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re: 19 million
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jul '06

27 Jul '06

greg said: > The download total as of right now is just over 19 million. 19 million downloads out of that measly p.r.? i'm impressed! i wouldn't have been surprised if nobody even heard about it. these days, if you don't have a multi-million-dollar ad budget, the big boys will usually drown you out with all their big noise. but i guess that word "free" still hasn't lost its magic touch, eh? people are sheep. so good job on the hype, michael! but now get back to work. :+) -bowerbird p.s. i think to become a discussion topic on one certain listserve and another certain blog, you have to be promoting some vapor, and make grandiose promises that e-books will soon cure cancer. reality -- especially .pdf reality -- is too humdrum for some people.

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World eBook Fair: 12 million downloads. Anyone notice?
by Jon Noring 27 Jul '06

27 Jul '06

Everyone, I just posted a TeleRead blog article, which in turn links to the blog article posted by Catherine Hodge at DPP Store, about the World eBook Fair (WeBF). My blog article: http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=5230 Catherine's blog article: http://dppebookstore.blogspot.com/2006/07/world-ebook-fair-12-million-downl… Both Catherine and I are perplexed by the lack of public discussion about the WeBF on the various ebook-related forums such as this one. What are your thoughts? Jon Noring

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re: 1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Jul '06

24 Jul '06

well, obviously, in prototyping a system, you use just part of the data, not all of it. especially on something like this. :+) i subset the content so i can _examine_ it, molding it into shape manually if necessary. in the process of that, i gain an understanding of what needs to be done, so i can program it, and i develop the first pass at those routines... for instance, as i said, one of the first tasks is whipping the catalog into the shape i want it... that job has already taken me a number of hours, and it's not done yet. the catalog was quite a mess -- and hey, it's just titles and author-names! -- so all told, it'll probably take me some 20 hours, and maybe 30, just for this 1:5 subset... you can see the current state of my clean-up work here: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/mcl/-catalog there's still work that needs to be done on subtitles, and on the "mirror" titles (which were a total disaster), but other than that, this data is now very consistent... by the time i'm done with this, i'll have good routines to clean it up automatically, to the extent it's possible. so i expect the next 1/5 of the catalog to be cleaned in half the time -- 10-15 hours. during each phase, i'll pick up more information on how to automate it. so the next 1/5 of the catalog will take half the time, about 6-8 hours. and the next 1/5 will take half that, about 3-4 hours. and the last 1/5 will take 1-2 hours. and by then, i'll have some very well-polished routines. so if i decided to do the whole job over, from scratch, for maximal consistency, it'd take about 4-10 hours... this time-savings, via automation, is what you want. that's why you just do a subset of the data in a model. -bowerbird

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1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Jul '06

24 Jul '06

i'm doing a 1:5 scale reworking of the p.g. library. i have selected e-texts 10000-14000 to work on. one early step is a massive clean-up of the catalog. this might involve serious breakage of compatibility with the existing library. (in other words, you won't necessarily be able to easily import my corrections.) if there is anyone out there who would like me to maintain a limited compatibility, so as to dovetail with their work, please do inform me immediately, and we can have a discussion about cooperation... thank you. -bowerbird p.s. if anyone would like to design the user interface for a program for end-users to access this reworking, feel free to share that too, frontchannel or backchannel.

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re: [gutvol-d] 1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 Jul '06

