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Early ebook history info wanted; "Alice"; Brown Corpus; Vannevar Bush; Asimov
by Jon Noring 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

Everyone, In doing some research on ebook history, which naturally will prominently include Project Gutenberg because of the obvious impact PG and Michael Hart has had on etexts and ebooks, I'm trying to reconstruct a fact database which includes the who, what, when, where, why and how of the various seminal events. So, I've just created a specialized Yahoo Group to collect/archive the snippets of facts that come up: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ebook-history/ You're welcome to join and post any information you know on ebook history. Especially wanted is the pre-1990 period: commercial, academic, and public (free). We should collect this information before it is lost to the mists of time. ***** Anyway, in doing research on what is found in the early Google Groups archive on PG, Bowerbird recommended that I dig through textfiles.com, which appears to have archived a large number of ASCII texts that existed on various BBS systems of the 1980's and early 1990's (its coverage/completeness is unknown, however.) So, focusing on the first "modern" classic book that PG issued, "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (text #11, officially released 01 Jan 1991), I dug through textfiles.com to see what they had. The oldest copy I found there was "alice11.txt", Millenium Fulcrum Edition 1.1, dated 1990 (by copyright claim.) See: http://www.textfiles.com/etext/FICTION/alice11.txt That was issued in the very early era when PG was still affiliated with Duncan Research. As an aside, it is interesting to note the huge differences in that early text's boilerplate compared with the present boilerplate. PG has evolved quite a bit in handling the legal aspects (particularly copyright) of its texts, which is to be fully expected. So this text is a nice historical reminder of how far PG has come in the last 16 years. I was hoping, though, to find a much older text version of "Alice". Bowerbird stated his belief that Michael Hart keypunched Alice a lot earlier than 1990/91, but so far I have not found that version, assuming it was distributed and ended up in some BBS or online archive. So, Michael, if you're reading this, did you keypunch "Alice" well before 1990, where did you distribute it, and does a copy exist somewhere? That would truly be a historical work, especially if it was "digiscribed" in the 1970's or early 80's (BBS systems began maturing in the mid- to late-1980's.) A question for others reading this: where else should I search for information on digitized books placed on BBS in the 1980's? Were there others besides Michael who "digiscribed" public domain books and texts in the 1980's and placed them online? (I plan to dig through more of the textfiles area to see what book texts are dated in the 1980's, if any, and who did them.) ***** Another interesting thing I discovered in my research -- and which some of you undoubtedly know about -- is the "Brown Corpus": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus In the late-1960's, the partial/full texts of a variety of 500 works published in 1961 were keypunched for computer use (a maximum of 2000 words for each work), totalling a little over 1,000,000 words. The purpose was solely for lexicostatistics and not for direct reading. For this purpose the Brown Corpus is quite famous (enough to rate its own wikipedia article.) Only a few years later, in 1971 Michael Hart keypunched into a computer "The Declaration of Independence" for the purpose of electronic "distribution" and direct reading by others, so Michael is, as far as is now known, the first person documented to experiment with electronic distribution of readable, published digital texts. (I plan to contact the Brown Corpus people, if any are still alive, to see if there were experiments at Brown, or elsewhere, on this in the 1960's.) But nevertheless, to see major portions of published texts and books being keypunched and processed by computers in the 1960's is truly remarkable. ***** Another really cool thing, I found a Usenet message from 1987 which, in turn, is a fairly comprehensive description of an Atlantic Monthly article written by Vannevar Bush in July 1945, entitled "As We May Think". It is beyond amazing the insights Vannevar Bush had relevant to ebooks, to elibraries (like PG's) and the role of individuals and volunteers. Again, some of you have probably read Vannevar Bush's article, but for those who haven't... Usenet summary: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hypercard/msg/660f72a6e3b5f7a2?… And the actual article is reproduced here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/194507/bush ***** Finally, Mark Bernstein, the founder of Eastgate, which in 1987 issued several contemporary hypertext fiction ebooks on floppy disk and CD-ROM, mentioned to me Asimov's mid-50's book "Foundation" where ebooks are implicit. Has anyone read this book and can comment on Asimov's 1950's vision for ebooks? Thanks! Jon Noring

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Editing jpg images
by Andrew Sly 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

The latest of a series of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman books I've been adapting for PG from another website is "The Portion of Labor". The person who produced this has also made some illustrations of availible. I've prepared an html file, and the unchanged images here: http://www.victoria.tc.ca/~sly/portion.htm Would anyone like to work these images into usable shape for PG purposes, or suggest how I might want to deal with them? Andrew

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re: [dp-pg] re: [gutvol-d] google and the translation thing
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 10 Mar '06

10 Mar '06

donovan said: > I can see this revealing > (or at least quantifying) > the disturbingly high rate of > spelling and grammatical errors. actually, hit-differentials are an excellent method to _detect_ spelling and grammatical errors, so it shouldn't be that difficult to clean the corpus quite thoroughly. but that's not the "knowledge" that google might glean that is so scary to me. that involves putting together disparate pieces of information that were never intended to be connected, but nonetheless exist out in cyberspace and _can_ be joined with enough "smarts". especially if you can dip into a few "private" databases, like the ones with credit-card info, you could build quite a dossier on any person (or place or thing) out there... -bowerbird p.s. in the news yesterday were reports that yet another credit-card database was hacked. does it strike anyone else as odd that "security" can be so lapse on this personal and private data at the same time that the corporations are wanting to "lock up" all their content? i'm beginning to think we should just all _pretend_ that d.r.m. works great to put them at ease, knowing that it'll all be cracked a few years down the line, and we'll be done with it...

