February 2017 - gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

[KIWIX][GUTENBERG] 50.000 public domain books available to everybody, everywhere, offline
by Emmanuel Engelhart 17 May '17

17 May '17

Hi, The Kiwix team is happy to release the whole Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) library in a ZIM format: http://download.kiwix.org/zim/gutenberg/gutenberg_mul_all_2014-11.zim.torre…. We also provide a few language specific versions here http://download.kiwix.org/zim/gutenberg. This file is dedicated to an offline usage (no connection to Internet) and it readable with Kiwix (http://www.kiwix.org) This allows anybody with a computer or a smartphone to own his own copy of this 50.000 books big library. You can also make it available for read to other people on your network, they only need a web browser. In this ZIM file, you will find all the books available in HTML (directly readable), but also in EPUB (and time to time in PDF). We have created a custom user interface which is really simple to use: in a few clicks you can find your book, read it or download it. What is also unique is that Kiwix proposes a fulltext search engine over all books content. You can see by yourself using this demonstration web site: http://library.kiwix.org/gutenberg_mul_all_2014-11/ Most of the work was done during a week long hackathon in Lyon, France by four Kiwix volunteer developers. This hackathon was funded by the Fondation Orange with the administrative help of Framasoft and Wikimedia CH. The Fondation Orange is the first beneficiary of this work and use it already for its own deployments in Africa. The solution to build this ZIM file is 100% free software and is available here https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg. This solution allows to release easily new up2date versions. This is not a "one shot" project and we will release periodically new version of this offline version of the Project Gutenberg. We also plan to use this code base to aggregate other online PD/free books libraries. Wikisource is one of the first we would love to add, this might be done pretty easily as soon as an OPDS feed is available. We hope to see this work deployed by other third part organisation which are on place where Internet is not available, expensive or censored. We also need more developer (mostly Python) workforce for the next steps, a hackathon with this purpose will hopefully be organised in 2015 (sponsor needed). Last but not least: users, please report any problem here: https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg/issues Regards Emmanuel -- Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more * Web: http://www.kiwix.org * Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline * more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication

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some gizmo that kids carry around in their back pocket
by bowerbird 24 Feb '17

24 Feb '17

Michael Hart Builds A Digital Athenaeum by Mark Frauenfelder wired magazine -- November 1998 Michael Hart says he really doesn't have time to talk today, or any day before 2000, for that matter: "I'm doing two books right now. I'm really busy." "Doing" doesn't mean "writing," however: Hart is formatting the scanned text of William Osler's The Evolution of Modern Medicine and The Last Days of Pompeii, by Charles Bulwer Lytton, to add to Project Gutenberg's existing library of 1,600 volumes. Every week, Hart's working overtime to meet his quota of 36 books per month and 2,000 by Y2K. The result will be something of a digital Library of Alexandria, with Hart its Demetrius. Since 1971, when he was given extensive time on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois's Materials Research Lab, Hart (with volunteer help) has been scanning the pages of copyright-expired books and uploading them for free distribution. Why? So people can burn up toner cartridges printing them? "No. Nobody's going to print these books out," says Hart. "Twenty or 30 years from now, there's going to be some gizmo that kids carry around in their back pocket that has everything in it -- including our books, if they want." Actually, some of these gizmos already exist. So it's really no wonder Hart feels pressed for time.

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error message on PG pages
by traverso＠dp.dm.unipi.it 22 Feb '17

22 Feb '17

I have a computer with an old firefox (20.0) and I cannot connect with it to PG, I receive an error page: ------------------------------------------------- Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to www.gutenberg.org. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s). (Error code: ssl_error_no_cypher_overlap) The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified. Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem. Alternatively, use the command found in the help menu to report this broken site. ------------------------------------------------- Not a problem for me (I use another browser) but might be a problem for other users. I don't have the same problem on other https sites. Carlo

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