October 2011 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] some questions for brewster kahle and archive.org
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

alex said: > I've been crazy with school, work, > and possible testicular cancer. take care of yourself, especially your health... those millions and millions of e-books full of embarrassing dirty text ain't goin' nowhere... we'll talk next week... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] some questions for brewster kahle and archive.org
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

alex said: > That one wasn't so hard, keep trying, "old man!" :) sure thing, kid... ;+) > I have to say I agree with you entirely here. > It's something I really want the archive to fix good! > I will certainly (and delicately, heh) bring this up > at the next collections meeting with my boss, > to see what/if she thinks we might do. well, i never had the ability to sweet-talk a boss, so i'll leave that bit up to you, for the most part... but odds are that she will give you the "standard" response of "there's not much we can do about it"; and, sadly, she might really believe that... many do, which is precisely why the problem has been ignored. but that's wrong -- completely wrong -- dead wrong... there is a _lot_ that can be done to improve that text. let's take a good look at it, and we'll see why. first, probably the most distracting thing about it is the presence of the runheads, a terrible irritation, both esthetically and visually and in reader-attention. yet it's very easy to get rid of 'em, even automatically. that, all by itself, would be a tremendous improvement. pagenumbers are much the same. and spacey punctuation is a _constant_ in these books, yet it too is a problem that can be fixed automatically... again, the application of merely these _automatic_ fixes would do much to improve the texts, at least to the point where the users would no longer feel _insulted_ by them. moreover, as my recent series (not to mention all of the similar series i've done over the years) has clearly shown, the rest of the steps that need to be taken to clean a text are extremely straightforward, and elementary to code, such that a _system_ for _end-users_ to _fix_the_texts_ could easily be put in place, for only a minimal expense, which is something archive.org shoulda done years ago... in return, archive.org gets text that it can be _proud_ of. -bowerbird

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these grapes are sweet -- lesson #25
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

