed out during the preprocessing, before proofers even see text. but nonetheless, putting such a powerful tool in the hands of proofers would speak _volumes_ on the responsibilities you entrust them with, and thus make a tremendous statement that would _embolden_ them... even if they never ever used it... *** as it is now, though, rfrank does the global changes himself, and he has been a little reluctant to do the job in the way that he really "should"... at least he was in one case -- where he declined to fix a contraction -- but perhaps that was not representative of his feelings more generally, so i'll let it go for now... *** as i said before, i don't know whether the d.p. separation between proofing and formatting is a good thing or not. i see the arguments in favor of it, and they seem compelling to some degree, but i also know that the vast majority of pages have little or no formatting, so i'm reluctant to lay another step on the overall process for no benefit. so, in cases like this where the answer is unclear, i'd do an experiment. luckily, rfrank is doing an experiment. it's not a well-controlled one, and we're not really privy to all of the data, so it's far from being ideal, but at least we're engaged in the active questioning of an unknown... still, it would be nicer if we were doing the experiment _properly_... *** rfrank does a pretty good job of showing proofers their diffs, _except_ that you must visit each project-page to see your diffs for that book... it would be far better if you were presented with all of 'em on one page. (and i would emphasize that page by presenting it to the user _first_, when they return for more proofing, so they'll realize its importance.) there's also the slightly troubling aspect that if you mark a page "done", the odds are lowered that it will be proofed again, so you don't obtain the satisfaction of getting a "no-diff" result on that page. i do believe that's counterproductive, and i'd like to see every page reproofed once, even after the page was marked "done", even by a high-c.i.p. proofer... and, of course, having the page reproofed, and having the "done" status confirmed by a "no-diff" by the subsequent proofer, would also raise the "confidence-in-page" for that page, and thereby serve a double benefit... (conversely, if the next proofer finds an error, they rescued a false done.) *** the "page tweet" idea is a good one. (the astute observer might realize that this is the same idea i always use on the bottom of my web-pages, where a person can leave a comment about that specific p-book page.) however, a way to _consolidate_ the tweets for a book would be useful. (and easy to code.) that way, a proofer could look at all of the "tweets" and perhaps answer some of the questions being posed, or fix some of the problems being reported, or take some other kind of positive action (such as finding a person who _can_ fix the problem if you cannot do it). also, it would be good if there were some dedicated buttons on the page, so it would be easy to say things like "difficult formatting, please check" or "foreign language specialist needed on this page", or stuff like that... again, that way a person perusing all of the tweets for a book will know exactly what needs to be done among this list of possible specific tasks, *** and -- just to finish up this post by taking it back to the beginning -- i note with amusement that rfrank uses the term "page" throughout his system. he lists the "pages" that you've done, and calls the notes you attach "page tweets", and the diffs are listed by "page", and so on. so it is ironic that when he talks about "page 123", he's not _really_ talking about _page_123_ at all! he's really talking about _.png_ 123! and the file named "123.png" probably isn't about page 123 at all! indeed, let's review the 7 files named "123.png" rfrank has up now: > http://fadedpage.com/p/201002140505/d/123.png > http://fadedpage.com/p/201002140533/d/123.png > http://fadedpage.com/p/201002270757/d/123.png > http://fadedpage.com/p/201002280257/d/123.png > http://fadedpage.com/p/201003020840/d/123.png > http://fadedpage.com/p/201003040537/d/123.png > http://fadedpage.com/p/201003070309/d/123.png what we actually find are pages 120, 112, 118, 106, 82, 124!, and 118, respectively. that's quite a range of pages, but alas, none are page 123. so any reference to a "page" number on the faded.com website is gonna frustrate anyone who wants to know what _page_ was being talked about, once rfrank has gone and deleted all of those files. which is a real pity... but alas, here i am talking about filenaming conventions again. help me! time to draw this to a close... *** while i'm letting myself discuss the negatives without feeling any guilt, i might add that it'd be nice if rfrank shared data from his experiments. of particular interest are all the intermediate files, such as the various pages as saved by individuals, and the concatenated text file at various "checkpoints" along the way, notably before and after postprocessing... without such data, we really have no way of evaluating the experiment! rfrank comes from a world of engineers working in private companies, where data is closely guarded, and he doesn't seem to have the attitude that is prevalent in the scientific world that data belongs to the public, and that sunshine is the best disinfectant, and open data is a positive... in this regard, i read and liked this article: > http://flowingdata.com/2010/03/04/think-like-a-statistician-without-the-mat… i sure could learn a lot more if rfrank were open with sharing his data, and my guess is that lots of other people could learn lots more as well. -bowerbird

