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OpenReader vs. the troll in the basement [re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries]
by David H. Rothman 22 May '06

22 May '06

> that "strategy" was worn out years ago here.. But you're STILL a troll ;-) And a censor, too. Your reverted to the old subject line without the T Word, and I don't mean "TeleRead." Doesn't this suggest that lists should be run with a little bit of order in mind? Well, blog areas, too, including the TeleBlog. Here's the deal. You gratuitously attacked OpenReader out of the blue. After my present message, we'll both have had our say; and now I think the PG list should get back to being the PG list. Meanwhile thanks for documenting that your source code is not open, and that you're really after 200K rather than 50K, if you're serious about selling the code. > as for my app itself, i've always said it's available for free. but not disclosure of the source code? this is bizarre. evil corporate two-guy osoft will offer downloads of dotreader for free and publicly reveal the source code of the basic reader. and yet the e.e. cummings of the performance poetry circuit wants 200K for his code. i am worried. surely we are all doomed to the maw of mammon if even poets are demanding 200k. of course, the real reason could be that you're ashamed of the source code--hence, the 200K price, if financial gain isn't the object. sure you don't want to share your app's code? > they should just go off and write it themselves, so > i don't think you could call me a very good businessman. Oh, well, so much for your added value. > p.s. evidently, book expo ain't keeping you very busy. kinda slow around the openreader booth, is it? :+) ROFL. Um, the show ended yesterday. I drove Jon Noring out to see Mt. Vernon (almost all work up until now), and, after a TeleBlog post, I'm gonna return to follow-up. Wait. Might do a few of the just-received notes first. Not sure. > considering the costs involve application of heavy markup... > i'm not sure how you will ever be able to convince anyone > that your cost-benefit ratio will be the best one available. Hey, we care very much about creation tools and the like to simplify things. Your own format isn't up to the range of content that OpenReader can handle, thereby reducing the chances of collecting your $200K, if that's what you want. Good luck at it, however. And now I suggest that you do the Netiquette routine and avoid a reply, now that we've both had our say. Remember, you were the one who broached these issues. Again, best of luck. Despite more than a little provocation, my big interest is in advancing OpenReader rather than harming ZML. Thanks, David David Rothman | davidrothman(a)openreader.org | 703-370-6540 http://www.openreader.org http://www.teleread.org/blog ------------Original Message------------ From: Bowerbird(a)aol.com To: gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org, Bowerbird(a)aol.com Date: Mon, May-22-2006 12:11 PM Subject: re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries geez, david, you'll have to do _something_ more original than calling me a "troll" here; that "strategy" was worn out years ago here... as for your fantasy that i "object" to openreader because i have "competitive business interests", what exactly would those "business interests" be? my source code is available for $200,000, (not $50k), but i will tell anyone who wants to buy it not to bother, that they should just go off and write it themselves, so i don't think you could call me a very good businessman. as for my app itself, i've always said it's available for free. again, not a good businessman. what can i say? i'm a poet. a good businessman would get a booth at book expo, and hawk the product there. just like you're doing now. for the record, i wish the osoft people all the best. you were very lucky they came along when they did, and i'll be glad when they finally turn your precious "openreader" format into something besides vapor. at that point, we will be able to measure its benefits and its costs, to decide how worthwhile its cost-benefit will be. considering the costs involve application of heavy markup, and similar benefits can be delivered with lighter markup, i'm not sure how you will ever be able to convince anyone that your cost-benefit ratio will be the best one available. but hey, microsoft has been able to do that for _years_, so don't give up... -bowerbird p.s. evidently, book expo ain't keeping you very busy. kinda slow around the openreader booth, is it? :+) _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 May '06

