- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

happy thanksgiving
by bowerbird 28 Nov '13

28 Nov '13

happy thanksgiving/ hanukkah/holidays to all the hard-working project gutenberg volunteers. -bowerbird

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Quality at PG
by Jon Hurst 07 Oct '13

07 Oct '13

Last Winter I did a bit of investigation into methodologies for improving the quality of works in PG's library. Rather than write a long report, I will skip to the conclusions. 1. The best method for getting a "better version" into PG with the least amount of effort by any one person is: i. Choose an edition from archive.org based on information from a respected academic source, e.g. the "Notes on the Text" section section of an Oxford World's Classics edition. ii. Get DP to digitise it. iii. Improve the DP version by comparing it against the extant PG text. The found error rate for a DP produced text averaged 1 error per 10 pages, a rate I consider more that worth the effort of correcting. Access to F2 output and page images is required for this step. Page images are nicely archived at DP, F2 is more of a problem. It is perfectly possible and useful to find errors in editions as different as the 1818 and 1831 editions of Frankenstein. 2. The PG errata system is utterly broken. I generated errata for the new Huck Finn and sent it to the original contributor, who confirmed the errors. This is errata against a known edition with known page images, and even in this best case scenario neither I nor the original contributor managed to get the text updated. PG should really be considered a write once library, and all references to an errata system should be removed from the site to avoid people wasting their time. 3. The single biggest impediment to improving quality is the PG policy of never replacing a text or in any way advertising the existence of a superior one. A modern DP produced text sourced from a carefully selected archive.org print edition will almost certainly be superior. 4. Very, very few people access PG texts via PG. Normal people go to the Kindle store or to the iTunes store. As such the greatest contribution that PG can make is to provide a digitisation of a well regarded print edition and get the words and punctuation right. Any sort of reasonably sane HTML skeleton, including those produced by DP, is fine. Master formats are not required. * * * * * Based on these conclusions, my recommendation: For each major text, one of the PTB (i.e. Greg, Marcello or a WWer) needs to select a well regarded print edition from archive.org and commission DP to digitise it with the assurance that the extant text will be replaced. A link to the archive.org PDF needs to be added, and DP needs to keep page images and F2 available for anyone willing and able to do the edition comparison; errata from such an edition comparison needs to be prioritised. * * * * * And no, I don't think that there is any chance that this will happen. I think PG is rudderless and the PTB are unwilling or incapable of taking the sort of meaningful action required. From a user standpoint, for "classics" I have given up on PG entirely, preferring paperbacks from a reputable publisher, despite all the advantages that e-reading brings. It saddens me greatly, because PG should be a great "open" project on a level with GNU/Linux and Wikipedia. Then again, if Linus Torvalds had mandated that no line of code could be changed in case it upset its contributor, and Jimmy Wales had locked down updates to 4 people, those projects probably wouldn't be very good either. Regards Jon

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Retrodigitization proposal
by rspuzio＠planetmath.info 06 Oct '13

06 Oct '13

I wanted to bring to your attention a proposal for a Wikimedia grant on which I am a coauthor. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/PlanetMath_Books_Project If successful, it would help improve technology for retrodigitizing math books. Given the considerable collective knowledge of this listserver on this topic, suggestions and comments would be welcome. Raymond Puzio

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Re: [gutvol-d] Quality at PG
by James Adcock 29 Sep '13

29 Sep '13

>And Google Books on "dracula bram stoker Constable & Co." leads to a claimed Dover reprint of Constable - again FWIW. Facsimile editions are available at reasonable price: http://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9781780330112/8874359872

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Torrents
by Eleanore Boyd 13 Sep '13

13 Sep '13

Has anyone already made torrents of the archives? Or is anyone else in the process of doing so? I'd rather not have two separate projects with the same end goal floating around on the Internet, and I won't mind helping if someone is working on hammering out torrents. Eleanore Boyd

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one of the most important points
by bowerbird 09 Sep '13

