- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Re: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
by juliet.sutherland＠verizon.net 01 Jan '05

01 Jan '05

> > From: Jim Tinsley <jtinsley(a)pobox.com> > Date: 2004/12/31 Fri PM 12:19:56 PST > To: gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org > Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks <snip> > 3. Google cut the pages ('cos the scans are just _beautiful_!) and scan > the pages of the books into images. As I've previously noted, destructive scanning of modern reprints is easy and usually results in good images and good OCR. > 4. Google run OCR on the pages. Along with every word, they store its > position in the image. Like: the word "poorer" is on page 62, in a box > 1.1 cm wide and 0.4cm high whose top left corner is 4.2 cm from the top > of the page and 3.1 cm from the left margin, . . . except I'm sure > they're not using cm. as their unit. Abbyy does this in its internal > files it saves, so it wouldn't shock me to find that they're using Abbyy > for OCR. The folks at The Million Book Project and The Internet Archive are using something called djvu that does this. It creates bounding boxes around each word in the image, then stores that information along with the text. The OCR associated with djvu is not ABBYY but another product that does not work quite as well. A DP volunteer posted the following in our forums: ---------------------------- Here's an interesting experiment... Go to http://www.google.com/googleblog/. Under "All booked up" (which talks about the Google/Library project), click on the link labelled "the survival of the fittest". This takes you to a beta of Google Print, for the specific book "Darwin, and After Darwin". Under "Search within this book", type "Darwin" and hit "Go". You'll get a new window with 3 images, showing the first few occurrences of "Darwin" in the book, where "Darwin" is highlighted in yellow. What's interesting is that in the third image, there are two occurrences of the word "Darwin", but the first is not highlighted. Similarly, if you search for "Berkeley", one occurrence in the second image is missing its highlight. This suggests that their searches are based on unproofed OCR results (where the unhighlighted occurrences correspond to uncorrected scannos). ... searching for "1 arwin" (one, space, arwin) and having it highlight "Darwin". (Try it, it's neat!) --------------- All of the above would appear to confirm Jim's assessment about what Google has done to date. JulietS

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!@!Googleberg eBooks
by Michael Hart 31 Dec '04

31 Dec '04

How many of you have tried Google Print? Have you noticed that the intitial offering of eBooks strongly resembles the Project Gutenberg catalogue??? We'd love to hear your experiences with Google Print. Thanks!!! Michael S. Hart

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Re: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks
by Dennis McCarthy 29 Dec '04

29 Dec '04

There is no "Google Print" library in a sense that I would think of one: i.e. I cannot seem to get any catalog of its collection or just browse Google Print. It works as an added feature to its regular search--so Google Print titles come up, as well as external links. This is fine in a way, because if I search for a text, and PG has it, the search results usually have a high ranking link to the a P.G. server. (So in a way, all of P.G. is essentially as findable to Google clients as Google Print is.) The lack of a catalog is bad in a way, for there is no easy way to see just what is available at Google that is in the public domain--in case you actually wanted to read an entire book on-line. You have to seach for topics or people and try to wend through what comes up in the search results. Of course Google does not claim to be a library. From its own website: "In general, Google Print is designed to help you discover books, not read them from start to finish. It's like going to a bookstore and browsing only with a Google twist." I do not find it a very useful service. But it is something that was not there before. I am not going to complain about it--that would be like looking a semi-lame-gift-nag-with-a-google-twist in the mouth. -----Original Message----- From: Michael Hart <hart(a)pglaf.org> Sent: Dec 28, 2004 6:49 AM To: undisclosed-recipients: ; Subject: [gutvol-d] !@!Googleberg eBooks How many of you have tried Google Print? Have you noticed that the intitial offering of eBooks strongly resembles the Project Gutenberg catalogue??? We'd love to hear your experiences with Google Print. Thanks!!! Michael S. Hart _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d --------------------------- Dennis McCarthy nihil_obstat(a)mindspring.com

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!@!Re: E-DOCS: Google Print Questions [J. Roland]
by Michael Hart 27 Dec '04