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roundlessness -- 012
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

rfrank's roundless experiment is proving to be _very_ interesting... and, as you might expect, there is good news and there is bad news. let's talk about the good news here in post #12, the bad in post #13. *** first of all, rfrank is showing that it's not all that difficult to set up a proofing site. in just 2 months, he's put together a critical mass, and that's quite an achievement. if he shares his code with others, they'll be able to move even faster. (if he doesn't, i've got a little code that'll do the trick for people who want a bit of a head-start.) it's another matter to pull workers to the site, of course. however, if project gutenberg chose to steer people to these _other_ sites, instead of funneling all the volunteers to distributed proofreaders (who -- truth be told -- don't even _want_ new people nowadays), it wouldn't be hard at all for these sites to get enough volunteers. but even with his low numbers of volunteers, what rfrank is doing is _head_and_shoulders_ more interesting than anything d.p. is doing. his site is dynamic, while d.p. has been too moribund for too long... *** in the last week, rfrank installed a spellcheck capability to his site. after a mere 2 months. d.p. went about 5 or 6 _years_ without it. *** moreover, when d.p. finally got a programmer to code spellcheck, the process was plagued by a forum discussion that ran 30 pages. at 15 messages per page, that's 450 messages. and most of 'em were from people who didn't know what they were talking about, and thus just added a buncha noise and confusion to the process. which is why it's probably not surprising that it was coded wrong. well, "wrong" is perhaps a bit strong. but the decision was made to do spellcheck using "aspell", because "it's open-source code". which would be fine, if you needed a full-fledged spellcheck... but that's not what a proofing site needs, because the object is _not_ to have another word "suggested" (which is the hard part about coding spellcheck), but merely to _flag_suspicious_words_ (a ridiculously easy task consisting of searching a dictionary to ascertain whether the word you're checking is included therein) so that all the suspicious words can be compared to the scan... i'm guessing rfrank did his spellcheck the simple way. *** rfrank also installed a capacity for a "good" and "bad" wordlist, necessary since that customizes the dictionary for each book, and -- like d.p. -- lets the proofers suggest words to include. unlike d.p., however, under rfrank's system, whenever a person "suggests" a word, it's _automatically_ included _immediately_. at d.p., a suggestion must be considered by a superior, who might or might not agree, and might or might not be timely. this is a signal of the disgust with which d.p. treats proofers. it also means that rfrank's system throws far fewer false flags, which means it provides much greater value to the proofers... i worked very hard, in the confines of that 30-page thread, to have d.p. give the proofers an automatic capability to add words to the good and bad lists, but they just wouldn't do it. rfrank did. good for rfrank. he's smarter than the d.p. crowd. *** rfrank has also included reg-ex checks, and scanno checks, so his list of helpful tools is already very impressive, 2 months in. *** rfrank has also shown he's willing to do global changes to text, which is one of those things that d.p. has been unwilling to do, in spite of the fact that i've pointed out the utility of it for years. d.p. would rather have individual proofers correct every instance of a global error -- one by one by one, painstakingly -- instead of fixing 'em all immediately, with one global change. shameful. *** rfrank also showed considerable independence when he decided he would have his people do proofing and formatting together... it's unclear to me whether the d.p. split between those two tasks is effective or not, but the _religion_ at d.p. is that it has been... so it is quite courageous of rfrank to test that accepted "wisdom". *** rfrank also seems committed to using diffs to train up volunteers. this, of course, is one of the benefits a roundless system offers, so it's natural that he'd take advantage, but it's still a good thing. *** rfrank has given workers a way to make comments _about_ a page without actually putting them _inside_ the text, which is fantastic. (he calls this feature "page tweets".) at d.p., they have a "project thread" in the forums (as does rfrank), but the only way to make comments about a page is to put them _inside_ the text. but of course then someone later down the line has to _remove_ them from there. that's a sign of a bad workflow, when someone later on must undo something that was done earlier. *** in looking at some of the projects, it seems that rfrank has finally started doing more aggressive preprocessing of the o.c.r. itself... for instance, the number of spacey quotes has dropped remarkably. there are still some, but nowhere near the number he had before... since this is an area that i know to be _so_ important, any progress toward enlightenment at all is the sign of a very good development. *** so, all in all, there's lots of positive aspects to rfrank's experiment. -bowerbird

