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Re: [gutvol-d] Moving and Removing eBooks
by Joshua Hutchinson 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Hart" <hart(a)pglaf.org> > > On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Joshua Hutchinson wrote: > > > I do remember a discussion last month about a file format that is completely > > unaccesible (the reader no longer exists). There is one or two ebooks in > > the PG collection in this format. There was call to deprecate those > > versions into an OLD subfolder (or something like that) so that people > > coming to the site weren't confused. > > Everyone refers to their own suggestions as "better". . .as "reform," etc. > Well ... duh! Do you honestly think people would suggest things that they think are "worse" than what is already being done? The test is whether OTHER people think those ideas are "better". > > No one advocated deletion, only better cataloging. > > As for "only better cataloging". . .the obvious thing is simply to point > plainly to both versions, with a note that the Folio format requires a > proprietary reader. > Allow me to use our very first ebook as an example of how we don't link to everything available on many things already. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1 As you can see at the above link, we have a link to different formats. However, we only show one edition of each one. For instance, the plain text version links to edition 12. However, if you go look at the etext90 directory, you'll see that there is an edition 11 available in plain text. We don't link to it, though. You see, we keep old stuff, but we don't have to link to it from the bibrec pages. That is all people were advocating in this particular case. We have a precedent of deprecating some things. Why is this particular case any different (especially since this has more potential to cause confusion)? > > That is probably where Michael's dozen is coming from, because many people > > thought this was a sensible step to take (and basically only Michael thought > > it wasn't). > > Actually, the dozen comes from various discussions we've had over time. > Fair enough. It wasn't clear in your original post what "dozens" were referring to. I apologize for putting words in your mouth. > > Some of us try to remember the past as we plan for the future. > Rather a non-sensical thing to say in this context. No one advocated forgetting the past (i.e., deleting anything). They did advocate reorganizing how we access that past data. Josh

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Re: [gutvol-d] Marking Bold in text files
by Joshua Hutchinson 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

* should be used to indicate a footnote in a PG text (though there may be OLD examples of doing such). For instance, all DP-generated text's footnotes would mark the * as [A]. A numbered footnote would look like this [1]. Chances are, if any old texts use * as a footnote marker, when they get updated, that will probably be updated as well. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jonathan Walther" <krooger(a)debian.org> To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" <gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org> Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] Marking Bold in text files Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 11:38:13 -0800 > > On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 02:36:35PM -0500, Joshua Hutchinson wrote: > > As far as I know, * to indicate bold is acceptable in the text > > versions. > > Sometimes * indicates a footnote; how do you distinguish using automated > tools? > > Jonathan > > -- Puritan: Purity of faith, Purity of doctrine. Sola Scriptura! > Eukleia: Jonathan Walther > Address: 12706 99 Ave, Surrey, BC V3V2P8 (Canada) > Contact: 604-582-9308 (between 7am and 11pm, PST) > Website: http://reactor-core.org/ > > Patriarchy, Polygamy, Slavery === Fatherhood, Husbandry, Mastery > Matriarchy, Monogamy, Prisons === Wickedness, Stupidity, Buggery > > It's not true unless it makes you laugh, > but you don't understand it until it makes you weep. << signature.asc >> > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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PT1 History of PG
by Michael Hart 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

