- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

!@!The Big Push, Well Not So Big. . . .
by Michael Hart 31 May '06

31 May '06

As most of you are aware, it is 5 weeks until we complete our 35th year of Project Gutenberg history, and we have about 462 eBooks left to make it to 20,000. This would be about 92 per week. . .we did 71 this week. So it's not such a Big Push as we did to get to 10,000, but a rather smaller push, which is why you haven't heard me say an awfully lot about it. . .things are working out much a closer match to reaching 20,000 on our 35th anniversary than anyone, myself included, would likely have predicted. However, especially since I am planning on taking a week off, right at July 4th, I am best man at my best friend's wedding, I am trying to get as much as possible done before I leave as soon as I can after sending out the Newsletter a week before. I am working on the July 5th Newsletter, and will have it out in a fairly complete manner half a day after the previous one goes out, and am hoping that some of our volunteers will have the wherewithal to update it and send it out July 5th with an entirely up to date revision, that hopefully will hit 20,000. More later, I'm just trying to make it one day at a time right now. . . . Thanks!!! Michael

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re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 May '06

31 May '06

michael said: > Actually, from what Brewster told us, and I think you were there, > he really does want to take the cheap route, and would prefer to > do mostly only raw scans if he could get away with it the world will eventually explain to him that he can't get away with it. if you can't search their text, you lose the vast majority of the benefits associated with having electronic-books. however, as i have said many times here, if you do the scans correctly, and do the o.c.r. correctly, and run a good post-o.c.r. correction app, you will end up with text that is _highly_accurate_. so accurate that it's much more than good enough for search purposes, even good enough to move to the public for "continuous proofreading". and again, i will "make this happen" _by_myself_ -- if it's necessary -- within 5 years, so this is no sticking point, none at all, really, i promise. and because brewster's stuff will be open-access, and guaranteed so, there's no need to even worry about that content. we'll get it straight. it is the stuff from _google_ that we have to be concerned about, because there's no assurance so far, let alone a guarantee, that we will be able to access that content easily, not unless we scrape it... i've said this before, too -- we need a coordinated scraping campaign. every public-domain book we scrape is liberated -- forever and ever. o.c.r., clean-up, and format conversions can be done _automatically_. michael, you asked me backchannel if scansets would need volunteers. for scraping, yes. but nothing else. just scraping. i'd estimate it takes 15 minutes of human work to scrape a book. (the actual downloading takes longer, but it can be unattended.) i'd then say it takes 30 minutes, on average, to do quality-control. (most books will take 10 minutes, but any books with problems take a disproportionate amount of time, so 30 minutes average.) quality-control involves renaming files according to solid policy. and then i'd estimate it takes 15 minutes to upload those scans to their permanent home, where they'll be viewable immediately and ready for treatment by automated systems when those come online. so this one hour of work is all it takes to liberate a book from google. -bowerbird

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re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 May '06

31 May '06

ingram said: > You would also be entitled to give me half a cookie computed out to how many decimal-crumbs? > I haven't yet figured out how you could > give me an imaginary number of cookies, that's ok, since you've given me a negative number of imaginary cookies, so we can just call it even... :+) -bowerbird

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re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 31 May '06

31 May '06

carlo said: > No mathematician can doubt that a straight line is a curve. of course, if you're talking about a curve that _is_ a straight line, and you want to be absolutely clear, you won't _call_ it a curve, you'll call it a straight line, because that is much less ambiguous. (perhaps even infinitely less ambiguous.) and that is true whether you are a mathematician or not... -bowerbird p.s. and if you asked for "a number of cookies", and i gave you _zero_, would you be inclined to think i had granted your plea?

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re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 May '06

30 May '06

michael said: > I note that the press didn't give Yahoo the time of day when > their similar announcements came out about a year later. . . c'mon, michael, you act like you're a novice when it comes to knowledge about how "the news" is created in the u. s. of a. the media doesn't just "give" you attention, except superficial treatment if you're some freak; otherwise, you have to buy it. google went and bought some coverage, and the o.c.a. didn't. it's as simple as that. sheesh... -bowerbird p.s. the songs you hear on the radio? same thing -- payola.

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Re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Joshua Hutchinson 30 May '06

30 May '06

> ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Hart" <hart(a)pglaf.org> > I suppose you are stressing the difference between mathematicians > and economists and MBA's, without trying to be obvious about it, > but that difference is all to obvious to everyone else, and that > a "growth curve" that is "flat" is not a "curve." > Not only are you the only one that keeps trying to say a "growth curve" that is "flat" is not a "curve" ... others have come out (including myself) to say that a growth curve can be almost any shape. A growth curve can be flat, negative, or a sin wave ... and it is still a "growth curve". But since this discussion is completely pointless, can we please let it drop? (which is the real reason I posted this response ... just let this all go) Josh

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re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 May '06

30 May '06

dave said: > In the UK one gets coverage for being interesting to the readers :-) so _that's_ what those topless women are doing on page 3, eh? :+) (then again, i guess you wouldn't call that "coverage", would you?) > Not all the world's media acts in such a cynical money grubbing way. :-( just wait until our corporations buy your newspapers... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 May '06

30 May '06

michael said: > A friend asked him why. . . > he said it was due to space limitations. well, my one quibble with the article was when he mentioned the google library scanning as the main impetus for resurging interest about a cyberlibrary. while that is undoubtedly true, i thought that he could have mentioned project gutenberg as well. it would've been a nod to your historic presence. however, if you want your library to move forward into the future that is being discussed, you'll need to consider the constructive criticisms i have issued. because if "books reading other books" _does_ take off, your library of standalone files which cannot will languish. you have the advantage now that most all of your files are pure ascii, so it behooves you to leverage that advantage... -bowerbird

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Re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 May '06

30 May '06

michael- some people say you are obsessed on the numbers. and/or that you overcount. but the systematic tracking helped us build your library. thanks for keeping the focus. -bowerbird

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re: !@!Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 30 May '06

30 May '06

michael- some people say you are obsessed on the numbers. and/or that you overcoat. but your systematic tracking helped to build your library. thanks for keeping the focus. -bowerbird

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