- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: [gutvol-d] re: accurately converted to any possible format
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 25 May '06

25 May '06

i said: > > as i've said for years now, with a small commitment from you > > to consistent formatting, i could take plain-ascii files as input, > > automatically apply the typographic niceties that are expected, > > and output the results to .pdf and to .html, such that the .html > > can be converted to a large number of other auxiliary formats. greg said: > Here's an eBook that should meet your requirements: > http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18257 well yes, that one works just fine. already did it for that one. :+) > You already have server space, yes, thank you very much, snowy has been very kind to me... > to provide a conversion utility. > Looking forward the pudding... well, but first there is that minor matter of the small commitment to ensure that all future files will conform to consistency as well... you know, first you plug the leak, and only then clean up the mess. and that's not a new request. that was the original precondition. but perhaps there's another way out of this impasse. > To each their own pudding. If I'm not saying "no" to you, > why would I say, "no" to someone with a different approach? it would be silly of me to expect _you_ to tell them "no", as if they couldn't bloody well do it themselves anyway. no, what _i_ am doing is telling them that .tei would be a waste of their time. i'm giving them a friendly notice, a heads-up, saying "hey i got it covered, you go on", but they don't take it that way, they get all pissed off at me... so, ok, you want to be gruff, i can be gruff, no problem. oh yes, greg, _you_ are one of "them". so you would be telling yourself "no". and i don't expect you to do that, no. indeed, i don't even expect you to listen to me telling you that .tei is a waste of your time. that's fine. you'll learn. > I have two other servers (snowy.arsc.alaska.edu and readingroo.ms) > with complete copies of the PG collection for development. ok, now we're getting somewhere. this could break through. > If people don't like the way PG postprocesses & posts eBooks, > they can grab 'em and do their own postings. As long as there's > a reasonable adherance to the principle of unlimited distribution > etc. (http://www.gutenberg.org/about) we'll even link to 'em! i have no stealaway desires, i'm happy to do things under your wing, my intention is to try and show you -- project gutenberg -- how you can save yourself a lot of work, and increase your unlimited distribution. i want to help the best cyberlibrary get better, i don't want to tear it apart. i would definitely agree to demonstrate some automatic transformations of your e-texts on a library-wide basis that could show you some shit... at first this would just be for experimental purposes. no promises. however -- if the effort continues, and it should ever come to that -- my "shaping" of the files by progressive transformations would result in a substantial fork of the library, but once you have satisfied yourself that it had retained all important data so the integrity of the books was intact and that only inconsequential inconsistencies had been removed, you will be amenable to _considering_ a wholesale replacement in one fell swoop. the benefits will be quite obvious, though. it won't be hard for you to be the decider... > I don't recall turning down David, but might have on the grounds of > being unable to effectively ingest & manage the files he was producing. > Today, I'd offer him his own server space to help him do things his way. ok, now you're _really_ talking. because david already knows how to do this. unfortunately, as we all know, he's kinda busy right now. with any luck, though, he's bored, and restless because the website that has been his business has been his life has taken up a lot of his time in the last many years or so is shut down, with any luck he's itching for some diskspace to play with. he might be jonesing for an ftp-interaction... but you know, honestly, all _i_ would really need from him is his ascii files. he's already made all of them consistent... i've never asked him for them before. but maybe now's the time? and if you and i ask him together, so i can work on the files for you? i've never seen his ascii files for sale, but i'd be willing to pay some. after all, the reason i want those files is they'd save me a lot of time. it seems quite reasonable to reimburse him for a little of that time. especially because he's got lawyer bills, i'm sure. (actually, i'd hope a lawyer has taken this case pro bono for the great exposure, but you know there are always lawsuit-related bills that have to be paid. i consider him a trooper, and i do believe in supporting our troops!) anyway... with _consistent_ files, i can start turning neat tricks right soon now. i might have to reshape david-consistency into zml-consistency, but that'll be a lot easier than reshaping p.g.-inconsistency into anything. so even if it's not immediate, it would be soon. of course, i'm not taking david's files for granted, no sir, as we haven't even yet asked. and he _is_ busy these days. he might even say yes, but have no time to fill the request. but, to sum up, i would be most grateful for: 1. on snowy, a copy of the p.g. library that i can start "shaping". 2. also on snowy, a copy of moynihan's ascii files for experiments? 3. diskspace for david to play, now if he wants, or sometime later. the understanding is i'm just playing with your files. no promises, no expectations, no guarantees. ok? -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Joshua Hutchinson 24 May '06

