- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

!@!Re: [BP] Re: EXTRA! Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter
by Michael Hart 29 Jun '06

29 Jun '06

By the way, as we have continually offered, if anyone would like to write up a different catalogue, counting system, or whatever, we would be only too happy to include it the Newsletters, and in the various archives. I am sure that people could come up with counts both higher, and lower, than whatever method is chosen, and we would be very glad to repost those counts each week, each month, or even each year, if anyone would be willing to put them together in pretty much a free fashion, as long as there was some internal consistency. Nothing like 100% accuracy would be required, and we should have the capability of averaging all such counts, hopefully to see in some manner an average count that reflected what people are used to seeing in library catalogues. As I will be away for a month, now would be a perfect time to do this sort of thing, and if it catches on, perhaps I won't have a Newsletter that I have to do so much of personally when I return after this trip. . .perhaps I won't have to do it at all. . . . Thanks!!! Give the world eBooks in 2006!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Blog at http://hart.pglaf.org

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Michael Hart is on the Road
by Michael Hart 29 Jun '06

29 Jun '06

I will be rather slow with my email responses for the next month, and I presumed, already correctly show, that some messages of the somewhat negative kind would come at such a time and I appreciate the way our list members have allowed me the opportunities for an easier time with such message as I don't have to respond alone. I really can't tell you how much I appreciate all the support for the work I have been doing, and hope will continue, with the very wonderful help of perhaps as many as 50,000 volunteers. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Give the world eBooks in 2006!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Blog at http://hart.pglaf.org

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re: [gutvol-d] How to digitize SRR's Five Laws?
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

mike said: > Despite being out of print > (a reprint is planned for later this year > by Ess Ess Publications of India > <http://www.essessreference.com/servlet/esgetbiblio?n=000313>), > Five Laws is arguably the most important work in library science to date. that's quite a sad commentary, isn't it, that what is arguably _the_ most important work in library science to date is _out_of_print_... so congratulations on bringing it back to life. the .pdf versions you've made are not as useful as they could be, however, because you've just wrapped the scans into a .pdf. that means that the text cannot be searched or copied out of it, and those are two of the big benefits of e-books. so yes, you are right they would be better with digital text. but there's no need to transcribe. instead, o.c.r. the scans, correct the results, and then wrap that digital text into several formats: plain text could be one, .html could be another, and even .pdf (except this time with text that is searchable and could be copied out of the .pdf). further, the scans could also be used themselves. (but you should strive for higher-quality scans.) here's a rough sketch of how to proceed: 1. scan the book's pages. 2. clean up the scans. (straighten, crop, etc.) 3. perform the o.c.r. 4. clean up the text. 5. proofread the text against the scans. 6. auto-convert the text to .html. 7. auto-convert the text to .pdf. i'd be willing to help guide you on any of the steps. (especially the last couple, which some people might try and tell you are "impossible". don't believe them.) distributed proofreaders would probably also help if you could donate the text to project gutenberg. since there will be one copy in cyberspace anyway, tell the publisher there might as well be lots of 'em. (online copies don't really cannibalize print sales; indeed, there are some indications they feed 'em.) besides, _books_are_for_use_, are they not? :+) for some pretty "digital reprint" examples to look at, see: > http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Mabie/Books_Culture.pdf > http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Cather/Antonia/Antonia.pdf > http://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/Einstein/Einstein_Relativity.pdf for a look at a system that enables volunteers to proofread, see: > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/myant/myantc001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/ahmmw/ahmmwc001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbc001.html -bowerbird

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How to digitize SRR's Five Laws?
by Michael May 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

Hi all, I am Michael May, new "Classics Editor" at dLIST, the Digital Library of Information Science and Technology: http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/ dLIST has received written permission from the copyright owner of works by S.R. Ranganathan to post electronic copies of several of SRR's books at the dLIST site, including the original 1931 edition of The Five Laws of Library Science, the main premise of which is "Books are for use!" Despite being out of print (a reprint is planned for later this year by Ess Ess Publications of India <http://www.essessreference.com/servlet/esgetbiblio?n=000313>), Five Laws is arguably the most important work in library science to date. We have experimented with PDF by posting the prefatory pages and Chapter 1 here: http://genie.sir.arizona.edu/1115/ However, Five Laws is over 500 pages and includes numerous illustrations. I believe a text or html version would be much easier to access and preserve. What advice do you have about how to proceed? I was thinking about starting by recruiting volunteers from the LIS community to transcribe the text. What should I think about or plan for before asking people to help? Does Project Gutenberg already have resources available that could help us? I'd very much appreciate any suggestions or advice. Thanks. Mike

