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

Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 May '10

18 May '10

jim said: > How about if you make your point by "fixing" some of the bad OCR's at TIA, > resubmit them to TIA -- and then use those examples to make your point? how about if i decide how i will make my point? -bowerbird

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adding e-books to itunes
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 May '10

17 May '10

here's more on this subject: > http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1505-how-to-quickly-add-your-oreilly-ebook… -bowerbird

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Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 May '10

17 May '10

aaron said: > You did not fully understand the announcement, > nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing. yes, i do fully understand it. i didn't care to talk too much about the in-copyright stuff, because i believed that the less said about that, the better. i can talk about that if you want to delve into it deeper, but remember i do support the overall mission of archive.org... so, do you want me to talk about that? first, though, answer me this: do you believe archive.org's o.c.r. of in-copyright material will be significantly better? i'm using the public-domain material to show the problem, simply because it's all i can see, and conveniently point to. but do you believe in-copyright o.c.r. will be problem-free? there's a chance that newer books will o.c.r. more cleanly, but if not, do you think archive.org will make corrections? will they bring their e-books up to a standard of _quality?_ i don't think so. so i, too, stand behind the point which i have been making. -bowerbird

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Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 May '10

17 May '10

aaron said: > LOL. So much for > "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, > and have always been available in that format." aaron, i don't have experience with the daisy format. are you telling us that one can't get text out of that? and are you claiming archive.org doesn't _start_ with the o.c.r. output when it creates the daisy-format file? if they give you daisy, and not text, then that must be part of the d.r.m. they wrap around the file to prevent the books from being "pirated" out to the seeing world. what i said _is_ true about the public-domain material. perhaps none of the public-domain material is counted in their announcement of "more than 1 million books"... > I suspect that the quality of the public domain books > will be roughly the same as the copyrighted texts. so we agree on that. > As to whether or not they will spend the time and > money to improve the quality of their books, I doubt it. so we agree on that. > The cost would otherwise be prohibitive, unless > the improvement could be made via software. well, we cannot know that unless we categorize the errors. which is precisely why i am undergoing such categorization. but yes, i've done more than enough research along the way to say unequivocally that _many_ improvements can be made, via software, with -- at most -- minimal human input needed. which pinpoints some of the ridiculousness around this issue. on the one hand, there are apologists who try to tell us that "even bad o.c.r. is better than no o.c.r. at all." well, that's true. but if we're really willing to settle for that, then why do those people over at distributed proofreaders even bother working? obviously, some of us put a value on correcting bad o.c.r. on the other side of the tightrope, we have those same people at distributed proofreaders who try to tell us that their job of correcting o.c.r. is horrendously difficult and time-consuming. and this is equally ludicrous. it takes them a long time to do it because they're doing it in a way that takes a long time to do it. i'm trying to walk the middle-ground, which seems to me like it should be a very broad path that's obviously the best to take, where we spend a sensible amount of time on a book (an hour), and take it to a place where it meets almost all of our needs... we can decide to ignore quality and focus on quantity alone, and we can have millions of books; and all of 'em are flawed. we can decide to ignore quantity and focus on quality alone, and we can have 23,456 books, like project gutenberg does... we can even do _both_, and have 23,456 high-quality books and millions of flawed ones. so, is that what we want to do? or we can spend one hour per book, and have half-a-million pretty-darn-good books, with all their obvious flaws corrected. i don't know why it's so hard to see this middle path is the best. -bowerbird

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Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 May '10

16 May '10

aaron said: > I just love it when people criticize something > without fully understanding it first. um, aaron, just exactly what is it that you think i fail to "fully understand"? because i do fully understand that a book with poor o.c.r. is better than no book with no o.c.r. there's no question about that. but that's not what archive.org's press release was all about. they were trumpeting the release of e-books in the daisy format, for the blind and dyslexic. _all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format. the reason this press release is cynical is that the o.c.r. can be awful, as i've been showing, meaning the text is bad and the daisy is bad. a sighted reader can refer to the page-scan if a passage is unclear, and resolve the issue. but a blind reader has no such recourse... so, if anyone here doesn't "fully understand" the issue, i'm afraid it is you, aaron, not me. -bowerbird

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the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 06 of 32
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 May '10

16 May '10

for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** nobody bothered to comment on yesterday's example, which likely means that nobody's even looking at these. which is fine. i'm a self-starter. yesterday's scan was a page that had been "annotated"... that is, a library patron had underlined one sentence and bracketed a few more, and "corrected" a few printer errors. such marks are not that unusual if we remember that these are books that are in a library, and have been checked out by who-knows-how-many patrons along their long journey. it might be "unfair" to judge uncorrected o.c.r. on such a page, because we cannot expect o.c.r. to overcome marks on a page. but that's the _point_, you see. these _are_ library books, and we can _expect_ that they might be marked on, and we cannot expect o.c.r. to compensate, which is just one more reason why we _need_ to make a good effort to actually _correct_ the o.c.r. *** nonetheless, it's not difficult to find examples of terrible o.c.r. even if we rule out any pages with markings made by patrons... so, for today's example, i'll again use verne's "around the world", and focus on a page that has no such patron-markings on it... *** here's the scan of page 69: > http://www.archive.org/stream/tourofworldineig00vern#page/69 and here's the o.c.r. of the entire book: > http://ia310838.us.archive.org/0/items/tourofworldineig00vern/tourofworldin… and here's the o.c.r. of page 69: > > Thii Tour of the World in Eiyldy Days. 69 > > " Be so good, landlord, as not to swear, but > remember this : cats were formerly considered, in > India, as sacred animals. That was a good time." > *' For the cats, mv lord 1 " > *' Perhaps for the travellers as well ! " > After which Mr. Fogg quietly continued his > dinner. Fix had gone on shore fchortly after ^Ir. > Fogg, and his first destination was the head- > quarters of the Bombay police. He made himself > known as a London detective, told his business > at Bombay, and the position of affairs relative to > the supposed robber, and nervously asked if a > warrant had arrived from London. It had not > reached the office; indeed, there had not yet been > time for it to arrive. Fix w^as sorely disajDpointed, > and tried to obtain an order of arrest from the > director of the Bombay police. This the director > refused, as the matter concerned the London of- > fice, which alone could legally deliver the warrant. > Fix did not insist, and was fain to resign himself > to aw^ait the an-ival of the important document ; > but he was determined not to lose sight of the > mysterious rogue as long as he stayed in Bombay. > He did not doubt for a moment, any more than > Passepartout, that Phileas Fogg would remain > there, at least until it was time for the warrant > to arrive. > > Passeparto\it, however, had no sooner heard his > master's orders on leaving the Mongolia, than he > saw at once that they were to leave Bombay as > they had done Suez and Paris, and that the journey > would be extended at least as far as Calcutta, and > perhaps beyond that place. He began to ask him- i count at least a half-dozen misrecognized words there, and another half-dozen other o.c.r. errors of various kinds. -bowerbird