27 Dec '04

On Wed, 22 Dec 2004, Lloyd Benson wrote: > From: Jon Roland <jon.roland(a)constitution.org> > Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 14:50:22 -0600 > Subject: Google Print questions > > The announcements would seem to suggest that Google intends to not only scan > the images of all these books, but to OCR and correct the recognition errors > of all of them, so they can be made searchable, offer the complete texts of > all the public domain works, and excerpts of the copyrighted ones (presumably > under the fair use doctrine). One announcement also estimated a cost of $10 > per volume. Project Gutenberg has already produced and distributed nearly 15,000 eBooks, with a budget that has yet to reach a significant total for all 33+ years, and is projected to reach a million eBooks without undue expense or effort. We'll just have to wait and see if either Google Print, or any of the various "Million eBook Projects" will ever come up with even 1% of a million eBooks that you can carry with you on a one inch stack of plain homemade DVDs. If it hasn't been proofread, and if you can't take it with you, it is only of limited value. . .sort of like reading over someone's shoulder. With Project Gutenberg eBooks, you OWN them. . .forever. . .and can save them in your own favorite formats, fonts, margination, pagination, or whatever, and you can search, quote, print, and do all the normal eBook fuctions. "A picture of a book is not an eBook." The term eBook should not be used to describe raw scans or raw OCR, as has been tried by some of the Google and "Million eBook" particpants over the past decade. I would say that an eBook has to be at least 99.9% accurate, and that it should then be a process as people read the eBooks, to send in corrections. Most of the Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofeaders would say it has to be over 99.99% and perhaps even over 99.999%. 99.999% would be one error perhaps every 100 pages or so, and I'm pretty sure the source materals we have are not that accurate. . .not that eBooks won't become more and more accurate, closer and closer to 100% accuracy, but I'm not sure they have to be all the much better than 99.9% before they can be made available. > This is highly ambitious, even to scan the images. The experience of the U. > of Michigan should show that it is not feasible to OCR these works accurately > for that cost, or in that timeframe. While uncorrected OCRs might enable > search, since most words appear more than once in a work, and at least one of > them might be expected to be recognized accurately, searching on entire > phrases could be expected to be much more problematic. I have heard this described before. . .has anyone tried their test eBooks??? > As one who works from a lot of older works to not only scan and OCR but > correct them, I know how much human labor is involved. There are volunteer > efforts like Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/c/default.php , but > I have concluded that it takes me more time to set up a project for them than > it would take for me to do the proofreading myself, and my work would likely > be more accurate, since I would understand the underlying content and know > how to render obscure text. While it does take a little time to set up one's first project with the Distributed Proofreaders, it is usually quite a bit easier the second time, not to mention that we have volunteers who will walk you through processes the first few times around, which seems to do the trick for nearly everyone. > So my basic question and concern is, how do we ensure that this project does > not release too many uncorrected texts into the world that never get > corrected, and perhaps propagate errors that come to be accepted as accurate > even when they are not? I wonder how many of these will be "released into the world". . .I have a strong suspicion that the answer is "none." Unless some outside source does it. > I would submit that it would be better to prioritize these works and release > fully corrected and annotated digital editions of the most important first, > going for quality rather than quantity. This has been the approach used by > the online collections such as ours at > http://www.constitution.org/liberlib.htm Although we do put some works up > before the correcting and reformatting is finished, we always flag those that > are still in progress, indicating the state of completion, and we stand by to > quickly make corrections that outsiders may discover are needed. I view all eBooks as "still in progress" as I have never proofread one in which I didn't find any mistakes. . . . My own views are that I would prefer to have access to twice as many eBooks at the 99.95% accuracy level [the Library on Congress standard] than half as many at the 99.995% level I think is being suggested here. After all, the books that get read the most will be the ones that get the most corrections. . .an obvious way to aim effort at the proper targets! Not only that, but, viewing the entire eBook effort as a 50 year process, of which I have walked 33+ years, I must state for the record that I think OCR, spellcheckers, grammarcheckers., etc. will be so much better a decade from now that doing the proofreading on the more obscure works will require so much less effort than it does today, that it will be a great trade-off. I'm not at all sure why people want eBooks to be so perfect to start with. I would prefer to get all 10 million public domain works we can find. . . or at least a million of them. . .online and freely downloadable before we try to approach the 100% accuracy level. Of course, I don't believe in the "raw OCR" idea that seems to be what the Google Print idea has in mind, even with spelling and "scanno" checkers, and I also don't believe in going so far in the other direction that we try for such accuracy levels that the number of eBooks only grows at half the rate it has been growing. The path is obviously somewhere in the middle. . .machine production is obviously not accurate enough [except in certain tests I have seen run with high contrast new materials] and after a certain point it becomes inefficient to keep proofreading before letting the public have access. After all, the public IS what this is all about, is it not? So let's let the public do the final proofreading, as a process, for all the years to come. . .at least until we have OCR that makes only 1 error in a million characters. . .and thus most of the errors we find are from the original publications. [Bye the bye, this is one of the reasons for using more than one paper edition to produce an eBook, when multiples of paper editions are available. Then the machine processes can compare to find even more errors. Well, enough now. . .let's make more eBooks!!! Thanks!!! So Nice To Hear From You! Happy Holidays!!! Michael Give FreeBooks!!! In 39 Languages!!! As of December 23, 2004 ~14,780 FreeBooks at: ~220 to go to 15,000 http://www.gutenberg.org http://www.gutenberg.net We are ~95% of the way from 10,000 to 15,000. Now even more PG eBooks In 104 Languages!!! http://gutenberg.cc http://gutenberg.us Michael S. Hart <hart(a)pobox.com> Project Gutenberg Executive Coordinator^M "*Internet User ~#100*" If you do not receive a prompt reply, please resend, keep resending.