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a tool for your grandma to download p.g. e-texts en masse
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

what are the feelings here on releasing a tool for your grandma to download p.g. e-texts en masse? although it seems in line with "unlimited distribution", it will also mean people scraping texts indiscriminately. would someone who has a stake in the bandwidth used please give me a definite answer? thanks. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

brad- the post you quoted, from me, was an errant send. it was actually a message posted by someone else. in general, i don't think much about how existing software will treat my files, because i consider it my job to deliver software that does what i want. non-programmers have to live within their apps, but as a programmer, i create the worlds i want... the question of how to "mark up" line-breaks is a non-starter for me. the plain-ascii p.g. e-texts already have hard line-endings in them indicating line-breaks. those are the ones inserted by p.g. my suggestion was that the original line-breaks should be used instead. i think the discussion has run its course this time. maybe it will come up again. or maybe it will not. and maybe there will be demand from users for e-texts that mimic their hard-copy counterparts, or maybe there will not be. maybe jeroen will work up a template i can use. or maybe he won't. time will tell on all these things. or maybe it won't. -bowerbird

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Daily progress reports missing from [posted]?
by John Hagerson 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

I have not received a daily progress report through [posted] since 22-JUN. Have they been temporarily suspended or discontinued? Have they been moved to another list? Thank you.

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Re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 28 Jun '06

28 Jun '06

Line-breaks are mark-up. They don't add anything whatsoever to the text itself and are completely arbitrarily decided, usually based on the technology that is used to display the actual content. You can deny the difference between structure, content and presentation all you want, but it is perfectly possible to reformat a book using columns instead of lines without changing the actual content. And where will your precious line-breaks go in that case?

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ebooks libre et gratuits
by Norm Wolcott 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

Ebooks libre et gratuits had an arrangement with MH apparently where their books would appear on PG eventually. Now that the ebooks web site is no more, what will happen to the ebooksgratuits which did not make it to PG? Will all of this work have to be repeated by someone else? Is there an archive anywhere of this enormous quantitiiy of work? Why did ebooksgratuits disappear? Pressure from Canadian publishers/ government? Is there an unknown story here? nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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re: [gutvol-d] the end of the line
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 27 Jun '06

