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Re: it's that time of year again
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

joey said: > Who defines the requirements to meet this particular bet? rothman is the one who's been making all the promises, so you'll have to get him to specify the exact conditions. which, of course, he won't do, because he specializes in vague. which, of course, is what he must do since he is selling snake-oil. (roll-up screens! color e-ink! more!) but if we must be pedantic for you, joey, i'll specify that it has to be new (no refurbs) at a widely-available price. of course, if we want to interpret rothman more liberally, he implies these cheap e-reader-machines would be sold "like calculators", in blister-packs at the local drug-store. (his whole notion was based on price-cuts via large scale.) as you will see, if you go back and read the original post, i predicted that such a machine _would_ become available, at that price, around the time that _lunch_ costs that much. but rothman would have had people believing that it was "right around the corner", some 5-10 years ago. wrong! -bowerbird

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Re: it's that time of year again]
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 Nov '09

25 Nov '09

david said: > Exactly when will these good things happen? good question. some things are pretty obvious, the only question is about their exact _timing_... > As I've said before, who's to say for sure precisely when? david, for years and years and years, you've been saying -- directly and indirectly -- that these developments are "right around the corner..." and you breathlessly promote every press release on the next "upcoming thing" as if it were _real_, when it's perfectly clear it's hype and marketing. you're a sucker, plain and simple, one born every minute. > But we should be looking ahead to the time when > e-book technology is going to get much better. yep. there's always jam tomorrow, but never jam today. every day, day after day, there's always jam tomorrow... -bowerbird

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Re: Real Competition to PG
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Nov '09

19 Nov '09

just as a reminder, in regard to the word "competition" in the subject-header of this thread, michael hart's emphasis on "unlimited distribution" means that _any_ use of the p.g. e-texts is to be considered as a "win", and thus the term "competition" would be out of place. good to remind ourselves of that every once in a while. -bowerbird

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Re: the creator of the cyberspace library
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 18 Nov '09

18 Nov '09

michael said: > It all depends on whether you think Amazon has us working for them, > or whether you think Project Gutenberg has Amazon working for us... and this is why you are the most brilliant man in e-books, michael, the person who invented them, the creator of the cyberspace library. -bowerbird

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Re: is this the beginning of the end?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 Nov '09

15 Nov '09

don said: > It's pretty hollow. not surprising. even the article put it all in the future tense. and h.p. talked about "potential", while amazon merely confirmed. > > This book has not yet been processed, > > but if you preorder we’ll process it faster > > and notify you when it’s ready. > Right. it makes perfect sense to me. how else would you prioritize which books should be done first? as for skepticism on the time-frame, how much time do you think it'll take 'em to prep a book? i would guess that it's a matter of mere minutes. (seconds for the scripts to run, and then a minute or two for a human to execute the quality-control.) *** jim said: > bookprep thanks for running that down, jim. good info. *** gardner said: > What's your point? "what's my point?" well, it's pretty obvious, i would think, isn't it? if h.p. is correcting the o.c.r., that's a big deal. but if they're just printing the scansets, it's not. so there is an informational asymmetry at work. > If there are pages missing or illegible sections, > then it might be better to skip that volume, > versus go ahead selling it to folks who are > likely to complain or return it. ok, i see what you meant when you said "proofing"; i consider checks like that to be "quality control"... those problems were common in the first few years of the google scanning, but are fairly rare nowadays. > But if you're lazy, you'd skip that step and let the > customer inform you if a given volume is unusable. well, we differ on terminology again, because i wouldn't call that "lazy", as it's more like a business decision, but i'd think a quick screening for those types of problems would be cost-effective, as opposed to making good on any complaints that your customers would have later on. shipping is gonna be one of your biggest expenses, and shipping a book twice, to make-good, will be expensive... (not to mention a costly infrastructure to field complaints.) > If you get a lot of complaints about a specific volume, > you can then go and figure out what exactly is wrong > maybe find a fill-in source or what have you. the "fill-in" source is likely right there in the umichigan stacks. > But why take on that work up front? again, google and michigan have each separately worked on correcting these problems, so i'd think very few remain. and a quick check by h.p. can eliminate any glitches that do. i'd guess most of google scanning nowadays is clean-up work. > People will pay the same whether you invest up front or not. but people will only pay once for a book. so if h.p. has to print and ship _two_ books to make that customer happy, they've lost money on that sale. that's why they'd "invest", up-front, to ensure they won't have to face that prospect. at least that's _my_ take on your particular point here... i guess real life will show us whether you're right or i am. -bowerbird

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Re: is this the beginning of the end?
by Christa & Jay Toser 13 Nov '09