23 Jul '06

dave said: > What on earth is one fifth of a library? first and foremost, it means porta-potties instead of rest-rooms. other than that, it means we have all the books, but just up through page 18 with each one, because statistics tell us that that's only how far most people read in a book that they buy... > Most readers do not get past page 18 in a book they have purchased. > http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm many of you might know dan poynter, who collected all these statistics from various places, as the guru of self-publishing... michael, once you get past the frustration of poynter's statistics, i'm positive you will find his web-page to be utterly fascinating... here are a few samples, on publishers: > 18. On average, they pay $465.17 for a simple cover design > to as much as $3,533.26 for a complex cover design. > Typical cover costs range $450 to $3,000. ... > 24. An average of 10 to 15 hours are spent designing a book cover. > 25. On average, 61 hours are spent in the editing process. > 26. On average, 29 hours are spent producing a news release for a new book. really, michael, i look forward to a ton of new posts from you based on the motivation you'll get from all of these statistics... :+) -bowerbird p.s. dave, actually it just means that i started out with 4,000 out of the (roughly) 20,000 e-texts in the p.g. library, so 1/5. for some reason (i'm not sure why), model-builders have always been fond of the 1/5 scale. it's big enough to be "realistic", yet still small enough to be a "model". it makes things very cute, too.

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re: 1:5 scale
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 Jul '06

22 Jul '06

speaking of interfaces, wow, a whole shitload of librarians just got their asses kicked bad... > http://www.amitgupta.info/E41ST/ -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] first pass at a p.g. categorization scheme
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Jul '06

21 Jul '06

joey said: > Really, the only difference I can see between your model and mine > is that mine is a server-side, collaborative effort, while yours > builds destkop-oriented data islands. well, you've done some semantic loading there, contrasting "collaborative" with "data-islands". i could counter with "nonpersonalized" versus "individualized", but i don't see much purpose. ultimately, the catalog should work both online and offline. and either approach is capable of it. the real difference is shown when you contrast your system with the wiki system marcello made, which operates in a fashion similar to my system. in your system, tags are applied toward e-texts. in marcello's system (or mine), the e-texts are applied toward categories. that's the difference. again, whether we want to consider that to be a "significant" difference doesn't really matter, as long as we understand that _is_ the difference. all this boils down to the catalogers: would they rather start with a _category_, and apply e-texts, or would they rather start with an e-text and then apply categories. i tend to think it'd be the former. (and certainly, from my standpoint of programmatic cataloging, rather than human-enacted, the former approach is far more easy for me to write code for.) there are still some things you haven't shown us with your example. the first is how nimble it is, once you have scaled it up to the 20,000 e-texts. so i multiplied your 1000-set by 20 times. it's here: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/misc/joeytags.html at 3.1 megs, it'll be a bit of a pain for dial-up users. the second is the back-end work that you will do to assign tags automatically. (for instance, although i recognize you were just using it for your example, language tags are unnecessary, because that info is already available in the current catalog, and just needs to be converted.) the third is how you're gonna let your catalogers add new tags to your standard set. the fourth -- a big one -- is how the catalog will be made into a public-facing entity end-users navigate. but none of these are especially _difficult_ challenges, so i'm sure you can manage them, and i look forward to experimenting with your system when it's finished. > And I don't see why they would need to be > mutually exclusive, either. sure, the data can be munged to work either way; as usual, it is just a question of _doing_ that work. and giving cataloger volunteers a choice of models would seem to me to be the best way to proceed... but my mission is not to work with volunteers at all, but rather to build a system myself and then put it directly into the hands of end-users. that's my focus. my gut feeling is that a wiki-style approach will be more successful at attracting volunteers than your tag model, but i wouldn't be surprised if i'm wrong. marcello's wiki has an inordinate level of difficulty; i'd allow people to simply enter the e-text number, and then automatically generate all the other info. having them enter that info (and then formatting all the links in wiki-markup) is a recipe for errors, plus it raises the cost of contributing to the point where i think you would have very few volunteers... > Perhaps you could populate your client-side app > with a list of "folders" and "alias files" generated by > polling my server-side app, and perhaps people could > publish their data island back to the world as a set of tags. you are welcome to collect data from my model if you want. and just as i'll be getting info from samizdat and blackmask, i'll also collect data from your server-side approach if i can... except i expect to be finished with my effort (limited as it is) before you even get fully started with your (unlimited) one... -bowerbird

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20, 000 e-texts versus 300 billion dollars (a rather remarkable ant)
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 Jul '06