22 May '06

geez, david, you'll have to do _something_ more original than calling me a "troll" here; that "strategy" was worn out years ago here... as for your fantasy that i "object" to openreader because i have "competitive business interests", what exactly would those "business interests" be? my source code is available for $200,000, (not $50k), but i will tell anyone who wants to buy it not to bother, that they should just go off and write it themselves, so i don't think you could call me a very good businessman. as for my app itself, i've always said it's available for free. again, not a good businessman. what can i say? i'm a poet. a good businessman would get a booth at book expo, and hawk the product there. just like you're doing now. for the record, i wish the osoft people all the best. you were very lucky they came along when they did, and i'll be glad when they finally turn your precious "openreader" format into something besides vapor. at that point, we will be able to measure its benefits and its costs, to decide how worthwhile its cost-benefit will be. considering the costs involve application of heavy markup, and similar benefits can be delivered with lighter markup, i'm not sure how you will ever be able to convince anyone that your cost-benefit ratio will be the best one available. but hey, microsoft has been able to do that for _years_, so don't give up... -bowerbird p.s. evidently, book expo ain't keeping you very busy. kinda slow around the openreader booth, is it? :+)

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 22 May '06

22 May '06

brad said: > If you haven't seen this, it's well worth the read. kevin kelly is always good for a sweeping overview. in spite of the tone of the article, the only "newish" idea in it is the notion that "books will read each other" and become synergistically interlinked, and that idea is one that is both interesting and perplexing at the same time. how -- _exactly_ -- is this supposed to happen? neither links nor tags, in their current form anyway, indicate an association between two external entities. even the most basic of building blocks in that regard -- a clean "a.p.i." into the cyberlibrary -- is absent... heck, the official policy at project gutenberg is that people must _not_ "deep-link" into the _content_ of your books per se, but rather only to a catalog page. -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 May '06