and so we come to the conclusion of our lessons in this thread, where i've explained how to digitize a book quickly and easily... you can find the materials we used for this series of lessons by searching archive.org for "booksculture00mabiuoft" for the book. *** in our lesson before this one, i showed you this .pdf: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes124a.pdf but to illustrate for you the process of _customization_, i have generated another .pdf, using other preferences... > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes125b.pdf this one uses a different font (verdana) in a bigger size. i think if you view the two, side by side, you will find that you have a definite preference for one or the other -- or perhaps you like the font in one and the size in the other. the point is, if we give end-users the capability to generate a .pdf which they customized to their personal preferences, that's clearly going to be the optimal experience for them... there are a lot more demo .pdfs which i could generate, not just different customizations, but of different types. for instance, these 2 .pdfs were created to be free-flowing. but we could generate one which retained the linebreaks and the pagebreaks which matched the original p-book... that .pdf would match the page-by-page website which i showed you in the previous lesson, and we could even do some things which _created_synergy_ between the .pdf and that website. specifically, we could put a web-link on each page of the .pdf that opens the respective web-page for it. if we then put a discussion-box on that web-page, then the offline .pdf would be a tool complementing an effort to provide a social-networking component to the book... you could read offline, but jump online to write or read annotations for a certain page if you felt moved to do so. i'll discuss some of this stuff at a later date, when i do a new "sweet grapes" series on the topic of my e-book tools. *** we'll recap in a minute, to finish this, but first: _caveats!_ the code i've shared with you in this thread is not "solid". it's meant to demonstrate one thing -- only one thing -- namely, that the code necessarily to accomplish the task of cleaning o.c.r. and making e-books isn't hard to write. indeed, if you are willing to write quick-and-dirty code, like the code that i wrote in these lessons, you can do it with a minimum of time and effort, even if you're doing that coding in a language that you've never used before, which i demonstrated by using a language i'd never used. the programming constructs you need are the simple loops and string operations that you can execute in any language. there's nothing difficult about this, nothing, in the slightest. having said all of that, though, quick-and-dirty code is still dirty code. it's not robust to violations of your assumptions, so it's fragile. and it most definitely won't do everything that you will find -- eventually -- that you need to be able to do... sometimes the code i wrote was outright bad. not in the sense that it had bugs -- it probably did, but for the most part, it all worked good enough to do the job for this book -- but it was most definitely not the _best_ way to write all those routines... sometimes i wrote it "the wrong way" because it was easiest to do it that way, and sometimes i wrote it "the wrong way" because i don't care to share all the hard-earned experience that i've gained over the years with the enemies i have here, and often i wrote it "the wrong way" just to make you think... i do have code that is solid, and capable, and flexible, and i know without question that it works across _lots_ of books, because i _developed_ it across lots of books. if i had wanted to give you the best code i could write, i'd have given you that. that wasn't my goal. my goal was pretty much the opposite, to share the _worst_possible_code_ that would _do_the_job_. so i wrote everything "from scratch", looking at no other code. and the bottom line is that you shouldn't "just trust" that code. use it and learn from it, especially what there is about it that enabled it to "work", in the sense that it "did the desired job". but don't "just trust" it. and if you do use it on some other book, know that you must examine the output closely, to see _if_ it worked correctly for _that_ book; you must find ways to _test_ for correct behavior. it's also the case that the _order_ in which i did the tasks was perhaps not optimal. i was _teaching_ and _demonstrating_, so i followed the order which optimized _that_, not "the job". and if you want to go through this exercise again, with me, on another book, to see what it'd be like if we did it again, i would suggest that we use _this_ book as our raw material: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=49047 it's going through d.p. now, so we'll have another digitization which we can use for comparison, so as to evaluate our work. *** now for the recap... this thread shows how to digitize a book quickly and easily. we've gone from raw o.c.r. to finished e-books, using only your wordprocessor and code written by this python virgin. congratulations, friends. now you know how easy it can be. and you will never again let anyone snow you with the _lie_ that it has to be some complicated and difficult procedure... it's a matter of running spellcheck, to correct o.c.r. errors, and doing a few consistency checks, to fix some other stuff. will a couple of "stealth scannos" survive? yes, it's possible. and you certainly won't catch all of the punctuation glitches. but if you ask your end-users to contribute error-reports -- and then _act_ on the reports _promptly_ (unlike p.g.), and give your reporters full credit for finding the errors -- you will soon discover that they'll be delighted to help you. plus, after your text is cleaned, you can just click a button to generate the three "canonical" output-formats you need. then distribute the text as-is -- that's right, the .zml file -- to allow your end-users to generate their own output files, personalized to their own idiosyncratic needs and desires... that is the way the cyberlibrary of the future should work! and thus concludes this thread of lessons. have a good weekend... :+) -bowerbird

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if you want to see just how bad it could get
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Oct '11

07 Oct '11

if you want to get an inkling about just how bad it could get if we let the copyright lobbies have their way, read this interview about copyright over in the arena of classical music... > http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111006/12220616236/lawrence-golan-speaks… you'll see the reality of unbridled greed. -bowerbird

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these grapes are sweet -- lesson #24
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Oct '11

06 Oct '11

this thread explains how to digitize a book quickly and easily. search archive.org for "booksculture00mabiuoft" for the book. *** first, let's clear up that loose end about the final spellcheck... to recall, we approached our unique dictionary with grapes116: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes116.py > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes116.txt you'll find it as the long list of words at the end of the output. we saved that file here: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes.all.unique.dictionary.txt now we essentially repeat grapes116.py with grapes120.py: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes120.py > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes120.txt the difference is, we're no longer using the regular dictionary, the "specials" dictionary, or the dictionary with british words... (if you look, you will see that they have been commented out.) so we _only_ use the all.unique dictionary -- words in this book. (we split it up into a "specials" part and a "regular" part, because _specials_ are case-sensitive, while regulars are case-insensitive.) now, the first time (or two, or three) that you run grapes120.py, there still might turn up a "notfound" word (or two, or three), but you just add 'em to all.unique and run the script again, until you finally get an output that tells you that no words were "notfound". that's the signal that your all.unique.dictionary is now complete... (if you're curious about what didn't turn out right in the first run, it was the roman numerals i, v, x, and xi, which should have been case-sensitive, along with a couple of initial-capped possessives.) *** and yet another loose end, brought to the surface by roger's questions about coding a page-by-page viewing apparatus... here's code that creates such a capability: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes124.py > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes124.txt season to taste... you'll find the set of page-by-page webpages in this folder: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes124-folder *** ok, so on to .pdf, and our finish-line... i explained why i'm not sharing my code for .pdf creation. but you can see a .pdf which i created: > http://zenmarkuplanguage.com/grapes124a.pdf this .pdf was output using one specific set of preferences. i might generate others, to demonstrate customization... or i might not. but either way... this ends our task of generating our trio of output-formats, which also completes the purpose of the thread in general... we've gone from raw o.c.r. to finished e-books, using only your wordprocessor and code written by this python virgin. we'll recap the whole thread in our next, and final, lesson... so if you have questions, now would be the time to ask 'em. -bowerbird