09 Sep '13

it's just been 2 years, to the day, since michael passed away. plus, in 2 more days, it would have been his "half-birthday". so it seems kind of ironic that y'all seem to have forgotten one of his most important points -- unlimited distribution. i guess it gives you a kind of thrill to play "master curator", making your lists -- "top 100", "best shakespeare", etc. -- but as one can put tens of thousands of e-books on a d.v.d., and have the whole library as close as an internet connection, it's obvious that kind of thinking belonged to the last century. which is the prescient vision michael had _4_decades_ back. so while you guys are discussing what the best restaurant is, michael hart is busy at the heavenly buffet, sampling all of it, heaping big piles of _everything_ on his tray, and _loving_ it. and lest you think your esoteria denotes that you're cultured, let me remind you that it wasn't that michael hart lacked taste. when i was with him at his local buffet, he insisted to a waitress that she replace a glass of water another waiter had given me, saying "he filled it from the spigot by the yogurt machine, and everyone knows that that spigot gives the water a rusty taste". well, that waitress just gave us a wry smile, one that imparted that while this regular _might_ be a slight pain in the rear-end, she did acknowledge that he knew what he was talking about. and it wasn't just in the buffet either; it was the library as well. heck, he could argue the merits of any number of classic books. and that's because he _recognized_ those merits, and decided to focus on the strong points of each, and not on the weak ones. you wanna argue about versions of shakespeare? michael was raised by parents who did that at the breakfast table. so go ahead and pick your "top 100". but michael would never be bothered with such patent nonsense, as he was busy distributing trillions of books to billions of people. _unlimited_distribution._ one of michael's most important points. -bowerbird

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Seeking input on "top 100" collection
by Greg Newby 07 Sep '13