19 Jul '06

juxtaposition with p.g. hitting 20,000 e-texts... the cost of the war will soon hit $300 _billion_. (very soon. it just crossed the $297 billion mark, and a billion dollars just ain't what it used to be.) the power to create, the power to destroy. the human is a rather remarkable ant, eh? -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] first pass at a p.g. categorization scheme
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 17 Jul '06

17 Jul '06

joey said: > I see no distinction between your model and mine, > other than what they're called. i can't really say that there _is_ a difference between them, joey, not until your model is fleshed out with a real live app. in my version, a book is represented by alias files that live in various folders. the names of those folders _could_be_ considered as "tags". but that's not how "tagging systems" are generally architected, not if i understand 'em correctly. what i'm looking to create is a simple system that people can understand implicitly, and operate easily on their machines... how that system is labeled is nothing but a semantic matter, just as long as everyone understands exactly how it works. i'll give people a "starter-set" of folders, but after that, they can develop things from there according to their own aims. if they want a category called "phat books", they tell my app to create a "phat books" folder, then they start checking off the books that they want to have represented in that folder. i see this as more disciplined and restrained than tagging, where idiosyncratic tags are more-or-less routinely applied. but, you know, i guess there's nothing to stop a person from generating many folders with just one or two books in each. at any rate, it is this _personalization_ of the categorization that i see as the main difference between folders and tags. tagging systems usually operate in a social network arena. and this is perhaps an important distinction as well, in that i see my system running as an app on a person's machine. although i think people haven't been too clear on it thus far, it seems that most of you see this operating on a webserver. as an aside, y'all might want to look at ning.com for a means by which you can easily create a social-networking web-app. now, it may well be that the best start-set of folders is created via a tagging system, perhaps one that is generated on a wiki. as i said yesterday, though, i'm more interested in doing this _by_myself_, because it seems too difficult to get any helpers, and too unwieldy to build a system that captures all their help. (it's far easier to just write the program for the end-user and leverage the work that's already done in regard to cataloging. for instance, one of the first cuts will be on the _language_, and i can determine that by simply checking that in the file.) but, speaking of a wiki, i think what you would get from that would be more amenable to my "folder" structure than tags, because each "page" on the wiki would represent a "folder". at least that's how _i_ would organize the wiki. for instance, i'd have a "beatrice potter" wikipage that listed all her e-texts. and i'd have an "esperanto" wikipage listing all those e-texts. (of course, you could also organize the wiki with each page representing an e-text, and then apply the tags on the page. but i think you would find that approach to be cumbersome. again, until i can see an actual working example on your end, it's difficult for me to comment positively or negatively on it.) but since i'm doing my thing by myself, the architecture of my catalog depends on being able to collect almost all of the data _programmatically_, via computerized analysis of the e-texts. the other source of information i will use in generating the starter-set of folders is the catalog-structure richard seltzer has set up over at samizdat.com. (and, if i could recover it, i'd add the one that david moynihan had at blackmask.com.) to sum up, i don't want to spend a lot of time generating the initial catalog structure, and i don't want to spend a lot of time assigning e-texts within that catalog structure. ok? my third concern is that people can modify to their desire. there are other concerns, too, such as being able to capture any additional information that people might contribute in the long run while modifying their catalog (the arena where tags really shine), but my 3 main concerns are the ones listed. also, a main goal of the starter-set is to give end-users a way to quickly eliminate the parts of the library they do not want to have downloaded to their machine, and give the rest of it a basic structure that can be navigated easily and intuitively, and i think the "folder" model qualifies well in that regard... so yes, you might be right that the same program that can administer the folder-structure might be an equivalent of one that can administer a tagging model. or it might not. i know what my app will look like. i need to see the other. -bowerbird

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Categorizing PG content
by Andrew Sly 17 Jul '06

17 Jul '06

I've just sent a message to the PG catalog list exploring categorizing posibilities for PG. I've put a copy of it at: http://www.victoria.tc.ca/~sly/pgcat.txt Any extensive discussions might be better placed on the gutcat list. To subscribe, see: http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi Andrew

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