27 Jun '06

jeroen said: > Although I agree with Michael that there is no need > to preserve things as linebreaks in most texts -- ok, well you and michael agree. that's good. :+) but what do you say to end-users who want that info? somehow, "tough luck, kid, _we_ don't think it's necessary" doesn't sound like the kind of thing _i_ want to tell people. because that's the type of statement that makes people go off to a different cyberlibrary. that's my whole point. (and to all of the other people who responded on similar "theoretical" grounds, i'm truly sorry you missed the point.) > if you really need to go to that level of detail, there > is always the original or the scans to fall back upon well, neither of those gives you the flexibility of digital text. but yes, a tight coupling of the two forms is the best method. you will note that those "digital reprints" from jose menendez allow a reader to summon the scan of the page with one click. (since the page already looks like the scan anyway, there might be little reason to do it, though, except to verify that similarity. but this constant willingness to demonstrate the verisimilitude will be the proof that makes people comfortable with the use of the smaller-sized digital reprint, with its expanded functionality, as opposed to the bigger, slower, dumber collection of scans. anyone who has proofread a scan against reflowed text knows the reflowing makes that task immensely more difficult though, so you'll never attain the same confidence in the text's accuracy.) > I want to make a case for preserving page numbers, > if not at least as recognisable anchors in text, and only for > those books being referenced to regularly by other books. page-numbers are retained in many e-texts these days... but i'm sure you remember we all had this same argument about page-numbers. i'm confident that -- down the line -- sentiment will similarly change to be in favor of line-breaks. in general, i've just been content to wait it out until the change; but seeing all the e-texts as they cross my screen downloading made me realize again the sadness of the discarded line-breaks. > This excludes most fiction, but is particularly important for > scientific works, which have constructed a kind of paper web > with cross references mainly based on page numbers. there are plenty of cross-references made to works of fiction. and the concept of "books reading each other" would require that _all_ of our books are brought under the same umbrella... > In long term, such references of course should give way to proper > references to the actual paragraph or sentence being referenced good! you recognize the need for a finer-grained pointer than the page. because that's the kind of thinking that leads to line-break retention. you can narrow things down rather specifically when you point to the range that's represented from page-19-line-7 to page-21-line-14, or from page-87-line-6 to page-87-line-8, can't you? not only that, this kind of reference also works for the person who only has the paper copy of the book, not the e-book, if the two are duplicates of each other. and that's precisely the type of capability i'll have in my viewer-program. even in a traditional browser, it wouldn't be hard to implement something roughly equivalent, though. the user could specify some text with a link, and after going to the precise point of the link, the browser could then execute a "find" command for the specified text. it wouldn't be hard at all, and would seem to give a rather exact form of pointing to a specific place. it has the benefit of being implemented entirely outside of the document, as well, which i see as being tremendously important. if all our links need markup in the original document to be implemented, as is the present case, we're _never_ going to be able to quickly get to a point of profuse interlinks. we'll get thoroughly bogged down in the quicksand of heavy markup first... (for an example of that, take a look at the markup which jon noring posted, and then read through that particular diversion of this thread. the horrors!) > but as a practical ad-interim solution, staying with page numbers will > increase the number of texts we can digitize with our limited means. it doesn't cost anything to retain the line-break information. > I would however, like to see the collection be incorporated in a kind of > wiki-like system, where people can add -- without tampering with the static > source texts -- annotations, add tagging and create live cross references i've had a demo up for some time now showing "continuous proofreading". > http://users.aol.com/bowerbird/proof_wiki.html i also used a similar template in these demo-books: > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/mabie/mabiep001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/myant/myantc001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/ahmmw/ahmmwc001.html > http://www.greatamericannovel.com/sgfhb/sgfhbc001.html this system could easily be elaborated upon to build what you requested here. indeed, i will be pouring all of the p.g. texts that i'll be handling -- perhaps some 5000-6000, as near as i can tell -- into just this type of system, within the next 6 months, and i would be open to any ideas that you might have... heck, design a webpage to do what you want, and i will use it as the template. you know me, i don't even care if it "validates", as long as it's easy and it works. *** andrew said: > There are places such as wikisource.org, where you could add the texts > and start providing links such as you mention here immediately. i'll check out wikisource.org to see what kind of capabilities they offer. in the past, when i've looked at existing sites, it has seemed that wikis aren't geared to do things -- like populate pages -- on a massive scale. even rather fundamental things like batch f.t.p. are sometimes missing. and when you're dealing with thousands, or tens of thousands, of files, it becomes absolutely necessary to deal with them in a template fashion. i also think there's a good reason jeroen asked for a "wiki-like system", and not a wiki per se, as indicated by his concern about "tampering" with the static source texts. the thought is that the original source -- and indeed, the string of comments as well -- must be inviolate. that's because the idea is to build a body of thought around a text, of which links -- intrasystem, and outgoing and incoming -- are a very crucial aspect. and it's not possible to link into a wiki proper, because what was there yesterday might well be gone today, only to reappear in different form tomorrow. you can't link into a pile of sand. oh sure, you could instruct users to leave link markup untouched. and they might even follow your instructions. (yeah, right.) still, that will interfere with refactoring, and get very crufty before long. besides, a good part of the give-and-take of this kind of conversation involves letting all of the arguments stand, rather than editing them. (and especially rather than "editing them by deletion".) let the future examine all the arguments, and see which ones stand the test of time. so you need to have stability for the process itself, not just for the links. -bowerbird p.s. jeroen, if you want to provide me a template, i could use it sooner rather than later, the better to architect it into my overall work-flow...

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