07 Sep '13

Input/feedback would be welcome. I'm giving a presentation this week on "why you should have a library in your pocket" at the Wolfram Data Summit. I've been working on a special collection of around 100 items that could be put on a CD/DVD, mobile device, etc. (in different formats: HTML, EPUB, or others). My goal is to have a test version of this collection by then. My listing is below as tab-delimited, and attached as an XLSX. If you notice any important omissions, please mention them! Criteria are: - interesting and worthwhile - English only - coverage of different types of content (i.e., reference, classics, non-fiction...) - only one item per author - must (probably) be public domain worldwide: - published pre-1923 - author, illustrator, translator death dates pre-1944 (life+70) This turned out to be harder than I thought, but lots of fun. I used our Bookshelves, Top 100, GUTINDEX.ALL, and other sources. I occasionally left something out that I thought was better forgotten (such as Taylor's "Scientific Management"), and made one or two arbitrary choices (such as Twain's "Connecticut Yankee" instead of Huck or Tom). The Genre categories are also somewhat arbitrary. Most of these have a great bibrec in gutenberg.org, but I just used a generic term like "fiction" or "history." Several items could use multiple genres, but I am just including one (for example, Oscar Wilde is listed as Humor, not Fiction). Thanks, and happy reading! -- Greg Project Gutenberg Selections The goal of this collection is to identify interesting and important works from the Project Gutenberg collection. "Every effort was made to identify items that are most likely in the public domain worldwide, not just in the US." Genre eBook # Title Author last Author first etc. Author death Translator last Translator first etc. Translator death Notes Adventure 1257 Dumas Alexandre The Three Musketeers 1870 Adventure 521 Defoe Daniel Robinson Crusoe 1731 Adventure 2701 Melville Herman "Moby Dick, or, the Whale" 1891 Adventure 996 Cervantes Miguel Don Quixote 1616 Business 8581 Barnum P.T. The Art of Money Getting 1891 Children/youth 271 Sewell Anna Black Beauty 1878 Children/youth 14838 Potter Beatrix The Tale of Peter Rabbit 1943 Children/youth 166 Wharton Edith Summer 1937 Children/youth 113 Burnett Frances Hodges The Secret Garden 1924 Children/youth 1597 Andersen Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales 1875 Children/youth 11171 Stowe Harriet Beecher "Uncle Tom's Cabin, Young Folks' Edition" 1896 Children/youth 5747 Alger Horatio Do and Dare: A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune 1899 Children/youth 19068 Grimm Jacob Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm 1863 Children/youth 289 Grahame Kenneth The Wind in the Willows 1932 Children/youth 55 Baum L. Frank The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 1919 Children/youth 503 The Blue Fairy Book Lang Andrew 1912 Children/youth 17412 Hope Laura Lee Bobbsey Twins Syndicate author Children/youth 28885 Carroll Lewis Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 1898 Children/youth 514 Alcott Louisa May Little Women 1988 Children/youth 120 Stevenson Robert Louis Treasure Island 1894 Children/youth 35997 Kipling Rudyard Jungle Book 1936 Children/youth 3005 Appleton Victor Tom Swift and his Airship Syndicate author Children/youth 39784 Mother Goose Children/youth 18732 Aesop's Fables Classics 11000 Clay Albert Tobias Gilgamesh 1925 Classics 7768 Lamb Charles The Adventures of Ulysses 1834 Classics 2383 Chaucer Geoffrey Canterbury Tales 1400 Purves David Liang 1873 Classics 5668 Scott Jonathan The Arabian Nights Entertainments 1829 Burton Richard 1890 Classics 1497 Plato Republic -347 Classics 24269 Homer The Odyssey of Homer -650 Cowper William 1800 Fantasy 829 Swift Jonathan Gulliver's Travels 1745 Fiction 5231 Trollope Anthony The Way we Live Now 1882 Fiction 730 Dickens Charles Oliver Twist 1870 Fiction 1260 Bront Charlotte Jane Eyre 1855 Fiction 768 Bront Emily Wuthering Heights 1848 Fiction 145 Eliot George Middlemarch 1880 Fiction 14155 Flaubert Gustave Madame Bovary 1880 Fiction 209 James Henry The Turn of the Screw 1916 Fiction 215 London Jack Call of the Wild 1916 Fiction 4300 Joyce James Ulysses 1941 