20 May '06

carlo said: > Just a possibility: > if a book quotes another, > and both are available > a link can be created > from one to the other. yes, an exact quote is pretty easy to locate. and of course, in most books, an exact quote will already have been credited explicitly there, so there's not even a need to do the search digitally (although it might be easier to do it programmatically than to try to locate all of these references "manually", at least if the false alarms from common expressions were manageable). > Easy if an exact quotation is available, > more intriguing if the reference is vague. the recent cases of plagiarism in books coming out of major publishing houses comes to mind here, doesn't it? it shouldn't be too hard to write a routine that would do a relatively good job rounding up "fuzzy" versions of quotes, as long as they had some substantial similarity... > Another could be to find similar content > even in absence of an explicit quotation, > and have a link from a section of a book to > a list of sections of other books. This might be > a detection of keywords coupled with a keyword search. well yes, this is what i would think most people have in mind when they talk about "the pages of books reading each other". and since we will be indexing each book anyway, it would be rather easy to set up a "semantic profile" of each book detailing any idiosyncratic words that are fairly common within its pages. books that have similar profiles could be linked to each other, and then pages or sections within one book that are similar to those in the other book could be linked together too, certainly. amazon already does this in a fashion with their listings of the "statistically improbable phrases" -- sips -- within each book, and the "capitalized phrases" -- caps -- so that's fairly obvious. amazon's "sips" and "caps" are interesting because you can click on them, and see a list of other books where they also appear... amazon also does an overall concordance, but i'd guess that that isn't as useful for earmarking a book in a set of its peers. (well, it looks like they formulate what's called a "tag cloud", with links to the actual occurrences, so that could be useful. still, i think the "sips" and "caps" would be more meaningful.) lastly, amazon also lists "books on related topics" for each book. i don't know if the quality of these associations is up to snuff -- amazon's version of "collaborative filtering" is a very bad joke -- but i'd imagine that it has utility for a range of book-buyers... (ok, more exploration tells me they do indeed use an overlap of "sips" as their main tool in discerning "books on related topics".) for those people who've never fooled around over at amazon, i've appended a sample of some of their info for a specific book. of course, what we _really_ want is not just to be _informed_ about similar books, but to have actual, honest-to-goodness hyperlinks between 'em, so we can point-and-click at our desks, rather than just order paper-copies to be delivered to our desks. > Both are already possible at the present state of technology. these and more, absolutely. tagging and annotation are other options that get thrown around a lot. the idea here would be that interested users would form a "folksonomy" that would link related books, perhaps with a commentary of their own. this would give us the type of "intelligence" that can only be exercised by actual human brains, and which might complement and/or supersede the "brute force" approach of automatic computerized semantic analysis. in another vein, the cats at the institute for the future of the book seem fond of author/reader interaction in the actual _writing_ of the book, in a process where a book grows "organically", against the backdrop of the cyberlibrary. in this approach, links might _predate_ the content -- in essence be a "cause" of the content, rather than merely an "effect" -- which is an interesting view... likewise, david rothman's hobbyhorse these days is "blogs inside of books". the initial version of an openreader viewer-app will support this capability, so david has been raving about this feature like it's some kind of epiphany. he is even of the opinion that amazon -- which announced such a feature will be available soon in mobipocket -- could save themselves "a fortune in development costs" by using openreader instead of mobipocket. given that it's relatively trivial to embed this capability, i'm not sure what he's thinking. i would go over to his blog and ask him, but i've been semi-officially banned -- i'm not banned, but many of my posts have now permanently disappeared -- because i have this annoying habit of saying things that do not go along with the official spin that he likes to hype over there. so i would certainly hope that his put-a-blog-in-your-book capability allows an author to ban any "trolls", because we wouldn't want to experience any disagreement now, would we? either way, amazon seems to have had no trouble implementing a "discussion" section feature -- currently labeled as "beta" -- on its webpage for each book. this is in addition to the "wiki" which it already had, the purpose of which i am not all that sure, and haven't investigated, because the overwhelming nature of all of the _stuff_ on each amazon page gives me bad information overload, and after a while i just feel a strong need to get the heck out of there! :+) *** at any rate, these are some of the ideas that are bubbling at the surface. and though some of them sound interesting, to be sure, i also find that i am left wondering if all of this "books reading each other" stuff is gonna lead to something immense that leapfrogs us to the next level of super-intelligence, or whether it's all much ado about not too much... time will tell, i guess... -bowerbird p.s. here is some of the information that amazon gives for a 1997 book... Internet Dreams: Archetypes, Myths, and Metaphors (Paperback) edited by Mark Stefik, with Introduction by Vinton Cerf First Sentence: We are born into a world rich in art, invention, and knowledge Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): electronic mail metaphor, digital library metaphor, electronic sketch book, digital tickets, electronic brokerage effect, digital property rights, networked libraries, digital works, marketplace metaphor, superhighway metaphor, digital library system, trusted systems, digital book, dream session, editing test, digital reality, new design methods, usage rights, digital library project, electronic hierarchies, virtual rape, warrior archetype, digital publishing, fire bringer, electronic mail address Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): Library of Congress, Jeremy Taylor, United States, Gutenberg Bible, America Online, British Library, New York, Vannevar Bush, World Wide Web, Boston Spa, Joshua Lederberg, Lynn Conway, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Turing Test, Bungle Affair, Carver Mead, Challenging Assumptions, The Machine Stops, Yellow Pages, Alexander Eliot, Civil War, Digital Property Trust, Internet Companion, Libraries of the Future Concordance These are the 100 most frequently used words in this book: access another article available between book case changes come communication community computer copy costs course design different digital dream dreammc electronic even example experience first form get good group however idea information internet joannel2 journals kinds know knowledge large library life market may means meeting members message metaphor methods might mud need network new now number often others own paper part participants people place players problem process project provide public publishers publishing read real repositories research rights room say see sense several should social society system take technology text things thus time two use used users virtual without work world Text Stats These statistics are computed from the text of this book. Readability -- Compared with books in All Categories Fog Index: 15.9 -- 75% are easier, 25% are harder Flesch Index: 40.0 -- 69% are easier, 31% are harder Flesch-Kincaid Index: 13.0 -- 76% are easier, 24% are harder Complexity Complex Words: 18% -- 66% have fewer, 34% have more Syllables per Word: 1.7 -- 65% have fewer, 35% have more Words per Sentence: 21.3 -- 77% have fewer, 23% have more Number of: Characters: 804,122 -- 83% have fewer, 17% have more Words: 129,664 -- 85% have fewer, 15% have more Sentences: 6,078 -- 73% have fewer, 27% have more Fun stats Words per Dollar: 4,987 Words per Ounce: 5,332