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do you want to look backward? or move forward?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Oct '11

06 Oct '11

any discussion of "what .epub supports" is dishonest dialog. because the truth is that different .epub viewer-programs "support" different subsets of the "official standard", and thus the _reality_ of the format is that it's one huge mess, a "standard" that's been embraced and extended to death, whenever it wasn't locked-down with d.r.m. to begin with. and that is exactly how the corporate publishers _want_ it. because they're trying to stave off the revolution that will short-circuit their cash-registers and ruin their business. so what are they doing with .epub? why, coming out with _a_3.0_version_, of course, the better to boggle you with. you think things were confusing and fragmented _before_? well let's throw audio and video into the mix too, because the last decade of the web _proved_ they cause infighting. throw in some javascript, and html5, maybe flash as well, in order to _ensure_ that e-books are a nasty experience. it's no accident that amazon outpaced i.d.p.f. even while using a format that was supposedly "inferior" to .epub... but the end-run is inevitable, so all i.d.p.f. can do is stall it. study the "history" all you want, most especially if you want to distract people from _the_future_. but if you want to go _forward_, we need _a_clean_break_ from crap like .epub... -bowerbird

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giants passing
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Oct '11

06 Oct '11

first michael hart. and then one month later, steve jobs. so sad... i've appended the article that recalls my fondest image of michael. -bowerbird ========================================= Hart of the Gutenberg Galaxy by Denise Hamilton Wired magazine, Issue 5.02 -- February 1997 What kind of a man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online by 2002 and make them available for free? (Hint: the kind of man who puts sugar on his pizza.) I am sitting with Michael Hart at Garcia's, a pizza place near the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where we are having a perfectly normal conversation about digital libraries and are preparing to tuck into our dinners. Hart is an e-text visionary and cofounder of Project Gutenberg, whose aim is to put copies of the world's greatest books on the Net for free. Hart is also a world-class eccentric with the social skills of a cranky 2-year-old. As I look up from my glistening pepperoni, Hart, who is 50, does the damnedest thing I've seen done to a pizza. Tearing open two dozen sugar packets, he sprinkles them methodically over his deep-dish pie until it is layered with white crystals. Then he digs in. "This may seem weird to you," he confides between mouthfuls, "but it's the only way I can get enough fuel to keep working. This right here is 2,000 calories, and it should keep me going for a while." Then the sugar begins coursing through his system, and Hart takes on the bug-eyed look of someone who has just hoovered up a few fat lines of Peruvian flake. The words tumble out. Sweat beads his upper lip. "Aaaah," he says, leaning back in the wooden booth. "I love working till I drop. I love looking back on the day and knowing I put another book online. That's what I'm here for. If I feel like I'm crashing, I eat. If that doesn't work, I sleep. I live by the nanosecond and burn the candle at both ends. With a blowtorch." For more than a quarter century -- eons, in Net time -- Hart has made Project Gutenberg his mission in life. Or, more accurately, his fervid, manic obsession. While other geeks have grown rich mining the silicon motherlode, he's been sitting like a troglodyte in his Urbana basement, tending a utopian vision named for the 15th-century German printer whose amazing invention first made books accessible to the masses. As the 20th century wanes, Hart is using the Internet to try to finish what Johann Gutenberg started, pumping into cyberspace digitized copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Moby Dick, and Orlando Furioso and the works of Henry James, Plutarch, and Dostoyevsky -- basically, any and everything that's ever been published between hard covers. It's one of civilization's oldest dreams: the universal library. And in an era of ever slicker Web graphics, blinking GIFs, and Java-powered billboards, he's doing it with militantly plain ASCII text files -- just the words, please -- downloadable anytime anywhere in the world by anyone with a functioning computer, a phone line, and a modem. No ads, no credit card numbers, no charge. Even by the Net's generous standards, Hart is a wild romantic. He refuses to keep usage logs. He's not a big fan of copyright extension laws. He considers the Web an appalling waste of bandwidth -- Gutenberg's main files reside on an FTP site. What passes for organization is a loose network of volunteer typists, scanners, editors, and proofreaders, plus a couple of pro bono attorneys, all held together by email. Other than that, Hart operates with something pretty close to no strings attached -- political, institutional, or otherwise. Not that a lot of the groups that share his aims would have him. Since Hart first typed the American Declaration of Independence into a U-of-I mainframe 26 years ago, Gutenberg has put about 1,000 titles online, on a budget smaller than some