- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: choke-points on the internet
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Dec '10

08 Dec '10

keith said: > I do understand the dynamics. then why did you ask? > Yet, how wikiLeaks and their > latest revelations are of concern > to PG is beyond me. then why did you say you understand the dynamics? > Please do not even reply. I do not really care. ok, you don't care. fine. i _do_ care. so i will reply. > Do you think I expect an answer! is that a question? > You do know what a rhetorical question is. is that a statement? -bowerbird

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Re: Amazon charging for PG books
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Dec '10

08 Dec '10

keith said: > I believe most do not get the point. no, it's you who does not get the point. seriously. > Works of Shakespeare are out of copyright. > If I produce a book containing his Works and sell it. > My book gains copyright! no, your book does _not_ gain copyright. at least not in the united states, which is where p.g. is located, so that's the set of laws which p.g. is obligated to follow, eh? > Meaning that one can use my book for > producing other books based on my content. i think you probably left out a "not" in that sentence. if your reprinting of shakespeare contained content that was _your_ work -- unique to _your_ edition -- then _that_ part of the book is under your copyright. for instance, you might have composed your own preface to the book, over which you'd own copyright. nobody could use that preface without your consent. but bill's work is still squarely in the public-domain, and can be used -- or sold! -- by anyone else at all. > Furthermore, being in the public domain and > having copyright and two different things. and you're completely wrong again on this, keith. if the period of copyright has elapsed on a work, it's public-domain; one is the obverse of the other. (a work can also be placed into the public-domain, in advance of elapsing its copyright period, but only by the official _owner_ of the copyright for that work.) (and we might also have the situation coming up soon where the court deciding the google book settlement decides to _shift_ copyright on _orphaned_works_ to the entity that's formed to administer the settlement, which would overlay another complication on all this, but that's not something we need to worry about here.) again, things are a little bit different in germany, and that is probably what is confusing you here... -bowerbird

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get password
by Paul Maas 08 Dec '10

08 Dec '10

password -- Paul Maas paulmaas(a)airpost.net -- http://www.fastmail.fm - The professional email service

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Re: amazon and the public domain
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Dec '10

08 Dec '10

linda said: > http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9P8KE congratulations! :+) > I posted a public domain book ($.99) on Sunday > (that I had transcribed), and which had been earlier > stolen by Amazon Digital ($2.99) and another party ($1.99). "stolen" is a loaded term that is wholly inappropriate. you know that, right? > Please read the note at the end of the Product Description. i think it's entirely appropriate that you should inform people that you were the person who did clean-up work on this book. i would think it would also be wholly appropriate if you added that other sellers have used your version to create their own, without having done much, if any, clean-up work themselves... that's the information customers need to make a good decision. but you need to get over the idea that _you_ own this e-book... the _public_ owns it. -bowerbird

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amazon and the public domain
by Linda Everhart 08 Dec '10

08 Dec '10

According to the post on Rosenthal's, he got that email last Friday. I've been working on learning the Kindle store ways, so I posted a public domain book ($.99) on Sunday (that I had transcribed), and which had been earlier stolen by Amazon Digital ($2.99) and another party ($1.99). On Monday, my version was published and Amazon's ($2.99) was taken down. It's still not available at this time (Tuesday) on the search engine, but you can view my first try at: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004F9P8KE Please read the note at the end of the Product Description. Linda Everhart codmolly(a)embarqmail.com

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Re: choke-points on the internet
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Dec '10

07 Dec '10

keith said: > First in what way does this topic concern PG? well, if you don't understand the underlying dynamic that pits capitalist greed against the public-domain, you will have a lot of company in the general public. > On another account, who do you think > plant a virus in the iranian nuclear power plant system! the u.s. and israel working in concert, of course. and an israeli recently killed by a bomb was said to be one of their experts who had worked on that virus... i'm under the impression that all of these governments know the secrets of almost all of the other governments. so i don't think wikileaks will be revealing on _that_ level, since they already know it all. i think they're worried about wikileaks because they don't want the citizens at the bottom of the totem poles to know. because they're afraid it's going to start a global revolution against the oligarchy. and i don't think it's the governmental revelations that will be the crucial linchpin, i think it will be the revelations on the _banking_systems_, and how they engineered the recent "crisis" that gave 'em a trillion-dollar "bailout" from taxpayers. -bowerbird

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amazon and the public domain
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Dec '10

