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

Re: awfully quiet -- 2555 chances at redemption
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 03 Sep '11

03 Sep '11

i said: > how the finally situation will resolve itself... mixed got i words there up some. *** rickywong said: > I know the guys at bookglutton. They aren't alone. i'm not sure what "alone" means there... > I think the term "social reading" is > quite broad and for different purpose. ok. > I'm looking more at enhanced content. then i'm not sure you picked the best examples. because i'd say it's gonna be pretty difficult to "enhance" things like "alice in wonderland" or "art of war" or the bible. or maybe not, i dunno. at any rate, i'd love to see you take your stab at it. i hope other people here give you feedback too... -bowerbird

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spring has sprung
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 May '11

19 May '11

devastation on three fronts in japan... and american soldiers on three fronts in the middle east... so what is the project gutenberg list doing to distract itself? having a discussion about d.r.m., of course. _of_course._ *** anyway, i sure can't help in japan, or the middle-east, but nonetheless i refuse to waste any time on d.r.m. so how about a quick overview of the common purpose? project gutenberg is tooling along at around e-text #35650. notable recent entries include #33333, "the statute of anne", produced by michael hart. page-images were included, and this e-text retains the line-breaks from those original pages, even including the end-of-line-hyphenates. what a surprise. #34567 is "paradise bend", and it was produced by al haines. *** the "progress" of restructured-text through d.p. continues to be tortuous... it looks like rfrank has defected to pg-canada, where they don't have to pay the epubmaker toll to marcello. meanwhile, one person has created a "dp2rst" python script. i guess if you patch enough scripts into the workflow, you just might get something that provides a smooth transition. well, either that, or you just get a truly botched workflow... either way, d.p. seems to have chased away all the p1 people, yet it still has a hard time keeping text in that queue, which is something of a mystery. but there have ceased to be any discussions of any backlogs in the forums, so i guess they've solved all of those problems... i'm not sure how they did it. maybe someone there will record the solution for posterity. *** all joking aside, distributed proofreaders is closely upon its 20,000 title... it will come along in the next few weeks, and stands as a testament that d.p. is more interesting in doing new digitizations than fixing the errors in the existing ones. to think that i first suggested reviewing old titles and fixing the errors in them way back in december of 2003, when p.g. was celebrating its 10,000th title. little did i know then that the library's quality would seemingly _never_ be a concern... i made the suggestion again at #15,000, and then at #20,000, after which i realized it was fruitless, and basically gave it up. oh well, this is a volunteer organization, and the volunteers make the decisions as to where their priorities are, and if _i_ don't like it, then i should just get up off of my fat ass, right? right. so that's what i'm gonna do, go for a nice little walk... after all, it's a lovely spring day here in santa monica... :+) -bowerbird

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Volunteers Needed For Almanac Project
by Michael S. Hart 26 Mar '11

26 Mar '11

Volunteers Needed For Almanac Project As many of you know, I started working on the CIA World Factbooks long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and then our CEO, Greg Newby took them over in a new format, and then Al Haines did them in the most recent formt, but it appears that the format changing has not stopped, and Al is just a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of having to redo all his methodology, starting all over again in a very real manner. In addition, I have turned up a number of old almanacs dated back to nearly 150 years ago and also a number of Canadian alamancs. These are invaluable research tools for anyone wanting to see how things were long, long ago, and before the historic and political rewriters of the Winston Smith camp got their hands on the data. So. . .PLEASE let me know if you would be willing to take a look, and perhaps get some or all of these into our collection. Thanks!!!!!!! Michael

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Re: spring has sprung
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Mar '11

24 Mar '11

jim said: > The famous title I reworked > still had at least a dozen "obvious errors" > that have never been fixed - even after > 100s of thousands of downloads one of those times where michael hart "solicited" my help and got no response was when he suggested that i could help on a project aimed at creating an e-text that was "error-free"... i rolled my eyes... first, there's no such thing, as michael himself has been quick to say all along. second, at some point in time, decisions have to be made that are not about "errors" per se, but which flow from the philosophy with which you are attacking the task at hand. for instance, when a specific chapter-header fails to match its entry in the table of contents, do you change one of them to _force_ a match? well, it depends on what you want to be doing... decisions like these become far more important than "correcting errors" very early in the process. third, and the main reason i rolled my eyes and decided to give no response is because i have already demonstrated -- countless times here, right on this listserve -- how to go about the process of creating an "error-free" digitization: by comparing two independent digitizations and resolving the differences between them. bingo. so i've been through the routine time after time, and now michael is proposing we do the routine? what a strange and curious request. i didn't get it. so rather than send back a reply saying "wake up!", i just opted not to say anything. at any rate, the reason i bring all of this up now is because here's a situation where they actually have two separate digitizations, and they did not even do a simple comparison of one against the other? that's stupid, to a degree that is embarrassing... and -- this is most telling of all -- not surprising. -bowerbird

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New Server vs. Kindle Third Generation?
by James Adcock 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

I have not been able to get PG to download books to my Kindle 3rd generation wifi-only machine since PG moved to the new server. I have confirmed that everything does still work on the 2nd generation machines, which includes the DX. I have also confirmed that my Kindle 3rd generation still works with all the other free websites such as feedbooks and freekindlebooks. www.gutenberg.org doesn't work at all on K3 -- ie home page doesn't display. m.gutenberg.org home page comes up but downloads don't work. "Magic Catalog" still works on K2s, but doesn't work on K3. Mimetype problem ? -- just a "shot in the dark" guess.

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2nd Circuit overturns Google/ASA agreement
by James Adcock 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

Decision of the 2nd Circuit drop-kicking the Google/ASA agreement that would have permitted Google to digitize and sell books still in copyright unless the author opts-out of the agreement. Court says this must be an affirmative opt-in agreement instead. IE authors have to give prior agreement before Google or anyone else can copy books still in copyright. Decision doesn't affect Google's ability -- like everyone else -- to copy books whose copyright has expired (usually due to old age) http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&id=115

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Kindle passwords
by Michael S. Hart 22 Mar '11

22 Mar '11

Is there any way to surf on a Kindle without setting up an Amazon account and making up a password. . .???

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API available?
by Toshiya TSURU 19 Mar '11

19 Mar '11

Hello. This is my first post. My name is Toshiya TSURU, A software developer in Tokyo. I'm looking for API of Project Gutenberg. Is API available at http://www.gutenberg.org/ ? -- Toshiya TSURU <turutosiya(a)gmail.com> http://twitter.com/turutosiya

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Duplicated books
by Dan Weber 17 Mar '11

17 Mar '11

Are #35335 and #35574 the same book? The title page of both is the same but the files don't match with my duplicate file utility. Dan Weber

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Service outage
by Marcello Perathoner 16 Mar '11

16 Mar '11

ibiblio said: > What: www.ibiblio.org and all hosted domains will be offline during an > infrastructure migration > > When: Tuesday, March 15, 9:00 am EST until whenever we finish (est. is > 12-24 hours) As we are moving to all new hardware (web servers, application server, database server, filer) it may take longer than 24 h to get everything up and running again. Of course the publicly visible services will get first attention. The posting and cataloguing services will come next. Then logging and statistics. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

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