big-time electronic publishers allocate for market research. His self-imposed goal is to reach 10,000 books by the end of 2001, Gutenberg's 30th anniversary. And with 9,000 to go, the questions rise like the greasy steam from our pizzas: Is Hart a deluded crackpot, a high tech saint, or just another Net eccentric? And what is a project with seriously historic ramifications doing in the hands of someone who puts sugar on his pizza? To find out, I'm pulling up outside the big, century-old, ivy-covered brick house that Hart bought years ago with a modest inheritance. In my honor, he's wearing slacks but quickly changes into the uniform he will sport for the rest of my three-day visit: black bicycle shorts that emphasize his pot belly, a red T-shirt, a baseball cap, and Nike Air Jordans two sizes too big that cost US$1 at a garage sale. Beneath the cap is short, thinning hair. He has a booming laugh and a large, clean-shaven fleshy face with graying sideburns. When I ask to use the bathroom, Hart gestures into the basement, past peeling plaster and ancient caulking. "Don't bother flushing," he hollers down. "I've got a garden hose, and I'll just run some water through it." I begin to realize that this is a man with clearly defined priorities. "Other than to redesign democracy, I can't think of anything more important than Gutenberg," Hart tells me when I return. "It's the Archimedes lever: Give me a place to stand, and I'll move the world. Well, that's what I'm doing. Our goal is to give away 1 trillion e-text files by December 31, 2001. That is 10,000 titles each to 100 million readers, which is only 10 percent of the present number of computer users. Since that number will double by 2001, we will meet our goal if only 5 percent of all users download a file." Easy as that. Hart calls himself an electronic Johnny Appleseed, sowing the Internet with books for the global proletariat. He foresees the day when, armed with the trashiest laptop and a modem, tribesmen in Borneo's rain forest will be able to click onto Gutenberg and download texts. But why would anyone want to read a book on a computer when they can hold a bound copy in their hands, I ask. Because it's fast, convenient, and free, Hart shoots back, along with a list of the people who are using Project Gutenberg already: Kids doing research for classes. People in foreign countries who want to practice English. Grandmothers turning their computer-savvy grandkids on to The Jungle Book. Folks looking for rare Robert Louis Stevenson volumes -- Gutenberg has the author's entire 30-plus volume oeuvre -- not carried by their local library or bookstore. And people like Jo Churcher of Toronto, who is blind. She downloads Gutenberg texts and runs them through a speech synthesizer that reads them out loud, like books-on-tape, only free. "Gutenberg has finally allowed blind people to begin building up libraries of their own," says Churcher, who likes the project so much she has helped scan in 12 books, including The Pickwick Papers, for Gutenberg's files. We move into Hart's living room, a dimly lit cavern piled with modems, computer cards, hard drives, videocards, and power supplies, all leaning drunkenly against each other. There are hundreds of boxes of software; thousands of records; CD-ROMs and CDs; moth-bitten beaver, mink, and monkey coats; hippie op art; what Hart says is an original Modigliani; a gaily painted child's hobbyhorse; a Cable piano from the 1910s; a Thomas Edison Dictaphone from the '30s; and rooms filled with books, including 50 complete dictionaries, three copies of Chaos by James Gleick, and nine of Mistral's Daughter by Judith Krantz. "She's usually a ditz," he explains, "but this was a good book." Hart is a garage sale fanatic, hitting up to 100 each weekend as he criss-crosses the leafy suburbs of Champaign-Urbana on a bicycle (he doesn't have a car). He also forages daily among neighborhood dumpsters, where U-of-I students routinely discard stereo components and new floppy disks. But his favorite dumpster is located behind the U-of-I computer lab. We drive there, and Hart hops right in, wallowing thigh-deep amid pizza cartons and plastic milk bottles because he knows the school often throws out old equipment, stuff he can use for Gutenberg or trade at the weekly "geek lunch" he attends with other tech-heads in the U-of-I orbit. Today, he fishes out a set of Unix manuals, an 8mm tape cartridge, and two copies of Mathematica, for Sun's Solaris operating system. Slim pickings. Nothing like the time he scored an entire ATT 7300 minicomputer. Hart doesn't need high-end stuff to run Gutenberg -- it's just nice to have around. Every few years, he gets a computer from Apple, NeXt, IBM, or Hewlett-Packard. Bell &AMP Howell once donated a $50,000 scanner, to help volunteers input books quickly. And he's thinking about setting up an email server, so he can offer free accounts to Gutenberg volunteers. Just talking about the idea gets him giggling with glee. As a child, Hart's idols were Peter Pan and Albert Einstein. In adulthood, the two have twined like a double helix to define his personality so that within one conversation, he can go from visionary brilliance to bluster to bumble. "Michael is one of the smartest guys I've met in my years," says Greg Newby, an assistant professor and assistant dean at the School of Library and Information Science at the U-of-I and a senior research scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. "He's