- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

interim report on eBookWise reader, info about Rocket
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

Hi all-- One quick note on the Rocket: If your power cord has gone out, call Fox International at 1-800-321-6993 for a replacement. If you're in the US it will cost about $33 including shipping. I don't know whether you can even get it outside the US. Don't try to go online to get it so you'll have a printout of the order; they'll just tell you to call the phone number. Now to the eBookWise reader: Judging from the info I have so far, its footprint is slightly larger than that of the Rocket, but it weighs less--about a pound, whereas Rocket weighs 22 oz. It's still slightly smaller than a trade paperback, though, and weighs considerably less. Some of its controls seem counterintuitive to me, but that may be just because I've used the Rocket so many years. There are thousands (about 7,500 to be precise) of commercial books for those who can afford to buy them; they're at eBookWise.com, which is a subsidiary of FictionWise.com, and is presently engaged in converting all, or almost all, of its content into an eBookWise format. Some of them are new books, often bestsellers, and others are classics that are not yet out of copyright. If I had it to spend, I could spend a thousand dollars there in two shakes of a puppy-dog's tail. Alas, I don't have a thousand dollars. Although loading your own content is right now rather clunky, involving upload to a server and then download through a telephone line, it is doable. You can keep your own bookshelf at the server, and download by telephone, so you don't have to take your computer on the road with you to change the books in your reader. They have their software engineers working on a direct USB download program, the kind Rocket has, but it isn't ready yet. This close to Christmas, they made the decision to make the device available now and fix the software later. This is a quotation from eBookWise's propaganda sheet: "In addition, the eBookwise-1150 can display your own personal content in the following file formats: plain text (.txt), rich text format (.rtf), Microsoft Word documents (.doc), HTML (.htm or .html), and Rocket eBook Editions (.rb)." So that means that just about any free online book is readable on this reader, except that far under 1% that are available only in PDF. So--PG, PG Oz, Blackmask, _http://www.sacred-texts.com_ (http://www.sacred-texts.com) , Phoenix-Library.com and umpteen dozen other sites are now your oyster, in a reader you can fit into any briefcase or backpack and most large-size handbags. (Phoenix-Library has good language-to-language dictionaries in a surprisingly large number of languages.) It will hold only about 20 texts at a time, which was also normal for the Rocket unless you bought the extra large storage device when you ordered your Rocket. I did, and my Rocket holds about 50 texts. However, it has a slot for a SmartMedia card; I checked, and you can get SmartMedia cards holding anything from 4 mg up to half a gig. (The half-gig card costs about $250.) It does not do much with illustrations, as it is grayscale only. However, it appears that at least some small illustrations can be put into it. If you want one right now, go to eBookWise and create an account. Put $110 into your account. You can immediately order your machine, which will use 10 cents short of the entire $110, but it will then give you $20 in book credits. Wait to buy them until your device arrives, but you can go through and select them and put them into your cart now. Of course, you can deposit as much money as you want to into your account, and put the books into your shopping cart, to purchase when your device arrives. This is not the best possible ebook reader, but it is the best presently available for anybody who is not content to read ebooks only on a computer or a PDA. Anne

1 0

Anybody want to test of this gutenberg browser ?
by Marcello Perathoner 02 Dec '04

02 Dec '04

-------- Original Message -------- From: Clif Flynt <clif(a)cflynt.com> Message-Id: <200412012104.iB1L4rm27796(a)clif.cflynt.com> Subject: Re: Project Gutenberg Browser To: marcello(a)perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 16:04:53 -0500 (EST) Hi, My apology for being slow in replying to your mail. Being a spare-time project, the TkGutenbrowser doesn't get as much attention as it deserves, and the move from "works-for-me" to "suitable-for-general-use" is always slower than I'd like. The browser software is currently at http://www.mod3.net:~clif This is very much a work-in-progress, but the software does what I consider the minimal set of tasks now. It will read and display text, save text as PDB for C-Spot-Run on a PDA, and download non-text documents (images, sound files) to a disk file. I've not added support for bookmarks yet and the help is rudimentary. I believe that Project Gutenberg has changed the data in the catalog.rdf file since I started the project, and it appears that most (all?) of the information is now in catalog.rdf, instead of being split between catalog.rdf and GUTINDEX.ALL. My browser is only using catalog.rdf now, and not downloading the other files. ... Clif .... Clif Flynt ... http://www.cflynt.com ... clif(a)cflynt.com ... ..Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide (2'nd edition) - Morgan Kauffman .. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster(a)gutenberg.org

1 0

Unicode versions?
by William Flis 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