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Project Gutenberg as musty library?
by Andrew Sly 27 Dec '04

27 Dec '04

Snippet of conversation found on usenet: > > I have probably 2,000 books and > > perhaps 50 videos, not a single one of them clutter. Getting them from the > > library and then returning them just isn't the same as rereading > well-worn, familiar pages, either, for instance. > > > Yes, it's quite different. Tho come to think of it, I feel that way about a > few books I get from the library once a year or so to reread. Elizabeth > Goudge's CITY OF BELLS for one. But those are old books themselves, been > there a long time, nice old pictures and nice old typeface.... > > What I'm trying to do is transfer that feeling to Project Gutenberg's 'plain > vanilla' texts. I already kind of feel like their site is a very old shabby > library, smelling of leather, mice, and I forget what all else.... > >

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Re: [gutvol-d] Ibn Batuta
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 26 Dec '04

26 Dec '04

In a message dated 12/26/2004 12:17:36 AM Mountain Standard Time, sly(a)victoria.tc.ca writes: <<<Hmmm... you may not need to go that far afield. I really appreciate the way that people are looking for ibn Batuta. He's enjoyable both because of his interesting writing and the interesting tales he has to tell, and because of his unique world-view that illuminates history from this period. Anne

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Final Report on eBookWise 1150
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 26 Dec '04