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Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 16 May '10

16 May '10

when are people going to start calling "bullshit" on the press releases from the internet archive? that's what i want to know. look at their text. it's raw o.c.r., and it's _awful_. and unlike google, they're doing nothing to fix it. but they're putting it out for the "blind and dyslexic"? is this some kind of mean trick they're trying to play? do they think blind people won't notice the bad o.c.r.? i don't know who's calling the shots over there, since they all _seem_ like nice people... but my goodness, the cynicism of these press releases is overwhelming. and all this "good publicity" that they are getting will soon exercise its karmic force, and bite 'em in the butt. it's past the point of embarrassment; it's _dangerous_. even if the press will print your lies, it's wrong to lie... -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men")
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 May '10

15 May '10

jim said: > All I can do is shrug my shoulders, and > suggest that others on this forum > go try it for themselves, > and see what happens to them. i will be buying an ipad as soon as the lines go down and i know i can walk in an apple store and walk out with one. i expect that i will be able to load .epubs onto the thing quite easily, simply by going through the itunes store... if i have any problems doing that, i will let people know. but i expect there will be no problems. and if people ask me why _you_ had problems doing it, i'll shrug _my_ shoulders, and mumble something about how you had some objection about doing things that way. -bowerbird

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Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men")
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 May '10

15 May '10

jim said: > Do me a favor and see what you can do with it using wifi > and without feeding Apple your credit card number, > nor signing up for one of the "Company Store" accounts: > aka iTunes, iBooks, nor the App Store. if you're gonna refuse to give apple your credit-card number, there's no reason to buy apple machinery... no reason at all... perhaps you'd like apple to use a different business model. fine. i can understand that. but that's apple's call to make. and if you want to bellow about it, i can understand that too. but when you continue to bellow, and continue to bellow more, and won't stop bellowing here, even though _nobody_here_ can do anything about apple's choice of business model, it gets old. it gets really old. to the point people really want you to shut up. even the people who agree with you. _especially_ those people, because you make them look bad because they hold your opinion. i suppose you know the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says "doc, it hurts when i do _this_", and the doctor replies by saying "then don't do that." take a hint, jim. please. *** greg said: > Instead, somewhat incredibly, when you use your iPhone's > Safari to click on an .epub file at www.gutenberg.org, > it tells you it cannot open that file. is there any browser that can _open_ an .epub file? -bowerbird

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the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 05 of 32
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 May '10

15 May '10

for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** one of the most creative cats of the last 500 years is jules verne. i want some of what _he_ was smoking! so let's look at "around the world in 80 days" for our example today of what's wrong with archive.org text. here's the scan of page 55 > http://www.archive.org/stream/tourofworldineig00vernrich#page/55 here's the o.c.r. of the entire book: > http://ia361301.us.archive.org/1/items/tourofworldineig00vernrich/tourofwor… and here's the o.c.r. of page 55: > > TOUR OF THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DA 78. 55 > > out ofj>rder his mechanism, so wonderfully organ- > ized. I Then he played at whistT/ For he found > companions as devoted to it as himself ; a collector > of taxes, who was going to his post at Goa ; a min- > ister, the Eev. Decimus Smith, returning to Bom- > bay ; and a brigadier-general of the English army, > who was rejoining his corps at Benares. These > three passengers had the same passion for whist as > Mr. Fogg, and they played for entire hours, not > less quietly than he. > > [As for Passepartout, seasickness had taken no > holci on him. He occupied a forward cabin, and > eafc conscientiously. It must be said that the voy- > age made under these circumstances was decidedly > not unpleasant to himTj He rather liked his share > of it. [Well fed and well lodged, he was seeing the > country, and besides he asserted to himself that all > this whim would end at Bombay. j [The next day > after leaving Suez it was not without a certain > pleasure that he met on deck the obliging jgerson > whom he had addressed on landing in Egypt./ > > I" I am not mistaken," he said, on approaching > him with his most amiable smile, " you are the very > gentleman that so kindly served as my guide in > Suez?" > > "Indeed," replied the detective, "I recognize > you ! You are the servant of that odd English- > man " > > " Just so, monsieur " > > "Fix." > > u Monsieur Fix," replied Passepartout. " De- there you go. i'll let y'all do the commentary on this one... -bowerbird

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