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re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 19 May '06

19 May '06

brad said: > This is exactly what I've been working on these past few years. > We'll be launching the spec (open and free) at the great! i look forward to playing with your stuff. -bowerbird

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UniPad 1.20 has been released
by Dave Fawthrop 18 May '06

18 May '06

Just got this Unipad is a programmers text editor which works in Unicode I have 1.0 which works well with internal huge font. Someone here may be interested |We are glad to inform you about the release of UniPad 1.20. |This upgrade is free of charge for all registered users. | | |Changes, corrections and new features: | |Upgrade to Unicode 4.1: | |o This version of UniPad incorporates over 1270 new characters that | have been added since Unicode 4.0. | |o New complete scripts are: | New Tai Lue, Buginese, Glagolitic, Coptic, Tifinagh, Syloti Nagri, | Old Persian, Kharoshthi. | |o Some scripts have been extended by adding new character blocks: | Arabic with Arabic Supplement, Georgian with Georgian Supplement, | Ethiopic with Ethiopic Supplement and Ethiopic Extented. | |o Some supplemental character blocks have been added: | Phonetic Extensions Supplement, Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement, | Supplemental Punctuation. | |o Other new blocks are: CJK Strokes, Modifier Tone Letters, Vertical Forms, | Ancient Greek Numbers, Ancient Greek Musical Notation. | |o Over 700 new characters have been added to the following existing character | blocks and scripts: | Latin Extended-B, Combining Diacritical Marks, Greek | and Coptic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic, Devanagari, Bengali | Tamil, Tibetan, Georgian, Ethiopic, Phonetic Extensions, General Punctuation, | Currency Symbols, Combining Diacritical Marks for Symbols, Letterlike | Symbols, Miscellaneous Technical, Miscellaneous Symbols, Miscellaneous | Mathematical Symbols-A, Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows, Enclosed CJK | Letters and Months, CJK Unified Ideographs, CJK Compatibility Ideographs, | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols. | |o For more information please visit the Unicode 4.1 page at the official web | site of the Unicode Consortium: <http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode4.1.0>. | | |New keyboards: | |o Dzongkha, Uyghur, Polish (Programer), Kannada, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek (Southern). | | |UniPad 1.20 is trialware. It runs in either unregistered or registered mode. Running UniPad in | |unregistered mode is free for anyone. Running UniPad in unregistred mode is "Session-Limited". After the | |session time you can save your work and restart UniPad for a new session. | | |If you register, you will be able to run UniPad in registered mode and this limitation will be removed. | |Download: | http:/www.unipad.org/download | |Registration: | http:/www.unipad.org/register -- Dave Fawthrop <hyphen(a)hyphenologist.co.uk>

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on the will to scan books and digitize their text
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 15 May '06