also one of the least mature. That makes for an interesting combination." Hart grew up in Tacoma, Washington, where his parents worked as government codebreakers during World War II. In peacetime, his father was a Shakespeare professor and a CPA. His mother was a math and education professor and ran a women's clothing store. Dyslexic but precocious, Hart was messing with algorithms while other kids were fumbling with Lego. He plowed through the U-of-I in two years, graduating first in his class with a self-created major in man-machine interfaces. Hanging around the university's computer lab after graduation, he dreamed of a universal digital library and posted an e-text manifesto that grew into Project Gutenberg. With the US bicentennial looming, he chose the Declaration of Independence as his inaugural text -- he also happened to have a copy of the text in his backpack. Next he did the Bill of Rights, then the Gettysburg Address. But the project moved sluggishly because Hart inputted everything manually after his day job of selling stereos. In those early mainframe days, Hart had to operate within the impracticable bounds of a 10-Kbyte donated storage space. But as computers got faster and smaller, Gutenberg began to look more like a real possibility. Things really broke loose in 1988, when Hart typed in his first full novel, Alice in Wonderland. Mark Zinzow, a senior research programmer at the U-of-I who met Hart that year, remembers thinking that the project -- which at the time had 10 books online and a 1200-baud connection -- was completely harebrained. "But it was also a noble goal," says Zinzow, "and I thought, 'If he wants to tilt at windmills, I'll help him get on his horse.'" Although Hart no longer had a formal affiliation with the university, Zinzow gave him access to email and mailing lists, and more important, an FTP server. Soon, he was watching in amazement as Gutenberg pumped out a gig of data each day. Around the same time, Hart was invited to place his digital collection under the official auspices of the Benedictine University, a tiny Roman Catholic seminary in nearby Lisle, Illinois. The symbolism did not escape Hart: monasteries had once been repositories of knowledge in the Dark Ages, copying and preserving books for posterity. Wasn't Gutenberg doing the same thing electronically, preserving e-texts long after paper and microfilm would crumble into dust? The monks went even further, naming Hart an adjunct professor of electronic text and giving him a $12,000 annual salary. They kicked in some extra money for living expenses, most of which eventually came from sales of a Gutenberg CD-ROM that has hit 100,000 copies. (Regularly updated, the current edition boasts more than 500 titles, on a single disc.) As the project grew, Hart's management style stayed laid-back. He refused to draw up a master list of books for the Gutenberg pantheon, preferring to let volunteers input their favorite tomes. Initially, Gutenberg got the usual suspects -- the Bible, Virgil's Aeneid (in English and Latin), and Hamlet. Then came more unusual fare: The Book of Mormon, Herland (a 19th-century feminist novel), and Flatland (science fiction, about 4-D travel). Deadlines were flexible. There was no follow-up. Sometimes the e-texts arrived months or even years late. Other times, they just dropped into limbo. What keeps things going is Hart's fanaticism. A DOS man and a neo-Luddite when it comes to GUI interfaces, he says he's never even used the World Wide Web -- he doesn't like the graphics. But the five machines that make up Gutenberg Central boot so fast you can barely see the start-up box flash by. And when a fresh new book from a volunteer comes in on a winter night, he'll wake at 3 a.m. and sit before the glowing screens in a sweatshirt resembling a hooded monk's cowl he got from the Benedictines. In summer, he works in nothing but biker shorts, blasting classical music or classic rock. To get his Vitamin D and avoid rickets, Hart relies on a full-spectrum lamp that mimics the sun's rays. Nearby is a rumpled mattress where he sleeps when felled by exhaustion. When I visited, he was proofing The Violet Fairy Book -- a 1901 collection of stories edited by Andrew Lang -- and checking that the format, spacing, and margins conform to official Gutenberg style. After scanning for errors, he adds a header -- "Welcome to the World of Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts. Readable By Both Humans and Computers, Since 1971" -- includes some boilerplate legal information, and updates his directory. Then he hits Enter. Bing -- the book is in an FTP site on PrairieNet, a community access computer system in the Midwest. From there, it will ripple around the world, to interested individuals, literary Web sites, and other digital libraries. Hart has to keep working, or he'll drown in data. Each day, he receives up to 400 pieces of email, chats with dozens of volunteers, and works on upcoming books. Besides running Gutenberg, he's also the central figure behind "Ask Dr. Internet," a free service run by a Gutenberg-like group of tech-heads that has evolved into its own full-time job. Even the most clueless AOL newbie gets an answer -- often with a liberal icing of Hart's own curious views about things like the Web and graphical interfaces. With Gutenberg, he gets help from 750 volunteers around the world. Lawyers work pro bono, researching a book's copyright to ensure it has