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Gutenberg News?
by Ross Olson 21 May '25

21 May '25

While cruising around I came across a few interesting sites: https://www.gutenbergnews.org/ https://projectgutenbergproject.blogspot.com/ Is there any interest in seeing these sites revived? Or having some sort of news feed that can be an RSS source?

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Amazon is selling, not giving away, PG titles
by James Simmons 01 Aug '23

01 Aug '23

If you've looked at Kindle books on Amazon you've no doubt seen PG titles that some reprobate has repackaged and is selling as ebooks. It seems that Amazon is doing that itself now. See this page where titles I donated are being sold by Amazon.com Services LLC <https://www.amazon.com/Lessons-Wireless-Telegraphy-Alfred-Powell-ebook/dp/B…>. Not given away with the images missing like they used to do, but sold. https://www.amazon.com/s?i=digital-text&rh=p_27%3AAlfred+Powell+Morgan&s=re… I tried to leave comments explaining the situation to prospective customers and those comments never showed up. I found out about this because I have taken many of my PG donations and created KDP printed books from them using LaTeX for typesetting and GIMP for preparing cover images. These printed books ended up looking quite nice and I don't think anyone who bought one ever complained about it. I told them in the description what it was and even included the URL of the PG title and explained that they could download the ebook version for free. About a month ago Amazon told me that printing costs for print on demand books were going up and I needed to re-price my books to get any royalty for them at all. I spent several hours doing just that, and when I was finished Amazon blocked two of my titles from being sold because Amazon does not allow you to use KDP to publish titles that can be downloaded for free. These two titles were part of a twelve volume set of The Mahabharata, so not selling these two and leaving the rest of my public domain print on demand titles alone was not a good option. I complained. For my trouble I got my whole account locked and had to promise to remove all my public domain titles from sale to get it back. I have books I wrote myself on KDP so I needed that account. I followed their rules and unpublished a lot of books that had taken me MANY hours to prepare. This was never anything other than a hobby that in a good year brought in less than 200 dollars. Having said that, these were nice looking books and I was proud to have them in people's homes. I published Hindu scriptures and epics, pioneering aviation books, and radio and electronic books by Alfred Powell Morgan, an author who loomed large in my childhood. Apparently in other people's childhoods too, because they sold better than any of the others. I know Amazon is not doing anything illegal, but I needed to vent about this. Thank you for your time. James Simmons

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Fwd: HTML lang attribute for PG boilerplate.
by Rick Tonsing 11 Jan '22

11 Jan '22

Have we been following the HTML lang attribute for PG boilerplate <https://www.pgdp.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=75903> thread at DP? I enclosed the boilerplate in a <div lang='en'> on the few foreign-language books I've repaired. As the thread pointed out it should not hurt to mark all of the PG HTML boilerplates as lang='en'. Cheers, Rick

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My notes on putting public domain books back into print using RST and LaTeX
by James Simmons 18 Nov '21

18 Nov '21

Since Project Gutenberg stopped accepting RST as a format for submissions I've used it to donate three PG books and have also put all three back in print using Amazon's print on demand service. I had actually done that with quite a few books when RST was still accepted. I thought it would be a good idea to write up some notes on what I learned doing this, and I had a Goodreads blog that wasn't being used for anything, so I wrote them up and published them there: https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/21812653-put-old-books-back-in-… It is surprisingly simple to convert PG texts to nicely formatted print on demand book interiors. I've even managed to sell a few of them, mostly radio books by Alfred Powell Morgan. Everything I've done for PG since the pandemic began is also available as print on demand. I hope that some of you will find these blog posts of interest. James Simmons

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Re: [gutvol-d] Apostrophe versus turned comma
by Jacqueline Jeremy 28 Sep '21