24 May '06

> ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Michael Hart" <hart(a)pglaf.org> > On Wed, 24 May 2006, Michael Dyck wrote: > > > However, if it makes things easier, I'll gladly refuse to acknowlege > > that statement *now*. A linear growth curve *is* a growth curve, and a > > pretty ordinary one at that. It certainly doesn't make it impossible to > > create an ordinary growth curve. But that's just disagreeing with what > > you said, rather than what you meant. > > No, a line is not a curve. > Here we go again. 1 - A growth curve doesn't necessarily curve nor does it necessarily grow. A growth curve can be flat (no change), it can be negative (lose value like my stocks recently), it can be linear (grows at a constant rate) or it can be exponential (what we typically think of as a growth curve). 2 - Just because you don't WANT to include certain periods of PG history in your growth curve analysis doesn't mean no one else can or that they are wrong for doing so. If someone wants to plot growth from the start of PG to present (which certainly seems reasonable to me), then that is a valid growth curve plot. If you want to plot it in the "modern PG era" from circa 1993 to present, then that is valid, too. Both plots need to specify the time frame they are plotting. Since we argued this to death already (as Michael Dyck so nicely linked to previously), can we let it drop now? Josh

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 May '06

24 May '06

michael said: > I wonder how great a percentage of Google's six year plan > will have to expire before Mr. Bowerbird will admit that > it doesn't look as if Google is even trying to make it to > 10 million in 6 years. michael, it certainly isn't necessary to call me "mr." bowerbird. but hey, it sounds kinda funny and cute, so please, be my guest. as for google's plan, i laid out my prediction last december: december 14, 2004 -- 0 books december 14, 2005 -- 10,000 books december 14, 2006 -- 100,000 books december 14, 2007 -- 1,000,000 books december 14, 2008 -- 10,000,000 books so not only do i think they are still on-track, and doing well, i actually think they'll wrap it up by the end of 2008, michael, _if_ they stop at the 10.5 million unique titles they have now. but i think the courts will clear a path for them by that time, and more libraries will come on-board, and their focus will expand from books into the wide variety of _other_ content commonly found in libraries, including much of the local stuff found in libraries nationwide, so that by december 14, 2012, they will have scanned a grand total of some 100 million items, at a cost of $10 billion. (all the local stuff will jack up the cost, from $1 billion to $10 billion. but by this time, the google boys will be worth $25 billion each, and google itself $75 billion, so this will just be a cost of doing business written off their taxes.) see, when you've got a ton of money, moore's law becomes your _bottom_ bound, not your top one. need to go faster? all you need to do is buy more scanners and hire more people. > My own projections show it taking about twice that long, so what if it does take "twice as long"? or 3 or 4 times as long? really, so what? your own e-library took 35 years to get to 20,000 items, and i think it's one of the best things in all of cyberspace... well, except for some of those videos over on youtube. people are really funny and creative, know what i mean? ;+) -bowerbird

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changing email addresses
by Norm Wolcott 24 May '06

24 May '06

Can whoever reads this please aarrange or tell me how to get reconnected with gutvol-d Thanks nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 May '06

24 May '06

michael said: > Obviously the press coverage about "Google library scanning" > has done more "as the main impetus for resurg[ent] interest > in a cyberlibrary" than the actualy scanning itself. well, d'uh, of course. that's how it always is. > And the latest estimated I have received show that Google's > total number of books has just recently passed 50,000 i do believe you misread that. 50,000 public-domain titles, with another 42,000 under copyright, for a total of 92,000. but even if it is just 50,000 total, they're still on my schedule: i predicted 10,000 after one year, 100,000 after two years, 1 million after three years, and 10 million after four years... > similar reports say that 88% are neither downloadable > nor proofread to any particular level of accuracy. except it's not google's job to make them downloadable, not in convenient form, nor to proofread the digitized text. it is _our_ job to grab the scans (as nicely and neatly as possible, courteous and respectful of the cost they entailed by scanning), and to make them available in a convenient format for reading, as well as to formulate automatic procedures to digitize the text and take it to a very high degree of accuracy. even if google did do these jobs for us, i would still replicate it, because i don't want to have to be dependent on google forever. > Somehow I don't think this was accidental. . . . the point is, if your books were _already_ "reading each other", people would have been talking about it long before this article. -bowerbird p.s. i see you're one of those old-fashioned people who refuse to recognize "resurging" as an adjective. it's ok. hopefully, if i keep using it that way, i'll win. (i'm trying to change the usage of "hopefully" with the same strategy.) :+)