THE HISTORY OF PROJECT GUTENBERG It seems I have been remiss in keeping everyone up to date on the history of Project Gutenberg over the past few years, so I am taking this opportunity to write A Brief History of Project Gutenberg in several segments that will, hopefully, make amends for this lack on my part. PART ONE: THE FIRST 10 YEARS 1971-1980 In terms of actual page production, many people dismiss the opening decade of Project Gutenberg nearly completely. Now in terms of space, the published eTexts, as we called those at the time, will all fit on a modern floppy disk. Because of stringent storage allocations our eText files on the million dollar mainframe were just barely allowed. The struggle to put even these small files online was enormous, as it was a totally revolutionary idea to put up a file for a non-predetermined time period. This idea of something an entire future could download had never been brought up, and thus it was VERY hard to get permission to post even a file as small as the Declaration of Independence, because it was going to take up permanent space on the computer. Files of the following list were perhaps the first inkling of a kind of permanence the early Internet pioneers did not consider: Dec 1979 Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address Dec 1978 Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address Dec 1977 The Mayflower Compact Dec 1976 Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death, Patrick Henry Dec 1975 The United States Constitution Nov 1974 Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln Nov 1973 John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address Dec 1972 The United States Bill of Rights Dec 1971 The United States Declaration of Independence These first 9 files were collected into all7011.txt and all7011.zip for easy redistribution in upper and lower case in later years. The original files were all upper case, as there was no lower case on the early machines we were using at the time. You may see that we skipped two years between the US Bill of Rights and the US Constitution; we were originally going to try to include the complete Constitution in just a year after the Declaration, but we were told that would take too much space, and we were given just enough space for the Bill of Rights. The next year we asked again, but room was still very scarce, and so we asked again the next year and the year after. By then I was able to make convincing argument that waiting any longer might delay it so long that people wouldn't have access to it long enough before Bicentennial year of 1776, so we finally got room at the end of 1975. This may not sound very exciting to you from 30 years later, but it was VERY exciting to us, being able to put these files online for a whole country to use during the United States Bicentennial. We finished out the decade with more of those "Freedom Celebration" documents, as they were called, which were placed on the walls of a a variety of schools, malls, etc., during this period. During the period the greatest struggle was just to talk operators, even those that were very good friends, into giving us enough space to store anything but the smallest files. It was one thing to have $100,000,000 in "computer money" that could be used to run programs and send emails, but it was quite another thing to be granted space to store files that people from around the country would download. Here's just one early example: When I completed the Declaration of Independence, I wanted to email it to everyone on the Net [DARPANet, as we called it], but I found, to my great surprise, that if I had done this, even with such small files as the Declaration of Independence [5K], that it would create a complete network crash, since most of our wires were 113 baud, or 11 characters per second. Luckily, I asked for help in sending it, and avoided becoming quite well known as the first person to bring the Net to its knees; and a "Morris Worm" would have only been an asterisk, and so would I!!! In the end we simply posted a message to what later became comp.gen so people could get the file on request. My recollection is that 6 people downloaded it, other than the other four on our site, so the greatest penetration would have been about 10%. . .which sounds big by today's standards, but I had been hoping for more. A word about the computer operators of the day: we used to joke in many ways that the computer operators were the current priesthood-- you handed in your offering through the stainless steel window, and prayed that they would be worthy enough for the computer to run it. If you understand this, then perhaps you can also understand how it was the computer operators had so much power. Not only should they be considered as the entire force of computer security of that day, but they could also save you hours, if not days, of time by telling you just where and/or why your program wasn't running. I was quite seriously lucky that my brother's best friend was the operator from midnight to 8AM, when most of the free computer time was available, and that he gave me the account I used to start Project Gutenberg-- and as lucky that MY best friend became the 8AM-5PM operator. I should add that even at such an early date, I had help from those anonymous contributors who so often help. In this case I never was able to find out who typed in the first U.S. Constitution versions. I asked and asked, and even though there weren't that many persons, I never could find or thank the one who did it. That version was a print version in what served as a sort of markup of the day, so all I had to do was take out all the markup, backspace/underscores etc. to create a version that looked good onscreen. If anyone knows, it would still be nice to find out today, and send our thanks; for now I would just like to include a general thanks to all the volunteers who have helped Project Gutenberg over more than 1/3 century. Anyway, that's the story of the first decade of Project Gutenberg-- and I hope to work up something for the 1980's for next week. I should add here that even though the Apple II was out, I had none of the kind of money it would have taken to buy one, so my computer ownership starts not in this segment, but in the next one. Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Postscript: For those interested in counting ye olde Project Gutenberg eBooks-- please note that there is no growth curve for this period; a growth graph would simply be a straight line, 1 title = 1 year, so it is a trivial point to say that at this growth rate it would take ~15,000 years to do ~15,000 titles, and that I would have been dead so long before we ever got to eBook #100 that no one would have remembered. Hence we do not talk about doubling rates for this period since the years required doubled at the same rate as the index entries did. Nevertheless, you will, from time to time, see people manipulate an army of statistics in such a way as to include these in patterns of growth, even though it is common knowledge that the earliest growth figures of any such pattern are quite linear. Just look at a curve of the population of the earth for a perfect example. Such curves, if studied in detail, yield a wealth of such growth information. Sample Moore's Law Projections Based on 1971 Here is an example of what would happen if Project Gutenberg growth projections were started using the 1 item we had in 1971: Start Finish Total Total ##### Year Year Years Doubles x2^y = Grand Total in Year #1 1971 2001 30 20 1*2^20 = 1,048,576 in 2001 #1 1971 2004 33 22 1*2^22 = 4,194,304 in 2004 Obviously no one ever seriously considered that Project Gutenberg might actually release a million eBooks in 2001, but there were a few examples recently of suggestions that we should have used the 1971 date, and thus the resultant figures listed above when doing our Moore's Law predictions. I trust at least this specific example has now been put to rest.