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taking stock on march 8th
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

march 8th is international women's day. rock on, estrogen! :+) *** congratulations to d.p. on the posting of their 17,000th e-text! the volunteers who digitize these books are _awesome_people_! *** speaking of women, and d.p. volunteers, juliet sutherland is the volunteer who has donated d.p. the most time and energy, so a special shout-out to her on this day. in a recent post to the d.p. forums, juliet admits to being frustrated by many of the "volunteers versus admins" threads on those d.p. forums. she also notes that her frustration is multiplied whenever she considers that the site does have many problems and that she, as the former top dog, bears a good deal of the responsibility. i've criticized juliet a lot, because -- frankly -- she deserved it. but it's not fun to see that anyone is frustrated, ready to quit... so i'd urge juliet to hang in there... juliet also said she often finds dkretz comments "off the wall". here's a quick note, juliet: he's usually right, and you're wrong. so try to see it from don's perspective as you hang in there... *** i'm in the middle of lots of different threads here, so i'll try and work on finishing them up this week. in no particular order... *** i want to finish my work on gardner's e-text, showing how it can now be auto-converted into various formats, as a way to demonstrate my version of "postprocessing", which seems to be far more direct than the d.p. version. *** i have some messages to post in response to carel... i've started notes about creating a proofing system, for carel and anyone else contemplating doing that. *** i have a pair of posts on the good and bad aspects of roger's roundlessness experiment... i will be finishing up the handful of books that i have taken from roger's site, comparing 'em with his output. *** i'm also going to show you a little perl script i coded which summons up the various pieces of each page of a book on roger's roundless site, and stitches 'em on one webpage, and also lets you "thumb through" the pages of the books on his site, to check them... here's the first draft of that script: > http://z-m-l.com/go/showbarebones.pl it pulls in the scan and text for each page, obviously, as well as the tweet (if any) and the log file information. under roger's current system per se, it's not convenient to do this on page after page. (although a person _can_ access each of the pieces of information independently.) but really, there's no reason why it shouldn't be easy to "walk through" the pages of a book as it's being worked. the script works for my cinema screen, but i'm not sure how well it will fit on smaller screens. but i'm unlikely to improve it in that regard, since i believe it's unlikely anyone will spend much time actually using the thing... (not that it's not useful; everything i program is useful; it's just that few people here actually use what i create.) i wrote it just to get myself back into some perl coding. notice that i _am_ willing to smooth out this code _if_ anyone really wants to use it, but -- other than that -- i'm just gonna add a few refinements to it and it's done. *** there you go... plenty of meat for this week... -bowerbird

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al and his 10-foot pole
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Mar '10

08 Mar '10

al said: > IMO - what bowerbird is proposing is outright theft. i guess it's silly season here on the project gutenberg listserve. people are quite casual lately tossing about the "t" word ("theft!"). won't somebody please come train the firehose on this attack-dog so i don't have to? some elementary public-domain f.a.q. will do. in the meantime, as i have "confessed" before, i've mounted some of roger's scansets on my own site, so if roger has a problem with me doing that, he should send me a cease-and-desist. (kidding, of course, which should be obvious since i hate lawyers so much; roger can just send an e-mail, and we can discuss it all friendly.) > His apparent "holier-than-thou" attitude doesn't make up for that. well, at least when i accuse someone of a moral shortcoming, i provide _evidence_, instead of just making some bogus claim. > Speaking both personally and as a Whitewasher, > I wouldn't touch such files with the proverbial ten-foot pole. gee, al, we certainly wouldn't want you, either personally or as a capital-w whitewasher, to get involved with _criminal_activity._ one day you're letting your parking meter run out prematurely, and the next day you're dealing in public-domain scansets, and the next day the russian mafia has got your sorry ass in a sling. can't be too careful. good thing you have a 10-foot pole handy. *** donovan said: > experience has shown that any discussion of DP on gutvol-d > generally and unfortunately serves little productive purpose. > While positive and insightful comments do occur, > (and are read and appreciated!), they are easily lost > in the background of posts which far too often contain > derision, belittlement, accusation, and misrepresentation. and again, i wish i could just toss out a phalanx of terms like "derision, belittlement, accusation, and misrepresentation" with a wave of the hand. but when i say something like that, i feel a very strong need to back the charges with _evidence_. because when the derision (and the belittlement) is _deserved_, then the "accusations" are not a "misrepresentation", but indeed a clear-cut indictment. beware the person who doesn't want to discuss the charges, but merely have them dismissed as a "misrepresentation"... -bowerbird