Fiction 42671 Austen Jane Pride and Prejudice 1817 Fiction 14591 von Goethe Johann Wolfgang Faust 1832 Taylor Bayard 1878 Fiction 39452 Bunyan John Pilgrim's Progress 1688 Fiction 219 Conrad Joseph Heart of Darkness 1924 Fiction 103 Verne Jules Around the World in 80 Days 1905 Fiction 160 Chopin Kate Awakening 1904 Fiction 2600 Tolstoy Leo War and Peace 1910 Aylmer Maude 1939 Fiction 45 Montgomery Lucy Maud Anne of the Green Gables 1942 Fiction 84 Shelley Mary Frankenstein 1851 Fiction 33 Hawthorne Nathaniel The Scarlet Letter 1864 Fiction 73 Crane Stephen The Red Badge of Courage 1900 Fiction 27 Hardy Thomas Far from the Madding Crowd 1928 Fiction 135 Hugo Victor Les Misrables 1885 Fiction 1245 Woolf Virginia Night and Day 1941 Fiction 599 Thackeray William Makepeace Vanity Fair 1863 History 18 Hamilton Alexander Federalist Papers 1826 History 816 de Tocqueville Alexis Democracy in America 1859 Reeve Henry 1895 History 25717 731 732 733 734 735 736 890 891 892 893 894 895 Gibbon Edward The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire 1974 History 5199 Shackleton Ernest South! 1922 History 23 Douglass Frederick The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 1895 Horror 345 Stoker Bram Dracula 1912 Horror 41 Irving Washington The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 1859 Humor 972 Bierce Ambrose The Devil's Dictionary 1914 Humor 308 Jerome Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat 1927 Humor 74 Twain Mark Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1911 Humor 86 Twain Mark A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 1910 Humor 844 Wilde Oscar The Importance of Being Ernest 1900 Humor 19942 Voltaire Candide 1778 Mathematics 201 Abbott Edwin Flatland 1926 Mystery 1661 Doyle Arthur Conan The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 1930 Non-fiction 575 Bacon Francis The Essays of Francis Bacon 1626 Non-fiction 1717 Chesterton G.K. What's Wrong with the World 1936 Non-fiction 205 Thoreau Henry David "Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" 1862 Non-fiction 769 Okakura Kakuzo The Book of Tea 1913 Non-fiction 61 Marx Karl Communist Manifesto 1883 Non-fiction 16643 Emerson Ralph Waldo Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson 1882 Non-fiction 4200 Pepys Samuel The Diary of Samuel Pepys 1703 Non-fiction 3755 Paine Thomas Common Sense 1809 Poetry 8800 Alighieri Dante "The Divine Comedy by Dante, Illustrated" 1321 Note: multi-file HTML Poetry 19 Longfellow Henry Wadsworth Song of Hiawatha 1882 Poetry 20 Milton John Paradise Lost 1674 Poetry 11101 Coleridge Samuel Taylor The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1834 Poetry 38877 Yeats W.B. Poems 1939 Poetry 1322 Whitman Walt Leaves of Grass 1892 Poetry 16328 Anonymous Beowulf 1928 Reference 10681 Roget Peter Mark Roget's Thesaurus 1869 Reference 1 Declaration of Independence Reference 2 Bill of Rights Reference 4938 U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses Religion 17 Smith Joseph Book of Mormon 1844 Religion 274 Luther Martin Martin Luther's 95 Theses 1546 Religion 10 Anonymous "The Bible, Old and New Testaments, King James Version" Religion 7145 Egyptian Book of the Dead Budge E. A. Wallis 1934 Religion 2388 "The Song Celestial; Or, Bhagavad-Gt" Arnold Edwin 1904 Science 944 Darwin Charles Voyage of the Beagle 1882 Science 59 Descartes Ren Discourse on Method 1650 Theatre 5333 Jonson Ben Every Man in his Humor 1637 Western 1300 Grey Zane Riders of the Purple Sage Syndicate author Criteria Life+70 English only One item per author "If the item is part of a set, I included the set (for example, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)" "When there are multiple versions, I usually chose the one with the better HTML and images" Original publication before 1923 "Death dates of authors, illustrators & translators: prior to 1944 (life+70)" World copyright guidelines: http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html#whatpd Some notable exclusions "Sun Tzu, The Art of War" Translator death date "Marcel Proust, Rememberance of Times Past" Translator death date HG Wells Author Death Date Einstein Author death date Machievelli's The Prince Translator death date Peter Pan Copyright exception in the UK