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Re: [gutvol-d] Marking Bold in text files
by Joshua Hutchinson 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

----- Original Message ----- From: "Al Haines (shaw)" <ajhaines(a)shaw.ca> > > FYI - I checked the Distributed Proofing site's FAQ's, but the only reference > I can find of bold text says to use the HTML <B> and </B> tags. > Just a quick elaboration... The DP faq is talking about markup in the proofing rounds, not the final product to PG. We do a lot of things in the proofing rounds that get changed (or in some encodings, deleted) in DP proofing rounds. As far as I know, * to indicate bold is acceptable in the text versions. Josh

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Moving and Removing eBooks
by Michael Hart 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

The Project Gutenberg Philosophy Concerning Orwellian History Rewriting While Encylcopedia Britannica has made it obvious on multiple occasions that they are embarrassed by references to their 11th edition, which is largely regarded as one of the seminal marks in refence materials, this attitude is not shared by others who would not approve of the Orwellian rewriting of history to make it appear as if Britannica had always been in possession of the facts it presents today and never had written from points of view that have now been become politically incorrect, or even discredited in more recent times. However, there are at least a dozen or two very outspoken volunteers at Project Gutenberg among a dozen or two thousand of such volunteers, who would prefer to delete many of the original Project Gutenberg eBooks in favor of replacing them with something else, as opposed to just working on them to bring them up to the standards of the modern era of eBooks. Shakespeare Compared To Britannica Shakepeare Donated by The World Library, The Earliest CD of eBooks 11 years ago Project Gutenberg received a donation of a "Complete Works of William Shakespeare," in their Folio format, which Project Gutenberg was then allowed to work with in plain text format to create their #100 eBook. . .a milestone of the day in which the only comparable eBook was #10, which contained both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible. The project of converting the World Library files took months, and the last night a dozen volunteers burned the midnight oil in various time zones, until, at last, just as we were running out of time zones, we completed Shakespeare's Complete Works, version 1.0, December 10, 1993. Official date was listed as January, 1994, as we were a bit ahead of schedule. Today Project Gutenberg has created about 150 times as many eBooks now, as we had then, though certainly only a few of them could rival eBooks containing the complete works of Shakespeare. Actually, several eBooks of various editions of Shakespeare have been added since then with each one having those who think it is the best of the bunch, not to mention, or only quietly, that we also included the Shakespearian apocrypha, and the Biblical apocrypha as well. While there really aren't any single volumes, no matter how large, that would increase today's eLibraries by the same comparable amount as that edition of Shakespeare did 11 years ago, something such as Britannica's 11th edition would be about as comparable as possible. Now. . .the question: Would someone be willing to do all the work to donate a Britannica 11th to Project Gutenberg this year if they thought it would be removed from Project Gutenberg a decade after it was first included?

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letter from blind PG user in Thailand RE: .txt vs. anything else
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

I just got an extremely distressed snailmail letter from a retired professor of Oriental and Buddhist studies, who is blind and lives in Thailand. I quote him: "Now as far as I can tell there are no more e-books available in "txt" format but only in "HTM" format. I am blind as I stated at the outset. I use an Apple computer with a screen reading programme called "OutSpoken" which conflicts with many document formats. It also conflicts with many common programmes, but that's another story which has nothing to do with you. "My problem with the Project Gutenberg Archive in its present form is that when I download a book, the file on my computer includes many rubbish characters which make it virtually impossible to read." <<a couple of paragraphs omitted>> "So in conclusion I thank you for services rendered me in the past and regret that they are no longer available to me because of the remarkable technological advances that you are incorporating into your archive. Yours, frustrated and regretful, Dr. Peter Della SAntina." I have told him that most books still are in .txt as well as other things, and that when they aren't, the problem usually is that they are prohibitively long and/or contain characters which we cannot use to post in .txt. I then told him that whenever he runs into this problem, he is to email me and I personally will send him a copy of the book in .txt; if I don't get it to him within 3 days, he is to assume I'm ill and send the request to Aaron Cannon. I know what he's talking about because I downloaded a copy of Kipling's story "The Brushwood Boy" a couple of weeks ago in .htm form and found a lot of rubbish characters in it, but I just read around them despite feeling rather exasperated. I had been seized with an acute wish to read the story at three AM, and after getting up, booting my computer etc., downloading it, putting it on my ebook reader, shutting everything down again, and going back to bed, my desire to redownload it at that time was nonexistent. Anyway, that could not possibly have been a recent post, though for all I know it might be a recent REpost. Most .htm files work just fine on that ebook reader. I told Dr. Santina that I appreciated his letting me know, and asked him to notify us if he ran into such problems in the future. I think this is a strong argument for continuing Michael's practice of posting everything in English in .txt AND whatever else rather than in whatever else by itself. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] Moving and Removing eBooks
by D. Starner 21 Jan '05