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Grimms Maerchen
by Michael Engel 08 Mar '06

08 Mar '06

There is a Grimm database (i.e. text files) of the following books on the internet * Brüder Grimm: »Kinder- und Hausmärchen (7. Ausgabe, 1857)« * Brüder Grimm: »Kinder- und Hausmärchen (2. Ausgabe, 1819)« * Jacob Grimm: »Kleinere Schriften 1 (2. Auflage, 1879)« http://www.lg.fukuoka-u.ac.jp/~ynagata/grimm_database.html They have downloadable Latex files Is that of interest for project Gutenberg ? regards Michael Engel

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Re: [gutvol-d] Sweat of brow
by Wallace J.McLean 07 Mar '06

07 Mar '06

> ----- Original Message ----- > From Tony Baechler <tb(a)baechler.net> > Date Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:22:46 -0800 > To Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > Subject Re: [gutvol-d] Sweat of brow > > Hi. sorry to nitpick here, and I admit this is out of my league, but > wouldn't a plain text edition remove any and all fonts or typography > anyway? There are still line lengths and possibly some editorial decisions that have been made along the way. It's a remote chance, but there may be room in the legal fine print for PD texts that would disclaim or renounce the copyright that may subsist in the e-text, where, and to the extent that such a copyright is recognized in national copyright law, and where, and to the extent that such a disclaimer or renunciation would be recognized by national law. There is no express provision in Canadian law for a disclaim of copyright, but there is some case law that says that such a disclaimer would estop any subsequent claim for infringement.

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an example of a .pdf with excellent e-book design
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 07 Mar '06

07 Mar '06

with so many examples of bad .pdf design out there, it gives me great pleasure to be able to point to one where the design is well-done, on wonderful poetry: > http://www.poetrysuperhighway.com/ToHellWithRL.pdf -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Re: [BP] monday morning quarterback -- #01
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Mar '06

06 Mar '06

cori said: > If however, it's Bowerbird's writing > that gives you an allergic reaction think of it as "fiber", it's good for the diet... :+) > you have some reading time free, > you'd be welcome to drop by the > Distributed Proofreaders' Smoothreading Pool, > where a wide variety of complete books can be read, > prior to their final Project Gutenberg upload & archiving. smoothreading is definitely cool. for anybody who wants to volunteer in user-creation of our global cyberlibrary, but doesn't have the time and energy to digitize a whole book yourself, know you can do your fair share by smoothreading... it's fun and easy, yeah, but it's also _necessary_. -bowerbird

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Re: [BP] monday morning quarterback -- #01
by Cori 06 Mar '06

06 Mar '06

On 3/6/06, Bowerbird(a)aol.com wrote: > i've started a new weekly "series" on best-practices > for people digitizing e-books from paper-books... > you don't have to be a member of the "bpsuper" yahoogroup > in order to read the messages. but if yahoogroups gives you > an allergic reaction nonetheless, the issue is also posted here: If however, it's Bowerbird's writing that gives you an allergic reaction, but you have some reading time free, you'd be welcome to drop by the Distributed Proofreaders' Smoothreading Pool, where a wide variety of complete books can be read, prior to their final Project Gutenberg upload & archiving. http://www.pgdp.net/c/tools/post_proofers/smooth_reading.php You don't have to be a member of DP to visit and download books to read! If you'd like to add comments (by editing the text and leeving [*typo: leaving?] notes,) you would need to create a new account in order to upload your edited copy. As a post-processor, I greatly appreciate the people who have found time to smooth-read my books - they pick out things I just couldn't find any other way, and every little query raised and checked is one less thing for errata @ PG to worry about in 42 years time :) Have fun, Cori

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monday morning quarterback #01 is now up
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 06 Mar '06

06 Mar '06

"monday morning quarterback", #01, is up... "m.m.q." is my new weekly "series" on best-practices for people digitizing e-books from paper-books... issue #1 is now available at the "bpsuper" listserve: > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bpsuper/message/3 you don't have to be a member of the "bpsuper" yahoogroup in order to read the messages. but if yahoogroups gives you an allergic reaction nonetheless, the issue is also posted here: > http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu/bowerbird/mmq/mmq01.txt learn what this "monday morning quarterback" says you are doing wrong, and what you're doing right... -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] Sweat of brow
by Wallace J.McLean 06 Mar '06

06 Mar '06

----- Original Message ----- >From Greg Newby <gbnewby(a)pglaf.org> Date Sat, 4 Mar 2006 13:45:33 -0800 To Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject Re: [gutvol-d] Sweat of brow >> Quaere; does "edition" or "typographical arrangement" copyright >> subsist in PG e-texts, in countries which recognize those types of >> copyright? > > Short answer: we only try to follow US laws, and I'm unaware > of anything like this provision in the US. Yes, but even if there were, ***the copyright status of a PG work in another country*** is determined by the national law of that country, not of the US. > It might be this type of copyright (or whatever it might be called) > would play a role in the EU and elsewhere...though in practice, if a > physical book is old enough to be public domain based on author's death > date, probably any typography copyright has also expired. Yes, but that's missing the point of typographical or edition copyright: a new typographical arrangement or edition of the work, in that form, has a copyright attached to it. Not the work, the typographical arrangement or edition of it. PG is infringing neither the copyright in the work nor the copyright in the typographical arrangement; but the PG edition may have copyright status in a country that DOES recognize typographical arrangements or editions, subject to national treatment and shorter-term provisions in that country's national law.

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