entered the public domain. Tech-heads like Zinzow provide sysadmin consulting and tend computers held together with gum and baling wire. Scholars input and proofread e-texts. A group of 50 Russian academics, for instance, recently did Webster's Unabridged Dictionary by hand. The 45 million keystrokes took them six months, for which they were paid $5,000 by one of Hart's financial supporters. Some texts are labors of love, by volunteers who tap along for years to finish one title. But most of the heavy lifting is done by a hardcore group -- mainly academics -- with access to state-of-the-art laser scanners. Geoffrey Pawlicki, a longtime supporter who put Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra online, recalls meeting Hart in 1980: "He had files in a backpack and was always running around hooking people up with modems. Initially he was dismissed as a crackpot, but the same could be said of Ted Turner." Not that Project Gutenberg's founder and a media mogul are likely to ever be confused -- for starters, Hart's totally uninterested in tracking Gutenberg usage. "I don't care where a book goes," he says, "I just want it to sprout legs and run." He knows that 10,000 files are downloaded daily on the U-of-I server, but that doesn't give the whole picture since the archives are mirrored on hundreds of sites the world over and heavily redistributed. (The New Zealand Digital Library, for instance, boasts 492 Gutenberg titles in easy-to-use HTML.) Many users post Gutenberg texts on their own Web sites, so Hart's work can be found on Tarzan sites, Shakespeare sites, and The Jungle Book sites, to name just a few. The only thing Hart asks is that anyone who uses a Gutenberg text tack on a "small print" header that says in part: "Why is this 'Small Print!' statement here? You know: lawyers. They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with your copy of this e-text, even if you got it for free from someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how you can distribute copies of this e-text if you want to." One result is that Gutenberg texts reach people who have no idea what an FTP server is, let alone how to use one. Hart gets a lot of email from the United States, Britain, Canada, Singapore, and Germany, so he assumes those are big markets. Many people comment on the CIA World Facts Book, so he thinks that's his most popular book. (It's updated annually, and he can put it online immediately because government publications are public domain.) Other favorites seem to be the Bible, Alice in Wonderland, and the collected works of Shakespeare. But even broaching the idea of doing more to find out what people might want from Project Gutenberg makes Hart see red. He imagines the sinister implications of tracking folks who want to download, say, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in a country like Iran. And besides, any effort to "steer'' the project misses an essential point. "Once we put a book out," he says, "it goes everywhere there are computers and readers. That's unlimited distribution. And in a world based on competition for everything, that's the biggest threat." So in one sense, Hart is an electronic David, striking a literary blow against an establishment Goliath that tries to control information through restrictive copyright law, downloading fees, and red tape. And for that, he has a lot of fans. "Michael's one of the few people I know who's not motivated by greed," says Zinzow. "He's trying real hard to do a good deed for the world, and he's really underappreciated. If Michael wasn't here, access to books on the Internet would be only for the rich. He's an electronic Robin Hood, keeping the Sheriff of Nottingham from creating a monopoly." Newby agrees. "When you have Microsoft buying up the right to thousands of art images, and the federal government taking away copyright, going backward and copyrighting things that weren't copyrighted before, it's not just paranoia; he's trying to fight the evil forces." Hart is happy to agree. "Some people say, 'I am the most powerful because I have the most power.' I say, 'I am the most powerful because I give the most power away.'" And there's no reason to doubt that his dogged pursuit of that ideal is one of the things that has enabled Gutenberg to survive all these years. The project has doubled each year since 1991, when he had 12 books online, and the way Hart sees it, Gutenberg should continue to do so. That means 1,600 books for 1997, 3,200 for 1998, and so on. But there are limits to what he can do without institutional backing and only a handful of hardcore volunteers. Even supporters like Newby say the man can barely handle his current workload and will be hard-pressed to take on more unless he delegates authority. Lately Hart's been trolling the Internet for someone to pass the torch to.But it's hard to imagine him letting go. "No one wants to be a supervisor, so I have to do it all myself," he says plaintively. Hart also refuses to waver from his initial vision, and this has limited his scope. If he made some concessions, it's possible Gutenberg might have 100,000 books online today -- a respectable library -- instead of 1,000. Indeed, Hart says, various academic institutions and even some Texas oil interests have offered to bankroll Gutenberg over the years, in exchange for control. One university offered him a six-figure salary, he says, to bring the project to their campus. He turned them all down