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people used to
by bowerbird 30 Aug '13

30 Aug '13

people used to care about project gutenberg... -bowerbird

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The Principal Problem of Today's Public-Domain E-Books
by Alexander Avenarius 19 Jul '13

19 Jul '13

Hello all, The (to my mind) best software for reading e-books on any platform, Marvin, www.marvinapp.com , is nearing its iPhone release, while the iPad version has also seen dramatic improvements over the recent months. I gave away all my Kindle devices to friends and family over the last few months -- Marvin's features simply blow Kindle (et al.) out of water, and there's no going back now for me. :-) Below is an essay I sent to the Marvin Beta email list earlier today, and because I discuss Project Gutenberg there, I'm forwarding a copy of that post to this list. Alex. Avenarius www.aboq.org ***** THE PRINCIPAL PROBLEM OF TODAY'S PUBLIC-DOMAIN E-BOOKS To me, the principal problem with all the "free"/public-domain e-books one finds floating on the Web nowadays, is not -- with a single crucial exception* -- their insufficient, inelegant, or amateurish formatting (such as that of headings), but the principal problem for me is the lack of proper bibliographical sourcing of the electronic editions -- or the choice of a poor paper edition as the source for producing the electronic edition. * The crucial exception is when formatting carries *meaning* -- then it must be retained faithfully. For example, if a word within a sentence is printed in italics, this can alter the meaning/tone of the entire sentence. To fail to reproduce the word printed in italics in the electronic edition, is inexcusable. Yet this is frequently a problem especially with the earliest Project Gutenberg files, which were based on plain-text, where advanced formatting was not possible. Some producers of such early editions completely skipped the reproduction of italics (inexcusable!), while others sought to reproduce italics using crude means (such as ALL CAPS) -- which is lame but at least tolerable. The problem with Project Gutenberg is that to this day (!), whenever users search for the e-book of a famous literary work, the Project Gutenberg search engine (and others) will seemingly suggest for primary download precisely one of those earliest, and therefore most fault-ridden, editions of the famous work. Why? Well, because over the years (and even decades, by now), the early, faulty edition has (sadly but logically...) accumulated the biggest number of downloads. Here one can see that the number of downloads alone does *not* equal higher quality -- in fact, in the case of Project Gutenberg, it often signals *bad* quality. Yet the general public does not realize this. And so, even though (say) _Huckleberry Finn_ may today be available in Project Gutenberg in various editions, the general reader will typically download and read the *worst* (= earliest) edition of them all. While a corrected, meticulously produced electronic edition of the same book, may frequently be ignored, "because it has so few downloads". :-( A "chicken and egg" issue, in a sense. But, apart from this exception regarding formatting (when formatting carries *meaning*), the principal issue is the lack of proper bibliographical sourcing. The only books suitable for study from the scholarly point of view, are those that retain the *exact* content of the books as they were originally published -- during the writer's lifetime, and ideally, under the author's supervision. No revisions, modernizations, etc., of the author's texts, especially performed after the writer's death, are permissible from the scholarly point of view. The only tolerable edition for scholars is one that in the German language is called "wort- und zeichengetreu", meaning: retaining every single word, and every single punctuation sign (!), *exactly* as they were in the authoritative edition released during the writer's lifetime. The issue of punctuation should not be underestimated: no other linguistic feature gets as much abused and wilfully distorted in so-called "modern" editions, as arbitrary changes to the original punctuation in a book. In the world of paper books, there is a wonderful US edition called "Library of America", which releases books based on the "wort- und zeichengetreu" principle. So, what we need in the electronic environment, are editions of the same quality, as "Library of America" has on paper. Note: LoA is now also starting to publish some of its releases in the electronic format, but they tend to be terribly expensive -- dozens of dollars for a single public-domain book; that is hardly the way to win over the general public. Rather, the producers of electronic editions of books should take care, before producing an EPUB version of a book, to select a reliable paper edition as the source, and retain it *exactly*. The problem is: finding a release of (say) _Huckleberry Finn_ from Mark Twain's lifetime, is more difficult, especially for the typical "amateur/volunteer digitizer", than just reaching for a random (but corrupted in the supposedly "modern" way) paperbook edition of the same work released in our own time. Well, but at *least* if you don't bother to select a reliable source paper edition when producing an electronic version of a book, you should *exactly* indicate in your electronic edition, which paper edition it was that served as your source. I find that this information is typically lacking in the free e-books one finds on the Internet. In fact, if the information is present, it is frequently deliberately *faked*, to escape copyright concerns. That is: a volunteer may take a present-day paper edition of _Huckleberry Finn_, produce an electronic version of it, but then, in the final electronic file, indicate that an edition from (say) 1914 had been the source -- just so that no one starts wondering about copyrights for the electronic file. Yet the wording in the electronic file may well be from 1997, despite the year "1914" stated at the beginning of the file. Bottom line: it's frequently a mess. :-( I only had a brief look at Marvin's default "Library" before deleting it (by the way, is there an option to re-download it at a later time? I can't find it), but I'm