21 Jan '05

"Michael Dyck" writes: > By the way, I'm curious as to why D. Starner would like to get rid of > those editions. Are they particularly bad/questionable for some reason? They're copyrighted, and PG has generally discouraged, for good reason, copyrighted editions of public domain works. From what Michael Hart said, I got the impression that it was an early 1930s edition; hence it does the other thing that annoys PGers to no end, adding a new copyright to material with no new copyrightable material. And if the edition really is so much better than the public domain ones, there should be something on the files talking about the edition, instead of it just looking like someone else digitalized a public domain edition and decided to give PG a copyright with a new copyright on it. > > Would someone be willing to do all the work to donate a Britannica 11th > > to Project Gutenberg this year if they thought it would be removed from > > Project Gutenberg a decade after it was first included? > > Yes, I would. And if you ask "Why would you go to all that effort, only > to have the results deleted in 10 years?", I would point out that it > would only be PG's copy that's deleted; the results of my work would > live on, elsewhere on the web. /* 'Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains: round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. */ Any person's actions are ultimately ephemeral. Most effort in the real world goes to the completely ephemeral; most of the rest, blogs and garage bands and writers trying to create the Great American Novel, will be disappear not long after it was created without even creating a ripple on the sea of life. Kubla Khan, the work of a couple hours spent as high as a kite, is interesting; the poetry of most college students, even stuff labored over for months, isn't. It doesn't matter how much work went into it; what matters is useful results. Speaking personally, I've got scans of several books on my hard drive that turned out to already be in progress. I shrug my shoulders and go on; that some part of my work will turn out to be for naught is inevitable. In the process of producing a German translation of Alice in Wonderland, I have scanned new versions of the Tenniel illustrations, as the previous ones are too small to capture the detail, and we can afford larger file sizes nowadays. If someone in ten years decides to produce the definitive version of the Tenniel illustrations and push aside my edition, then so be it; I certainly won't take it personally. If something of mine has to be redone or deleted, then it has to be redone or deleted. I certainly don't advocate the widescale wasting of work that's already done, but I don't agree with the argument that we should keep something of no value because someone put work into. But I certainly seem to be a minority voice here. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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Re: [gutvol-d] letter from blind PG user in Thailand RE: .txt vs.anything else
by Joshua Hutchinson 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

----- Original Message ----- From: Gutenberg9443(a)aol.com > > I think this is a strong argument for continuing Michael's practice of > posting everything in English in .txt AND whatever else rather than in whatever > else by itself. > No one has advocated doing away with .txt as a posted format. The closest I can recall is a suggestion to do away with 7-bit ASCII text files. Deleted accents never made much sense to me anyway, so I certainly wouldn't cry over the loss of 7-bit ASCII. The only books that should be unavailable in text are ones that physically CAN'T be done in text, such as the complex mathematical works that requires TeX and PDF work. If anyone finds a book that does not have a text version posted should contact the bugs email address at PG to get that fixed ASAP. Josh

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DP crisis?
by N Wolcott 20 Jan '05

20 Jan '05

Does DP have a post-processing crisis? With thousands of volunteers texts flow regularly through the OCR and first phase quickly. However there are several thousand books that have been in post processing over a year. Many of these are hard, but many are plain text. Is it appropriate to re-scan a book to start the process over again hoping for better luck? One could clear another edition, etc. N Wolcott nwolcott2(a)post.harvard.edu

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Nightly feed of clearance information--Possible?
by D Garcia 18 Jan '05

18 Jan '05

It would be excellent to have a nightly-updated feed of appropriately anonymized Cleared clearances published by PG in the same or similar format as the Catalog feed. Granted, this is not the same as David Price's list, but it would be beneficial to would-be content providers and take some of the load off of him. There is the drawback that the old 'gbn' clearances would not be in the new database, but it should be possible if there is a willing volunteer able to convert those appropriately to the new format, and I will mention that I have appropriate experience in this area. I can forsee some difficulty in tying old clearances to current PG usernames, though many should be mappable via email address. Thoughts?

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