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re: [gutvol-d] re: Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries]
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 May '06

23 May '06

i said: > > it is relatively easy for a programmer to "embed" > > shared annotations into an e-book marcello said: > > How would you know? um, because i've built a number of prototypes that do it. of course. before i make bold assertions, i've done years of research... didn't i post a message saying i could do a demo-app for david, to show how simple it is?, and didn't david say, "ok, go ahead", and didn't i say "ok, i will, you can expect it by thursday, i'd say?" just a minute, let me check... ok, the first two messages did indeed post ("i can do it", "ok, do it"), but i never got around to sending the third one this morning, sorry... i'll send it first thing tomorrow, since i think we've had enough for today... still, this is fairly easy to program. here's the code that sends out a note: > dim abcd as dictionary > dim socket1 as new httpsocket > dim lec as integer > abcd=new dictionary > abcd.value("myname")=editfield1.text > abcd.value("myemail")=editfield2.text > abcd.value("mycomment")=editfield3.text > socket1.setformdata abcd > socket1.post "http://users.aol.com/cgi-bin/guestbook/bowerbird/bbb.html" that's it. all the code you need. that's a real-live form, on the web right now, found at: > http://users.aol.com/bowerbird/bbb.html you can post from the page itself, filling out the form right there, using any web-browser on any internet-connected machine... or you can compose your comment on your own machine, and, using the program that contains the code listed above, post that comment to the website. (the downstream app is interacting with the code that runs the guestbook script on the .html page, so you will find the same variable names as above if you look at the code that creates the .html form on that page. fairly easy to figure out.) *** and here's the code that fetches the text of the webpage and puts it in an editfield. this is realbasic source-code, by the way. > dim http as new httpsocket > readit.text=http.get("users.aol.com/bowerbird/bbb.html",30) open another window in the app on your machine, and the two-line function above loads and displays the comments from the webpage. well, _that_ was certainly simple, wasn't it? and those are our two functions, one to post, the other to read. *** ok, wrap a g.u.i. around it, and you've got the demo app, pronto. with what?, a dozen lines of code?, all copied from the manual? like i said, pretty elementary. realbasic does all the heavy lifting. your mileage, using your language and your compiler, may vary. so, from my vantage-point, yes, this is dirt-simple. do you have any questions? -bowerbird p.s. marcello, thanks for creating my shrine. i can point to it in the future as holding a good number of my prognostications, not to mention my phat and sassy attitude, donchajustadoreit? thank goodness for the internet archive, right? brewster rocks!

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re: [gutvol-d] re: Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries]
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 May '06

23 May '06

michael said: > It is quite obvious that many people view > both Bowerbird's and Mr. Rothman's comments as attacks, > even Bowerbird and Mr. Rothman, though rarely would the > mention include self-reflection on this matter. for the record, i do not feel i have made _any_ "attacks". and i firmly believe if you look at what i have actually said -- as opposed to how david has _characterized_ what i've said -- you will see that that is so. indeed, if you find otherwise, i'd be happy for you to draw attention to it, so i can explain. i have said _unflattering_ things. but with good evidence. i _never_ resort to spin-doctoring, such as his name-calling. he flames me, and then tries to blame it on me by calling me "a troll". don't tell me you can't see through that transparency. and really, take a look at the latest thread. i made a simple point -- which is that it is relatively easy for a programmer to "embed" shared annotations into an e-book -- and he eventually ended up dragging in a _myriad_ of unrelated charges, some of them _silly_. meanwhile, it still remains easy to embed annotations in an e-book. contrary to what a naive observer might be led to believe by teleblog -- or even his recent posts here -- openreader is _not_ the only way to provide "interactivity" to electronic-books. not even close. all these other issues that he is throwing up are a _smokescreen_ intended to divert your attention from that very simple fact, and if anyone reading these posts doesn't realize that, then i _fear_ for their reading comprehension. of course, david doesn't _want_ people to read these posts, that's why he's throwing up a barrage, hoping that lurkers will just view the subject-headers (where he promulgates his smear job by prominently using the "troll" word). is what i'm saying here unflattering? you betcha. is it true? you betcha. but i don't do "attacks". i do hard-headed analysis with a focus on fact. and i don't get emotionally involved -- it interferes badly with the logic. it's a lot smarter to stay on-point. i do a lot of self-reflection. i can look at myself in a mirror just fine... -bowerbird