07 Dec '10

i'm composing a post on how project gutenberg should approach an arrangement with amazon... but it appears that real life has just whizzed by. according to this post on morris rosenthal's site: > http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing/?p=626 amazon is not accepting public-domain e-books. after preparing and submitting a book with content in the public-domain, morris got this from amazon: > We’re implementing a new policy that addresses > the customer experience problem caused by multiple, > undifferentiated copies of public domain titles > in our Kindle catalog. > > Our vision is to have high-quality editions of every > public domain title in the world available on Kindle, > including a free edition of each, and to avoid the > confusion that is caused by having a large number of > undifferentiated (or barely differentiated) versions of each. > > To protect the customer experience we have decided > to stop accepting and selling duplicate, undifferentiated > versions of public domain titles where there is a free edition > already available for sale. As a result, we are removing > the following title(s) for sale on our web site: > > Charles Dickens Tale Of Two Cities > (The Works Of Charles Dickens) by Dickens, Charles, > Digital Item ID: 847429 interesting, eh? morris goes on with his own reaction: > I checked, and sure enough, Amazon published > their own free copy of the book the day before, > on December 1st 2010. > ... > I decided to check on how many classics they’ve > already published in their new push to protect > the customer experience, Here’s the complete list: > A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens > > I thought that was pretty funny too. remember when i asked whether anyone here would want project gutenberg to veto other public-domain republishers, if it were to magically be given that veto? and remember how i said consider the answer carefully? that's because the situation could also come up where project gutenberg would be the _victim_ of such a veto. and that scenario might well be coming to pass. amazon can create their own "blessed" copy of _any_ public-domain book, and then refuse to carry others. because, as far as amazon is concerned, p.g is just another one of the republishers who are creating a confusing situation, a "customer experience problem." now how does it feel? now you want to get up on a high horse and complain about how the public-domain belongs to everyone, eh? morris goes on: > Update: A Tale Of Two Cities is a new Oprah pick, > and her people must notify the trade beforehand > to prepare for demand. So my guess is that Amazon’s > newfound sensitivity will be one-and-done. just in case you thought that the new amazon policy was brought about by the recent brouhaha with p.g., don't get a big head. there are bigger fish in the sea. much bigger fish. including a great whale called oprah. -bowerbird

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choke-points on the internet
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Dec '10

07 Dec '10

i have always said that the "rich boys" who run the world would cut off the internet if it really started to hurt them. but i didn't think they'd have the cajones to do it directly. i thought they'd blame it on "terrorist hackers" instead, and pretend that they were trying to "solve the problem", and always just "'succeeding" enough so _they_ had access, but the public didn't, or got it only in very sporadic bursts. but current events prove they won't bother with a charade. they're now cutting any cord they can that leads to wikileaks. oh sure, at first they did it with cowardly denial-of-service attacks that they tried to lay off on anonymous individuals. but anyone with even half a brain knew that was not true... it didn't take long, though, for the government to come out and start to take direct action that was loud and aggressive. you probably are just as familiar with those actions as i am, so i won't bother to recount them, except for one which you might not have heard about: raytheon has told its employees that they cannot read wikileaks even on their own machines in their own homes; it'd jeopardize their security clearances. welcome to your future, people... your boss owns your ass... so if you think you're gonna use the internet to take down the repressive government you elected to run your country, or the businessmen who really do, might wanna think again. -bowerbird

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google e-bookstore is open for business
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Dec '10

06 Dec '10

google opened their e-bookstore today... since it has been delayed for quite a long time -- i believe it was promised for last christmas -- you could have expected that they'd get it right... and in a number of ways, they did. but there are still some embarrassing glitches that reveal themselves with very little prodding. for example, 2 of the 4 books on the top shelf at the site are lacking proper paragraph indents. that's the kind of thing you should see right away, and fix immediately, certainly before release-day. the one search i tried took me to the wrong page. the flowing-text display gives a nice 2-up display, so you see facing-pages. but scanned-page mode only shows one page at a time, so that's inefficient. in an interesting twist, the text-reflow display mode shows you the pagenumbers from the original book, which means google is keeping track of that variable. (but they don't show you where the pagebreaks are.) the text-resize feature gives some very odd results. in addition to resizing the text, it changes the rule. (the "rule" is the body-text width between margins.) when text-size is increased, the rule is increased too. in and of itself, that's ok, perhaps even to be praised. except that the rule is increased _too_much_, so that not only are the words on the line bigger, but there are _more_ words than there were at the smaller size. this is very bad, both from a typographic perspective, and from a user-expectation perspective. we expect -- based on experience with other text software -- that bigger text-size means _fewer_ words per line... my research has also shown that it's good if you can reproduce the linebreaks and pagebreaks of the scan, but google hasn't given itself the capability to do that. it'd be nice if at least _one_ of the text-resize options gave the end-user the same linebreaks as the p-book, so that we could easily compare the two render-modes. as it is, it's difficult to check if google's o.c.r. is good... (even more so because they don't give you a combined display-mode, where the text is shown next to the scan.) *** there are some other things which are not "problems", but which aren't as full-featured as we'd like 'em to be. google only lets users choose between a miserly 4 fonts. there are only 3 leading choices; 2 are fairly unusable. the text-size choices won't help the visually challenged. *** google claims to have 3 million e-books available now. but i'd bet you they won't give anyone a complete list... oh, and they'll keep your books in the cloud for you... which means they can cut you off any time they want. in sum, at least the thing is out and we can bang on it; but it certainly could've made a more impressive debut. *** ironically, in light of one of the recent threads here, 1 of the 4 books on that top shelf was a republishing of dickens, by penguin, with "enhanced-book" extras. $7.99. those "enhancements" better be damn good... -bowerbird

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Re: choke-points on the internet
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Dec '10

06 Dec '10

michael said: > You didn't know they would??? well, as i just said, i always knew they'd do it, eventually, once their interests started to get impacted badly enough. but i thought it would take something rather _serious_... of course, i don't know how serious wikileaks will eventually become. what has been released so far is embarrassing, yes, and somewhat revealing, but very little of it has been "shocking". but only about 1,000 of the 250,000 cables have been put out. and the power-holders do know what's in the other 249,000... so the fact that they're trying to do a preemptive strike _now_ has to be a telling sign that there is still a lot of dirt to come, and that some of it will undoubtedly be extremely damning... -bowerbird p.s. by the way, michael, i sent you a present last friday... you should get it this week, they guessed thursday or friday. i sent it u.p.s. if you want the tracking number, i can send it. it's a present for december 10th, which i remember is a day that is special for you... just a little something from a fan...

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