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

Copyrigh
by Ricardo F Diogo 27 Jan '12

27 Jan '12

Hi, Can anyone please tell me if PG has ever faced any trouble with any authors or publishers for copyright reasons? Did we ever had to remove any books from our catalog? Were there any copyright related conflicts? Are they documented somewhere? (A postgraduation student needs this info for a college paper). Thanks, Ricardo F. Diogo

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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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Re: precisely why i called the bluff
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 Aug '11

31 Aug '11

jim adcock said: > Not exactly sure what would be pulled by who where. well, no, jim, you're "not exactly sure", because you do not have the type of vision or clout michael has, unfortunately. which is not a slam, since few people do. certainly none of the "business as usual" people who are running the show now. they're all just a bunch of sheep. their redeeming quality is that most have good intentions. they're not "bad" people; they just like their familiar ways. it's not even clear that michael still has his old chops, but i'm _certainly_ not going to count him out just quite yet... especially as i dearly hope he'll shake their complacency. > But Google is making progress towards "reasonable" > 100% human-free OCR translation of the body text > of books, not including "the hard parts" such as > TOC, Index, etc. and then only on relatively recent pubs > such as circa 1900s. google will eventually have error-free text throughout. which is what i've said all along. it is fairly easy to see. and the 50,000-item p.g. library will merely be "quaint," a testament to an outdated workflow that wouldn't scale. > One could imagine a system that accepted such > "good enough" OCRs and put them online immediately, > and which allowed real-world readers to propose fixes > as they read the book. You could still require PG volunteers > to review the proposed fixes before accepting them. why would you "imagine" such a system, when you could find it described perfectly, with proof-of-concept demos, in the posts on this very listserve going back many years? i mean, seriously. a lack of imagination is _one_ thing... but a willful ignorance of the past is quite another thing. yet even this scenario is mired in the dated viewpoint that correction of o.c.r. is the main problem that needs solving. d.p. has tons of almost-fully-corrected books languishing... -bowerbird

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precisely why i called the bluff
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 Aug '11

31 Aug '11

benjamin said: > I'm afraid they weren't intending to say, bowerbird... which is precisely why i called their bluff, benjamin... because "no fruitful conversation" is their _secret_code_, which translates best as "sour grapes" after "eating crow". but the thing about a secret code is you can't say it out loud. *** jim adcock said: > Good luck on all the good books you make and submit BB > -- because fundamentally that's what it's all about. this idea that "what it's all about" is to become a cog in the inefficient machine that has already been built is a big part of the problem which is why d.p. has now become stagnant, producing what has become its customary 2500 books/year. their traditional workflow will never be able to scale higher, which is exactly what many years ago i said would happen... the good thing about good old whatshisname, you know, the guy who _started_ this project, oh yeah, michael hart, is that he always had his eye on the horizon, he was always looking to ratchet things up; whenever he reached a height (and sometimes even before), he was immediately ready to look to the next horizon, and the next mountain, preparing to proclaim a new goal, giving everyone the next challenge. now the people in charge at p.g. and d.p. want you to march in lockstep with what they did yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and the year before that... oy vey... i sincerely hope michael pulls another rabbit out of his hat... -bowerbird

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the year of the e-book
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 Aug '11

30 Aug '11

it's the year of the e-book, and the 40th anniversary of project gutenberg, and gutvol-d is a ghost-town... -bowerbird

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Re: year of the e-book
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Aug '11

28 Aug '11

bastien said: > Ask them why! why? -bowerbird

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happy birthday project gutenberg!
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Aug '11

19 Aug '11

michael said: > Considering the 40th Anniversary of eBooks happy birthday, project gutenberg! > 40 years ago...one title available at Project Gutenberg. perhaps even more amazing: after its first 20 years, project gutenberg only had 100 e-texts in its library -- still more "proof of concept" than anything else... but it took only 12 more years to expand to 10,000, and gain the heft to merit the appellation "library", with this growth fueled by _individual_digitizers_... all this got the attention necessary for larger efforts, such as internet archive and google, and thus we saw the possibility for electronic-books to finally emerge, after a decades-long period of quite painful gestation. and thus, in 2011, we have the "coming of age" time for e-books, when amazon reports that it sells more e-books than p-books, while self-published authors -- always insulted previously with the "vanity" slur -- discovered (quite by accident) that a direct connection to their audience enabled them to make _big_ money, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even millions... just as shocking, a wide range of e-book hardware is available in all the digital-gadget big-box stores, and even being touted in slick commercials on television. my word, even barnes&noble is in the e-reader game! so there is definitely cause for celebration! :+) at the same time, however, the news is not all good... and the ugly part of the equation can be summed up in one word: greed. unsurprisingly, leading this side are the corporations, this time in the form of the boys at the publishing houses, who are extremely reluctant to give up their gravy train, so are draggin' their feet... you know all the tactics... copyright legislation, d.r.m., an "open standard" called ".epub" that is a piece of shit, and every fear/uncertainty/doubt issue they can muster. but, hey, we _expected_ those selfish kids to be greedy; after all, it's the object of the capitalist game they play. what really hurt is that they were joined by a group of _authors_, who couldn't see the vast potential in being free of their corporate masters, and thus joined them in suing the google scanning project... and then what _really_ brought the house crumbling down was when google decided to turn evil, and buy out of the lawsuit by throwing some chump change to their "opposition" from extraction via onerous extortion of you and me... google deduced it could get the public and libraries to pay for access to google e-books... so essentially the "global library" we envisioned has been morphed into a "global bookstore", a monopoly with too-high prices. and just today, google announced "iriver story", some e-book tablet "integrated" with its e-book platform... "through which you can buy and read google e-books over wi-fi". thus the bait-and-switch is fait accompli. will future generations even know what a "library" is? or will they have access only to the books they pay for? what about the rest of the world, much of which cannot begin to afford the ridiculous rates google will charge? just how hard will the greedy capitalists fight this fight? i don't know the answers to these questions, but i can say that, at my age, i'm less optimistic than i once was. it is entirely possible that we won the battle for e-books, but lost the war for a global cyberlibrary accessible to all. so again, happy birthday, project gutenberg! but now starts the hard part... -bowerbird

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88 Translations in one PG file???
by Michael S. Hart 01 Aug '11

01 Aug '11

I seem to have lost my memory on this one. Can anyone point me to the right file? If I have the old style URL with /etext##/filename.txt is that supposed to point me to the new file location? Thanks!!! Michael

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