flat. "Almost everybody out there wants to charge for books, and they want real control over which books we do and which edition comes out," Hart grouses. "They want a bit in my mouth. I don't trust them." He's right to worry. In recent months, complaints about Gutenberg's use of over-taxed U-of-I computing resources led to an ultimatum from school officials: find a formal university sponsor or get off. Hart tried the library, the School of Library and Information Science, and a computer network run jointly by the Big 10 football schools. No luck. "The library, which would be the logical place, wasn't interested in sponsoring it -- they might have been concerned about the project's academic credentials," says Bob Penka, an associate director at the U of I's Computing and Communication Services office. "Whether that's snootiness or what, I don't know." Hart has lost his U-of-I email account, but so far the project is getting a stay of execution -- at least until the next round of complaints. Is Gutenberg too important to be left to a solitary eccentric? Maybe it should be organized by the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or some such organization. But herein lies another problem. Hart isn't the only one staking out literary dibs in cyberspace. The Georgetown Center for Text and Technology counts more than 300 online library projects in nearly 30 countries, including the Dartmouth Dante Project, with 600 years of commentary on Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Oxford Text Initiative, which charges users to download its scholarly publications. And for all its high-minded goals, Gutenberg's simplicity works against it. It lacks the bells and whistles, the flashy graphics and sophistication that grant-givers love. Instead, Hart plods along in ASCII, doesn't give a hoot about market research, and wants to give his product away. The lack of recognition rankles. "There are literally a billion dollars of grant money out there, and I'm never going to get any of it," he says. And those 300 competitors? "All those projects will never produce even one mainstream book that you or I will ever see." Digital library experts say he's got a point. "Funders tend to be interested in projects that use state-of-the-art technology or advance knowledge, or that create something new and exciting," says Ann Bishop,a coprincipal investigator with the U of I's Digital Library Initiative project, which is working with commercial publishers to put academic journals online. "Projects that aren't high tech tend to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps if he played it up as something vital to national education, he would get more funding. But I don't know if he's interested in twisting it that way." Ultimately, Hart's biggest impediment may be US copyright law, which pretty much prohibits Gutenberg from publishing anything written after 1920. The law now protects a work for 50 years after the author's death, which means that Hemingway, Genet, and Garcia Marquez won't be online anytime soon. Even The Odyssey and Plato's Republic are off-limits if Gutenberg wants to post a translation published after 1920. One exception is when an author gives special permission, such as cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, who approached Hart to release an e-text of his novel Hacker Crackdown. The copyright problem isn't getting any easier. The first US copyright law covered 14 years, with a possible 14-year extension. A 1909 amendment doubled that to 28 years, and in 1976, the law was extended again. Now Congress is considering going to life plus 70 years. "Do you realize that under the proposed law, the blueprint for the Wright Brothers' airplane would still be under patent?" asks an incensed Hart, who has testified in Washington against the new bill's passage. "If they win, we'll have to get a certain number of titles and then quit. Unless we want to do the Robin Hood thing. And I'm too old to be a revolutionary." A glint appears in his eye. "But I'll do Gone with the Wind on my deathbed," he vows. "The book and the movie. It should be out there." I leave Urbana feeling that Hart just might meet his short-term goal. If he were any less obsessed, he would have given up a long time ago. Instead, he is doubling each year. But I also wonder how long the project can keep expanding exponentially. Unless Hart can draft reinforcements or hook up with a sponsor, eventually it probably will stall, and that's a shame. As the plane takes off, I recall Hart's description of the mad rush that comes from sitting in his basement, watching the newly transcribed titles come in, working on them, and then launching books into cyberspace. His words echo in my head: "Bennett Cerf never published a book a day, but I'm doing it. Do you have any idea of how powerful that makes me feel? But sometimes I go to bed at night, and I don't know what I'm going to do in the morning because no one's sent me anything. That's kind of scary." ----------------------------------------------------------------- Denise Hamilton is an obsessive reader who writes regularly about business and culture for the Los Angeles Times, New Times, and other publications. ----------------------------------------------------------------- this article was found at: http://www.vivanet.com/~akp/index.html akpgsh(a)rit.edu or akp(a)vivanet.com "All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost." -- J.R.R. Tolkien