28 Sep '21

I WWed that book and left the apostrophe as per the files submitted. I noticed the turned comma had not been used, but I'm not aware that its use is compulsory if someone prefers to use an apostrophe for the omission of the "c". Jacqueline On Tuesday, 28 September 2021, 04:30:29 am ACST, gutvol-d-request(a)lists.pglaf.org <gutvol-d-request(a)lists.pglaf.org> wrote: Send gutvol-d mailing list submissions to gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit https://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d or, via email, send a message with subject or body 'help' to gutvol-d-request(a)lists.pglaf.org You can reach the person managing the list at gutvol-d-owner(a)lists.pglaf.org When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific than "Re: Contents of gutvol-d digest..." Today's Topics: 1. Apostrophe versus turned comma - Mc, Mac, etc. (Paul Flo Williams) 2. Re: Apostrophe versus turned comma - Mc, Mac, etc. (jeroen(a)bohol.ph) Seeing the latest posting of "The Invasion of India", apparently by a "J. W. M'Crindle" (#66388), I wonder why his name is rendered with an apostrophe, instead of either the turned comma (open single quote) or a simple "c". His name was John Watson McCrindle (1825-1913), and the Internet Archive version of the book clearly shows that the turned comma is used for his name, the normal printer's approximation of the superscript "c". Using the apostrophe like this means that "The Invasion of India" isn't found when searching for McCrindle, even though his other book on PG, "The Commerce of the Navigation of the Erythræan Sea" is correctly attributed. There's a very good essay by Michael Collins about this: http://greenbag.org/v12n3/v12n3_collins.pdf Regards, Paul I've seen this usage a few times in older books. If the symbol is encoded as an apostrophe, this probably is a simple oversight, or because it was seen as a straight apostrophe and "curlified" automatically. Encoding it correctly (with the turned comma aka open single quote, or the more obscure modifier letter turned comma) would not resolve your issue with finding/not finding the author name, which I think should be done by amending the metadata with variant spellings and if applicable pseudonyms of authors. I normally try to provide add such information in my submissions. Jeroen. Quoting Paul Flo Williams <paul(a)frixxon.co.uk>: > Seeing the latest posting of "The Invasion of India", apparently by a > "J. W. M'Crindle" (#66388), I wonder why his name is rendered with an > apostrophe, instead of either the turned comma (open single quote) or a > simple "c". His name was John Watson McCrindle (1825-1913), and the > Internet Archive version of the book clearly shows that the turned > comma is used for his name, the normal printer's approximation of the > superscript "c". > > Using the apostrophe like this means that "The Invasion of India" isn't > found when searching for McCrindle, even though his other book on PG, > "The Commerce of the Navigation of the Erythræan Sea" is correctly > attributed. > > There's a very good essay by Michael Collins about this: > http://greenbag.org/v12n3/v12n3_collins.pdf > > Regards, > Paul > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > https://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > Unsubscribe: https://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/options/gutvol-d _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org https://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d

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Apostrophe versus turned comma - Mc, Mac, etc.
by Paul Flo Williams 27 Sep '21

27 Sep '21

Seeing the latest posting of "The Invasion of India", apparently by a "J. W. M'Crindle" (#66388), I wonder why his name is rendered with an apostrophe, instead of either the turned comma (open single quote) or a simple "c". His name was John Watson McCrindle (1825-1913), and the Internet Archive version of the book clearly shows that the turned comma is used for his name, the normal printer's approximation of the superscript "c". Using the apostrophe like this means that "The Invasion of India" isn't found when searching for McCrindle, even though his other book on PG, "The Commerce of the Navigation of the Erythræan Sea" is correctly attributed. There's a very good essay by Michael Collins about this: http://greenbag.org/v12n3/v12n3_collins.pdf Regards, Paul

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Ebookmaker has stopped working, error messages
by James Simmons 29 Aug '21