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Bowerbird's development schedule and the $200K he's demanding [Re: [gutvol-d] re: blogs in e-books]
by David H. Rothman 23 May '06

23 May '06

As for your doing a demo, hey, be my guest. OSoft and others have long since carried out the basic concept of shared annotation, and the SA-capable dotReader is on the way from OSoft. Of course I'm actually concerned that your demo would hurt the cause of shared annotations by showing it off less than optimally, whether it was brower- or reader-based or both. And you're not going to have the related standards infrastructure that dotReader will. Who knows, you might even want to give us, er, "lock-in." Now, back to some grubby details from the ZML world, such as the rival reader app that you've spent so many hours trolling for--against OpenReader. What's your development schedule for your reader, so we can guard against "hype" and "vaporware"? Isn't true you've taken forever to get your reader out? And beyond people not paying you $200K or whatever, how come you won't share the source code for your rival reader? Are you ashamed of it? I still don't have a satisfactory answer. Code can be dear to one's heart, but still is a long way from poetic musings. Why must you keep your brillance to yourself? Don't you believe in open source? Answer those questions, and then I suggest that we wind down this thread in the interest of bandwidth and time--both mine and others'. PG people are very welcome to write me privately or phone me--especially Greg, if he's really serious about the comments he made to U.S. Today extolling interactivity. Here's PG's chance to adopt a powerful format (OpenReader) and enjoy readers worthy of it (dotReader and in the future FBReader). I'm all ears as far as suggestions from Greg or anyone else, and I know others will be as well. David Rothman | davidrothman(a)openreader.org | 703-370-6540 OpenReader: http://www.openreader.org OR's first implementer: http://www.dotreader.org TeleBlog: http://www.teleread.org/blog

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re: Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries]
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 May '06

23 May '06

david said: > You gratuitously attacked OpenReader out of the blue. no, i didn't. but i'm sure you'd like to spin it that way. what i said was that you were making a big deal about "putting a blog inside an e-book", when that is actually a somewhat trivial thing to do. look, i've inserted a blog inside of this e-mail: > http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2006/05/19/the-book-is-dead-long-live-… -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 23 May '06

23 May '06

michael said: > I seem to recall an earlier report from someone > who did lots of searches for Google books and > determined that 88% of them were published after 1922. i've posted this before, taken from lorcan dempsey's weblog, summarizing an article in d-lib. i always find it again easily by searching his site for "anatomy". > http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000800.html > The anatomy of an aggregate collection > September 17, 2005 > Approximately half of the print books > in the combined Google 5 collection > were published after 1974. > Almost three-quarters were published > after the Second World War. > Using the year 1923 as a rough break-off > point between materials that are > out of copyright and materials that are > in copyright [16], more than 80 percent > of the materials in the Google 5 collections are > still in copyright (this is of course an upper bound). if google has scanned roughly 100,000 pre-1923 items, and they were taking books off the shelves randomly, then we could assume they scanned 400,000 post-1923. but if we assume they were doing the pre-1923 items first, 100,000 pre-1923 scanned means 100,000 total scanned. seems to me assuming things does us absolutely no good. but google is _going_ to scan 10+ million books, eventually, so i'm not sure what difference it makes _how_many_ they've done "so far". are we really questioning their _resolve_ here? seems to me that they've proven they are dedicated to this... so attempts to figure out "how many books so far?" are silly. especially since we know that many of the post-1923 items did not have their copyrights renewed -- except that we do _not_ know what percentage, and thus cannot even _assume_ the answer to that important question, not with any certainty. if we say that half of the post-1923 books were not renewed, then that means that 60% (20% and 40%) are not in copyright. if we say that 1/3 of the post-1923 books were not renewed, then that means that 53% (20% and 33%) are not in copyright. if we say that 2/3 of the post-1923 books were not renewed, then that means that 86% (20% and 66%) are not in copyright. not that the answer would matter any, because due to the litigious arena into which we have allowed the project to be thrown, there's probably no way google would be likely to take the risk of showing _any_ of the orphaned material. so we're back to the original 20% that is pre-1923 and clear. of course, the answer to this is to give google an immunity, to let them serve as the "test-bed" that will act to bring out any claims of copyrighted material that might be lurking... in other words, let google show each book, in full, _until_ some _proof_ of copyright is rendered by another party. (and i do mean proof, and not just some bullshit claim...) -bowerbird

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