26 Dec '04

I promised a final report after the eBookWise 1500 Librarian was released. It was released last week. It took me a little while to get the computer and the device to talk to each other, but the problem turned out to be that I had only turned the computer off and on after each program was installed. I was supposed to have completely unplugged the computer. Please do not flame me over this. You are authorized to disagree with me. I know that some people would rather spend 42 days stuck in a semiprivate hospital room with a roommate who is in love with the soaps, than possess a device that will allow them to read and mentally tune out the television. Forget about all the negative comments in my initial report. As long as I have loved and been faithful to my Rocket, I have to admit that the 1500 is better. It will allow me to do things that my Rocket won't allow, including making handwritten notes with my stylus, so henceforth the Rocket will be my pleasure reading device and the 1500 (we have named her Isis, to relate well to my computer, whose name is Sesheta. Sesheta was the ancient Egyptian goddess of libraries and librarians; Isis was the Lady high everything else.) will be my work device. The only problem I'm still having is the fact that Isis holds only about 20 books. But after I get to the computer store and get a SmartMedia card and its driver, Isis will hold over 300 books very easily. This is a winner. If you have any interest in being able to carry 300, or even 20, books around in your purse or backpack without tearing your shoulder into shreds, hie yourself over to eBookWise.com and buy the eBookWise while the price is right. $110 will buy and deliver it, and you'll then be given $20 to spend on books. All books are 20% off for about another week. With this device, you can read ANY BOOK ON THE INTERNET, unless it is in an encrypted format incompatible with .txt and .htm and .doc. You can definitely use it to read anything posted on PG and anything posted on Blackmask. Between FictionWise and eBookWise, literally thousands of commercial titles are available. Also anything you can get in .rb will transform itself into the right format in less than a minute. If you use a PDA or even a cellular phone with a lot of memory, you can carry around one to three books, if you don't mind reading in teensie weensie typesize with a line that consists of three words (or two if they're longer words). Blech. Yesterday at the family Christmas party I was showing this thing to my husband's former wife, and she held it in her hand and said, "Well, it doesn't weigh less than a book that size." I conceded the point--a Rocket is 18 ounces and I think an eBookWise 1500 is about 22 ounces-- but then pointed out that it weighs far less than 20, or 300, books that size. (When anybody in our family is in the hospital for more than a day, daily book runs are necessary to take away the read books and bring new ones. This device will obviate that necessity. Although it is true that you should never have valuable stuff lying around your hospital room, as thieves are familiar with hospital rooms, you can ask a kind nurse to lock it away for you when you're about to go to sleep.) Or--You're travelling cross-country. Every evening you stop at a motel. At the motel, you have your choice of the Gideon Bible if it hasn't been swiped, the food service menu, or television--or your own selection of 300 books. OR--if you're stuck in the hospital emergency room waiting interminably for somebody to come and attend to you or your loved one, wouldn't you like to have something to read with you? Maybe even two somethings, so that the person in bed, if it's not you, can also have something to read? If I had the money I'd give one of these to everybody I know. If you don't want one, don't buy it. But if you can afford it, at least give it a one-week trial. Then if you still don't like it, give it to somebody you don't like. Anne

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Revolutionary chapter / Google's ambitious book-scanning plan seen as key shift in paper-based culture
by Steve Thomas 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

Not sure if I sent this already, but it provides some useful info on the process Google is adopting. In the light of discussion on this topic so far, this may be enlightening for some readers. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/12/20/BUGROAD6QT1.DTL -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, Adelaide University Library ADELAIDE UNIVERSITY SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 8 8303 5190 Fax: +61 8 8303 4369 Email: stephen.thomas(a)adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/

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Re: [gutvol-d] RE: [gavel-d] Ibn Batuta
by D. Starner 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

"Dave Fawthrop" writes: > Maybe a friend of a friend of someone on gutvol-d? I don't think it's helpful to try and push people into handling a entire specific book right at the start, especially without OCR. > There are quite a lot of people who can read Classical Arabic, There's a lot of language communities out there that PG doesn't have much contact with. > Unicode has all the characters required. Also right to left writing. Unicode has pretty much all the letters we need, sans the myriad varietes of early 20th-century phonetic characters. That doesn't mean we can transcribe them easily. > Also because Arabic is a language designed for calligraphy, a page scan of > a well written copy would be useful. It's not really any different from English. A page of English calligraphy may be beautiful, but it's not a text version. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

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!@!Re: [gutvol-d] Fwd: Project Googleberg (fwd)
by Michael Hart 25 Dec '04

25 Dec '04

Request permission to quote/forward your comments, you can be anonymous if you like. . .as it may get back to Google. . . . > I have examined what seems to be the preliminary "Googleprint" > catalog. It consists of books scanned and posted by other people > including us. At least half of them that I looked at are available > only as page scans, and I have to want a book an awful lot to put > page scans together just for my own use. They use a LOT of our > books; in fact, everything they have that they are aware we have > shows us as the best or only site to go and get the book. Though from this message it wasn't clear whose words these are. David A. Desrosiers desrod(a)gnu-designs.com http://gnu-designs.com _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d(a)lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

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