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Re: [gutvol-d] do you want to look backward? or move forward?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 05 Oct '11

05 Oct '11

ricky said: > I happen to disagree, but > love to hear the counter view the shelf-life on this topic expired about 10 years ago... the next step in that little dance was the question asking "what about the deluge of content that will be inevitable?", the answer to which was "collaborative filtering systems". then there were all the user-generated-content systems, the ultimate "failure" of which i recently documented in a post discussing the problems within wikipedia and d.p. the thrust: power freaks grab power and ruin everything. then all that was followed by the rise of myspacefacebook, where people are busy chatting up their high-school peers, and twitter, the 21st-century telegraph where people who are too busy and superficial for more than 140 characters have found that they too have an ability to do "networking". but, again, i refer you to the subject-header of this post... for those who want to look ahead, the interesting questions are ones like "where do we go from here?" and "how can we use the tools now available to do something irresistible?", and "what is the next form of art that will be _captivating_?" -bowerbird

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Career opportunity inside
by gutvol-d＠pglaf.org 05 Oct '11

05 Oct '11

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Re: [gutvol-d] do you want to look backward? or move forward?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 05 Oct '11

05 Oct '11

ricky said: > I'm not sure. i'm sure. i'm absolutely positive. > As content creators, it's in publishers' best interest except publishers are _not_ "content creators". _writers_ create the content. always have; always will. the publishers have traditionally taken that "content" and made it the subject of large press-runs so as to make affordable the print-books they then placed in brick-and-mortar bookstores. they are _middlemen_, and all the services they rendered were a function of the former nature of the book as _a_physical_product_, and they extracted the lion's share for those services... but now writers can turn their own content into e-books -- using a few dozen lines of code, as i've just shown -- that are easily uploaded and then available world-wide, without necessarily giving up _any_ cut to a "publisher". the old days will soon be history, and publishers know it. indeed, they are _sure_ about it; even absolutely positive. the only question is how long they can ride it until it dies. -bowerbird

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