afraid the books Kris included in his sample collection, suffered from the deficiences described above: not just (perhaps) the insufficient formatting of headings and such (which are largely cosmetic issues I'd be willing to tolerate), but especially a lack of proper bibliographic sourcing of each book. Do the books included in Marvin's default "Library" clearly state on which paper editions they are based; and are these the *optimal* paper editions on which to base an electronic edition? And, do they only *state* those editions to have been the source, or has someone actually verified that the electronic text truly conforms to the text in that particular paper edition, preserving the "wort- und zeichengetreu" principle? That is, is every word, and every punctuation sign in the electronic edition, *exactly* the same as in the *optimal* source paper edition? If not, then those electronic editions are not suitable for scholarly reading. Note: I have nothing, in principle, against "modernized" editions of classics. I just would never read them myself -- but reader tastes differ, and other readers might prefer a modernized electronic edition over the original one. This can be compared to digital music: an audiophile would refuse to listen to music encoded in 128kbps MP3 files -- such files simply do not faitfhully enough preserve the full flavour of the original recording. An audiophile would probably only accept a loss-free FLAC digital file, nothing less -- no MP3 recordings of any kind. Because I'm no audiophile, I'm OK with those inferior 128kbps MP3 files. But, I *am* what you might call a "digital bibliophile" -- in that nothing except the full flavour of the original edition of a literary work, will suffice me. Just like an audiophile will only accept a FLAC recording (or equivalent), and nothing less -- in the same way, I only accept "wort- und zeichengetreu" editions of literary works, of the "Library of America" type, and nothing less. So, I have nothing against modernized editions of classics -- provided that they are *clearly labeled* as such, and provided that they are not *the only editions* offered to the reader of electronic books. Sadly, neither of these conditions is typically met nowadays. A typical public-domain e-book will either entirely forego stating its source -- the paper edition on which it is based; or it will only briefly (lacking sufficient detail) state it "pro forma", while actually being based on a different (contemporary) edition; or it will have chosen an unsuitable, *modernized* paper version of a classic as its source, without giving the reader a choice. The reader of electronic literature nowadays is typically only given a single choice: "Here's this [modernized] electronic EPUB edition of the classic -- take it or leave it!" The "modernized" part is frequently only implied, and not even stated explicitly to warn the reader who might *not* wish to read a "modernized" text. This is clearly unacceptable, from the scholarly point of view. And if I remember correctly, the e-books included in Marvin's default "Library" suffer from the ills mentioned above, too. Due to this sad state of things, I just can't switch my studies of literature to Marvin completely. For many classic literary works I'm reading, a reliable electronic editon ("wort- und zeichengetreu") simply isn't available. I, therefore, need to locate a *photographed* PDF file of the original paper edition (or photograph the book myself, using the fabulous Scanner Pro app on the iPhone), and read *that* edition, clumsily, in GoodReader. I'm simply not given any other choice! :-( For example, my no. 1 favourite writer is Leo Tolstoy. Will I be able to read his possibly most famous work, the novel _Anna Karenina_, in Marvin? No... Only in GoodReader. I read Tolstoy in Russian, but as far as I'm aware, there is not a single reliable Russian EPUB edition of the novel available online, anywhere, despite expired copyrights. There are countless *modernized* EPUB editions of _Anna Karenina_, but apparently no EPUB edition that would satisfy scholarly needs. And so, I will need to read _Anna Karenina_ in GoodReader, in this photographed PDF file of an original 1889 Russian edition: https://www.sugarsync.com/pf/D6495512_1736831_99821?directDownload=true The first Russian original book edition appeared in 1877/8, so I'm getting pretty close there; not many corruptions will have been introduced into the text within the 12 intervening years, especially because Tolstoy was around until 1910, and wouldn't have knowingly permitted a "modernized" corruption of his text. Finally, a separate issue is that of translations. Is Marvin meant to be software for an international audience, or just for English-speaking (English-reading) users? If the former, why should Marvin's default "Library" only include books in English, and not also in some other languges? Why Dostoyevsky in English tranlation, but not (also, or primarily) in original Russian? Why Kafka in English translation, but not (also, or primarily) in original German? Why Plato in English translation, but not (also, or primarily) in original Old Greek? Etc. :-) Naturally, it's easy to criticise, and a lot more difficult to suggest some practical alternatives for Kris instead. If, indeed, those alternatives exist. Does a reliable German EPUB edition of Kafka exist, a reliable Russian EPUB edition of Dostoyevsky, let alone a reliable Old Greek EPUB edition of Plato? It must be feared that the answer to all three of these questions is... no. :-( It should be the task of literary scholars and literary institutes around the world, in the upcoming decades, to ensure that *reliable* EPUB editions of all classic works, fully meeting all scholarly criteria, become freely available, so that Kris would then only have the very easy and pleasurable task of "randomly" picking whatever classic he prefers, in whatever *original and/or translated* language, and include it in his sample Marvin "Library". -- Alex. Avenarius www.aboq.org [sent via The Bat! 5.4]

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the wiki and the community
by bowerbird 07 Jul '13

07 Jul '13

it's great p.g. has a wiki, now that it's chased the community away... -bowerbird

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