15 May '06

i said: > however, if the paper-book is in fairly good shape, and > its text is rather straightforward, and a best-of-breed > scanner is used, and the scans are done carefully, and > then properly treated (e.g., deskewed and regularized), > and o.c.r. is done with a best-of-breed program, then > auto-clean-up tools combined with normal spell-check > will produce quite accurate text, thank you very much... ...and... > so it's 600,000 scanned versus 10,000 proofed... > meaning that any people who want one of those > 590,000 that have been scanned but not proofed > will need to do the o.c.r. and proofing themselves, > providing they can locate the scan-set online... > sounds fair to me. of course, whether or not people will deem it necessary or even desirable to _do_the_work_ to get digital text is another question entirely. branko ran a poll at the teleread site and in the forums at distributed proofreaders, and the results indicate that people have little interest in digitizing their home library, the books they have sitting as paper-copies in their homes. over _half_ say they'd digitize them only if it could be done with _less_than_one_hour_per_book_. over one-quarter say they'd do it only if it took _less_than_ten_minutes_per_book_. a not-insignificant number want it happen almost _magically_, having it take it _less_than_one_minute_per_book. (telepathy?) since teleread specializes in creating unrealistic expectations, it would be tempting to chalk these poll results up to that, but alas, some respondents are people who actually digitize books. (but yes, the teleread respondents are even more out of touch.) it's somewhat shocking to understand that even people from distributed proofreaders say this, some of whom have likely spent more than ten minutes proofing _a_couple_pages_, so they have to know that time-frame is completely unrealistic. so this isn't just massive ignorance about the time required. the results tell us that _if_ they have a paper copy of a book, people seem to feel little need for a digital copy of the text. i know that i often tend to think from a mindset that posits that digital text has many advantages over the printed page, but people seem not to consider those advantages important. at least not enough to merit a non-trivial amount of their time. it seems only natural to extend the results, that if people have the scan-set of a book, they'd have little need for digital text... *** meanwhile, an article by kevin kelley in the new york times: > http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12vote.html?ex=1305086400 > &en=5b3554a76aad524a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss informs us a company in china has scanned 1.3 million unique titles in chinese, which it estimates is about half of the books published in the chinese language since 1949. that's right: _1.3_million_. already. and still going strong... while we americans can't even get to a paperless office, and publishers sue the daylights out of the one and only company in this country who is willing to scan our libraries, china is moving quickly to becoming a paperless country... so michael, in spite of the flack that people want to give you, it looks like you've been _undercounting_, by a wide margin... and maybe just maybe you're holding your "world e-book fair" on the wrong side of the globe... -bowerbird

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Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
by Brad Collins 15 May '06

15 May '06

If you haven't seen this, it's well worth the read. For those of you who don't know, the author, Kevin Kelly used to be the chief editor of Wired Magazine back in it's glory days during the great Bubble. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/magazine/14publishing.html?_r=1&oref=slog… b/ -- Brad Collins <brad(a)chenla.org>, Banqwao, Thailand

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Please how do I get my etexts displayed like this?
by Dave Fawthrop 15 May '06

15 May '06

My etexts are individual stories and/or poems which are known individually and were often published several times in their own right. see etext no 18175 from weekly newsletter >>> |Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories, by Florence Finch Kelly 18309 | [Illus.: Stanley L. Wood] | [Contents: Emerson's Wife]] | [ Colonel Kate's Protge] | [ The Kid of Apache Teju] | [ A Blaze on Pard Huff] | [ How Colonel Kate Won Her Spurs] | [ Hollyhocks] | [ The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of Johnson Sides] | [ A Piece of Wreckage] | [ The Story of a Chinee Kid] | [ Out of Sympathy] | [ An Old Roman of Mariposa] | [ Out of the Mouth of Babes] | [ Posey] | [ A Case of the Inner Imperative] | [Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/1/8/3/0/18309 ] | [Files: 18309.txt; 18309-8.txt; 18309-h.htm; ] <<< -- Dave Fawthrop <dave hyphenologist co uk> "Intelligent Design?" my knees say *not*. "Intelligent Design?" my back says *not*. More like "Incompetent design". Sig (C) Copyright Public Domain

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WAP books
by Greg Newby 14 May '06

14 May '06

I remember Marcello had done some work to allow www.gutenberg.org to work on mobile phones via the WAP method. We're working with someone to get a bunch more reformatted PG eBooks for mobile phones...copying them to wap.readingroo.ms (not yet running) from wap.mobilebooks.org Question: has anyone had success with their WAP-enabled phone via wap.mobilebooks.org ? Feedback or input would be valuable! Keep in mind, there are a *lot* of people with a *lot* of mobile phones. Making our eBooks "phone-friendly" will be a great accomplishment. -- Greg

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