29 Aug '21

I used Ebookmaker as recently as yesterday with no problems, but today I'm getting no epub generated and output.txt shows the following: unzipping /htdocs/ebookmaker/cache/20210827154639/Vishnupuranam.zip Input file: Vishnupuranam.html EbookMaker 0.11.4 WARNING:root:Gutenberg Database is inactive because psycopg2 not installed Traceback (most recent call last): File "/var/www/.local/share/virtualenvs/ebookmaker-A6HCkzTJ/bin/ebookmaker", line 18, in <module> EbookMaker.main () File "/var/www/.local/share/virtualenvs/ebookmaker-A6HCkzTJ/lib/python3.6/site-packages/ebookmaker/EbookMaker.py", line 534, in main job.url = os.path.join(absoutputdir, output_files['epub.images']) File "/var/www/.local/share/virtualenvs/ebookmaker-A6HCkzTJ/lib/python3.6/posixpath.py", line 94, in join genericpath._check_arg_types('join', a, *p) File "/var/www/.local/share/virtualenvs/ebookmaker-A6HCkzTJ/lib/python3.6/genericpath.py", line 149, in _check_arg_types (funcname, s.__class__.__name__)) from None TypeError: join() argument must be str or bytes, not 'NoneType' I tried it a couple of times to be certain. Other than correcting some spelling errors, my input today is no different from yesterday. James Simmons

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Questions on metadata in HTML files
by James Simmons 28 Aug '21

28 Aug '21

A few weeks ago I got an email saying I was one of the last two PG contributors using RST and that RST would no longer be accepted by PG. It was suggested that if I wanted to use RST I could convert it to HTML using pandoc. I have been experimenting with pandoc and rst2html and have gotten good results with both, so I have a pretty good procedure going where I can make RST files and generate usable HTML files from them. I think rst2html gives better results than pandoc, but both work OK and I don't miss the PG extensions to RST much if at all. HOWEVER, I am not entirely clear on how to submit my HTML docs now. The ebookmaker page suggests that I can include metadata in my HTML files and ebookmaker will pick it up. That does not seem to be happening. My HTML metadata looks like this: <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /><meta name="generator" content="Docutils 0.16: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/" /><title>A PROSE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF VISHNUPURĀNAM</title><meta content="A Prose English Translation of Vishnupurānam" name="pg.title" /><meta content="99999" name="pg.id" /><meta content="Public Domain" name="pg.rights" /><meta content="James Simmons" name="pg.producer" /><meta content="This file was produced from page images at Internet Archive." name="pg.credits" /><meta content="Manmatha Nath Dutt, M. A., M.R.A.S." name="dc.creator" /><meta content="A Prose English Translation of Vishnupurānam" name="dc.title" /><meta content="en" name="dc.language" /><meta content="1896" name="dc.created" /><meta content="yyyy-mm-dd" name="pg.released" /><meta content="images/cover.jpg" name="coverpage" /> This is pretty much what I used with RST, but with names all lower case. I've tried both ways and ebookmaker ignores them both. So how do I put metadata in HTML so ebookmaker can find it and use it? James Simmons

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Newbie questions on using ReST
by Joseph Koshy 19 Jul '21

19 Jul '21

Greetings, Some newbie questions: Q1: Which tool should I use to check my work, when transcribing a book to ReST? The Project Gutenberg ReST Manual [1] mentions 'epubmaker', but I wasn't able to get this to work on a recent Ubuntu GNU/Linux machine with Python 3. Would 'ebookmaker' [2] be a suitable replacement? [1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/181 (ReST Manual) [2]: https://github.com/gutenbergtools/ebookmaker (ebookmaker) Q2: Do we have examples of ReST-sourced books containing complex tables? I am looking for ways to: - to embed tabular material inside block-quoted text and footnotes, - to render tabular material without the horizontal lines between rows, - to format a table caption using small caps, - to right-justify specific sub-columns inside a left-justified column group. Thanks, Joseph Koshy

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Help needed in keeping the modified dates in FileZilla for PG-errata
by Rick Tonsing 18 Feb '21

18 Feb '21

I've been told that some PG-errata users are able to retain the modified date in FileZilla in Windows OS. How does someone do that? I've noticed that the created and accessed dates are blank on the PG book files I've looked at so far. For all of the files downloaded with FileZilla, Windows sets all three dates to the now date and time. Cheers, Rick

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