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Re: roundlessness -- 011
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

michael said: > Just to make it "official". . .we will save all scans sent. roger doesn't appear to be interested in submitting scans yet... (d.p. reluctance on this perverts all who come in contact with it.) would you mount scans for his books that _i_ sent in? -bowerbird

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the best proofers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Mar '10

07 Mar '10

here are some of the findings from my analyses of the various "experiments" done over at d.p. the best proofers miss between 5% and 25% of the errors over the course of proofing an entire book. the worst proofers miss an even higher percentage, but it is not all that much higher, probably 10-40%. there is no evidence for the position that proofers "get bored" and therefore miss a higher percentage if the text they proof is clean (i.e., has few errors)... p3 proofers are no better than p2 or p1 proofers. some errors withstood over 5 rounds of proofing; there was nothing obviously "difficult" about them. the best predictor of whether a page is now "clean" is how many people proof it without finding an error. if the last person to proof a page found an error, then you cannot reliably predict it to be error-free, no matter how confident the proofer believes that... if anyone wants to dispute or discuss these findings, i'd be open, and will ask about your supportive data. -bowerbird

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roundlessness -- 011
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Mar '10

06 Mar '10

ack! rfrank has started "archiving" the books from his roundless site... it sounds like he'll be deleting the scans when a book posts to p.g., even though, so far, he has _not_ posted those scans to p.g. as well. please won't somebody tell him p.g. will mount those files for him? (and there are lots of i.s.p. who offer huge amounts of storage and bandwidth nowadays at a very cheap price, like dreamhost; there is absolutely no need to delete files for "space" reasons.) -bowerbird

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Re: the d.p. opinion on "prerelease" of e-texts
by cmiske＠ashzfall.com 06 Mar '10

06 Mar '10

> some people are quite agitated at the thought of the idea. > they drag out the old rot about how "d.p. means _quality_". > -bowerbird DP does have a standard of quality similar to many current publishers of books. I frankly cannot recall the last time I read a book in any format or from any publisher/producer of books that did not contain errors of some sort or another. Humans are not perfect. Writing, editing, and proofing are human endeavors and, as such, are limited by our imperfections. The fact that they even strive for quality at DP is a mark in their favor. There are many eBook producers of public domain books that hold quantity so far above quality as to make a majority of their books almost unreadable. I would worry that a pre-release version of a text might result in PG getting a reputation for being yet another supplier of illegible eBooks (even if these books are only available in a 'special area'). As Michael asked only for 'serious objections' against a pre-release section being created, I cannot think of any objections that go outside of simply wondering if you are willing to have these books circulated as they stand (people may grab them and distribute them 'as-is'). Would they have a header that specifies that they are 'not ready for prime time' as well as being in a special area? (Many people strip the headers, so the source of origin issue often becomes a moot point.) The more I think about it, the more I feel that it would actually be rather nice to see something along the lines of the 'roundless experiment' produce decent quality 'first release' books and then have people nitpick them to 'perfection' later. The point would be the format of storage so that the rough version could be compared to the original scans and corrections/updates be done with ease. Also, if a book is backlogged at DP, it would make sense to have a method for someone outside of DP to adopt the book and finish it. Carel -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [gutvol-d] the d.p. opinion on "prerelease" of e-texts From: Bowerbird(a)aol.com Date: Tue, February 23, 2010 5:22 pm To: gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org, bowerbird(a)aol.com just in case you were wondering, dkretz _did_ copy michael hart's saturday post over to d.p., giving michael's position in favor of prerelease of texts while they're still "in progress" at d.p. that was on saturday evening, and since then there have been over 100 posts in response: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=42940 there was an earlier discussion on the issue too: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=42695 the earlier discussion had over 100 posts as well, and had a poll, which got a high number of votes. the poll question? > Making preview texts available on a dedicated site, > with a clear label that they're work in progress. > Good idea/bad idea? the poll results? > 45% -- I'd rather you didn't > 17% -- I couldn't care less > 36% -- Great idea! some people are quite agitated at the thought of the idea. they drag out the old rot about how "d.p. means _quality_". -bowerbird _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

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