13 Nov '09

Just to expand on one comment from Mr. Bowerbird: paul said: > Could it be that a lot of PG's books are rarely read, > and the traffic seen for these books is due to people > downloading the whole collection simply to have it? bowerbird said: could be. but i doubt there are many such people. One reason someone might download the whole collection is, they simply wish to improve their English. As anyone from a foreign country will tell you, English (especially American English) is a bizarre language with rules for grammar that have apparently random exceptions for each rule. Reading good literature in English, ANY good literature, is one way to get a handle on the language. "English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." -- Unknown Another reason someone might download the whole collection is, they are young. High school or first year college, with an undeclared major. They don't know what their final career will be. So having the whole collection means a vast library at their fingertips -- useful no matter what their future research needs. Oh heck, it doesn't have to be that they are young. I mean, if you had unlimited funds, wouldn't you wish to add on to your house, a library containing 20,000 books? That is Project Gutenberg. Would you read all 20,000 books? No. Would you read 1,000 of them? Probably. (I read a paperback book every three nights. I've been reading such since I was ten. I'm now fifty three. At a guess, that's 4,000 books.) But, it's just a matter of WHICH of those books you would read. So a Project Gutenberg client has a choice to make: Pick and choose book titles while online (and the clock is ticking); or download the whole shebang and then pick and choose at your leisure -- off line. That, I think, is where a decent percentage of the "whole library" downloads goes. "The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all." -- Voltaire Hope this helps, Jay Toser

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Re: Real Competition to PG
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 13 Nov '09

13 Nov '09

um, well yes, amazon and the kindle are using p.g. e-texts. so is everybody else. and no, nobody goes back to pick up the "updated" versions. and given the difficulty of doing that, it's not surprising at all. -bowerbird

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a question about the format about plain text ebooks
by Anya Kazantseva 02 Nov '09

02 Nov '09

Hi everybody, I am doing some text analysis on a large subset of Project Gutenberg etexts in us-ascii plain text format. I need to extract only the actual etext body from each etext file; in other words, I need to be able to cut off any legal fine print, notices to potential volunteers and information about donations. I looked randomly at several files and it looks like *** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK*** and “END OF PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK” delimit the parts I need. My question is: can I count on these markers appearing in each and every text? Or are there other delimiters and/or tags? Thanks to anyone who can help. Regards, Anna

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Re: is this the beginning of the end?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 26 Oct '09

26 Oct '09

paul said: > Could it be that a lot of PG's books are rarely read, > and the traffic seen for these books is due to people > downloading the whole collection simply to have it? could be. but i doubt there are many such people. and is there any particular reason why you'd want to doubt that there is actually an audience for a book? if the only people who download unpopular books are the ones who are downloading all books, then you should have a number of unpopular books that have the exact same download-count all the time... so if you need to test your hypothesis, that's a way. p.g. books are different from google books, in that someone has spent a good deal of time on each one, meaning that there has to be some intrinsic interest. -bowerbird

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Re: is this the beginning of the end?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Oct '09

23 Oct '09

gardner said: > I think we differ in our assumptions about the economics. i agree. wholeheartedly. > My thinking is that having a huge back-catalogue of titles > is mostly a marketing gimmick. um, i'm not sure how that "gimmick" is supposed to work. having more titles in your catalog isn't going to make me any more (or less) likely to order a specific book from you. if i want a particular book, i'll order it. if i don't, i won't. if i don't want it, i'm not sure why your having a million -- or two million, or twenty million -- other titles would make me decide to change my mind and suddenly want it. > I anticipate that perhaps 1% of the available titles > would ever get ordered by anyone. i anticipate that 50% of the titles will be ordered in any year. but the vast majority of those might only be ordered _once_. and i'd assume that, over the course of 5 years, every title will end up being ordered -- a couple of times, at the very least... > That means that 99% would not have to have any investment > put into them at all in order to fill a slot in the back-catalogue. i agree, that -- until a specific book is ordered -- it won't be fixed. or maybe i don't. it would be nice to think that umichigan itself is thumbing through these scansets to identify any problem children. (and we could certainly hope that students will be using the scans, and bringing glitches to the attention of people who can fix them.) > In my vision, time spent on doing *anything* non-mechanical > to a book is, on average, 99% wasted. i guess it depends on what you would consider "non-mechanical". most of the scripts to handle the scans -- deskewing, centering, noise-removal -- probably don't need any human attention at all. but every single one of these scansets has garbage scans in them, such as excess blank-pages in the beginning and color-correction scans at the end, not to mention library-style check-in pages, etc. so it will absolutely be necessary to have a human thumb through all of the pages, to eliminate these unnecessary pages and also to ensure that odd-numbered pages always occur on the recto and even-numbered pages always occur on the verso, and that there are no missing pages or page-spreads, and no duplicated pages. this quality-control pass only needs to be done _once_ on a book, but it would be stupid to the point of ridiculous to go without it... (and as it's only a minute or two of work, it's economically feasible.) there might be some problems which would evade quality-control, such as a page with a few characters cut off at the end of each line, but for the most part, i'd think a simple pass would catch most stuff. if you look at any particular scanset, you should be able to see immediately why such a quality-control pass would be necessary. > Better to let the market help identify the 1% of valuable titles > and concentrate your scarce fixup attentions on those. any book for which an order has been received is "a valuable title". > Assuming that even without manual review 99% of your titles > are actually fine as far as scan quality and completeness goes none -- 0% -- of the scansets are "actually fine" right out of the box. > you are actually quite likely to get away with a 1 part in 10,000 > return rate. And customers might not actually *read* the > whole book either. If 50% wind up on shelves unread, or > have problems that are annoying, but that don't result in returns, > the return rate drops to 1 in 20,000. i don't think amazon thinks of quality-control issues the way you do. > And if, in the end, they have to ship two copies to a customer, > they only have to do *that* once. After a return they can go > and fix up that exact book, and never have to double-ship > that one again. i think you underestimate their commitment to a quality product... -bowerbird

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