I prepared ("postprocessed" at Distributed Proofreaders) also a Unicode (UTF-8) version of this book, but it doesn't seem to have made it to posting at PG. The UTF-8 elements were all pronunciation symbols, which one might expect to be important in such a book. I'm currently working on another volume in this series, with similar symbols. I've also been working on a book on Native American sign language, which contains a good number of special symbols used in transcribing the NA spoken languages, also requiring UTF-8. So my first question is, did my Unicode version just get lost somewhere? (I usually upload directly to PG but submitted this one the long way around through DP's "Post-Processing Verification" system so someone else would take a look at it, since it was my first attempt at Unicode.) Second, if not, are Unicode versions welcome? Bill Flis > Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones, Robert > Bridges 14227 > [Link: http://www.gutenberg.net/1/4/2/2/14227 ] > [Files: 14227.txt; 14227-8.txt; 14227-h.htm]

2 1

request for input (first timer here)
by stuart 01 Dec '04

01 Dec '04

I am starting on a project to convert Jane's All The World's Aircraft 1919 to an ebook, any suggestions welcome. If interested, take a look at http://ww1aviationlinks.cjb.net/janes/index.html

2 1

On quote-like marks...
by Jon Noring 30 Nov '04

30 Nov '04

Regarding the recent discussion about ASCII and the single/double quote marks (and what to use), I have my two cents to add (and those here who are much more expert at character sets and Unicode than I am will undoubtely be able to add to this.) The situation regarding single and double quote-like marks is even more complicated than what it has been presented so far. It has an impact on the future expanded use of PG texts as envisioned by Michael Hart and others, such as text-to-speech and language conversion. So I believe it needs to be dealt with in a more standardized-fashion (that is, don't simply use the straight keyboard ' and " for everything under the sun.) Quote-like marks are used for multiple purposes in texts -- especially single quote-like marks. And then there are the "curly" types of marks used in typographical presentation. Here's a (probably) partial list of their multiple uses: 1) For marking up quotations (other conventions are also used) 2) Word contractions (e.g., "we're" for "we are") 3) Possessives ("the Emperor's crown") 4) Non-breaking character modifiers (see below) 5) Minutes and second of time and arc. (50d3'25") 6) Feet and inches unit indicator (She is 5'7" tall) 7) Other mathematical symbol and unit measurement uses. Item (4) is particularly interesting since I'm working on cleaning up Burton's "1001 Arabian Nights Tales", and in it there are many Arabic names where, when Burton converted to Latin script, single quote-like marks were inserted to indicate a type of non-breaking character modifier for pronounciation purposes. For example: Ja'afar. This semantically differs from the apostrophes used for contractions/ possessives -- or at least semantically different enough (imho) that warrants differentiation in character encoding/entities. In the XML markup of the Arabian Nights, I've chosen to use the following Unicode character conventions to keep everything straight. It's not what I necessarily propose PG/DP do, but it indicates one possible approach. Since at present I do not enclose quotations in <q> (for example), I keep in the quotation marks (double and single) to identify quotations. In the Arabian Nights I find some odd quotation passages, a couple of which start in the middle of one paragraph and end in the middle of another paragraph later within a story, so adding <q>...</q> would result in non-well-formed XML (I could use the "mile marker" approach as defined in TEI, but for the Arabian Nights have chosen not to.) 1) For quotations using double quote marks, I use the Unicode left-double quote mark for the beginning, and the right-double quote mark for the ending: “ and ”, respectively. (The "curly" quotes -- for those who don't like curly quotes for reading, it is trivial to convert them to straight keyboard quote marks, but going the other way is more difficult to do.) 2) For quotations using single quote marks, I use the Unicode left-single quote mark for the beginning, and the right-single quote mark for the ending: ‘ and ’, respectively. 3) For the non-breaking character modifier as described above, e.g. for "Ja'afar", I use the Unicode character specific for this purpose: ʼ 4) For word contractions and possessives I use the ordinary lower- ASCII single straight quote mark: ' (For later presentational purposes this character can always be converted to the right-single "curly" quote mark.) For use of ' and " for minutes and seconds of arc, and feet/inches, there are special Unicode code points for these (I don't see this usage in the Arabian Nights footnotes, but maybe I'll encounter it somewhere, not having finished the 5000+ footnotes.) If one is working with plain text files (not XML), the above Unicode characters can be encoded at the bit-level using UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding. Jon Noring

2 1

Re: [gutvol-d] 7-bit ASCII, how many characters?
by D. Starner 29 Nov '04

29 Nov '04

"Michael Hart" writes: > On Sat, 27 Nov 2004, Andrew Sly wrote: > > A while ago, I had the address of a web page which explained > > in detail why ASCII-96 should not be used as an opening single > > quote, but I can't find it now. It's <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html>; basically, the grave and the Latin-1/Unicode acute accent (U+00B4) should be balanced and are in most modern fonts, > In addition, if this really had been intended to be a French > accent grave, why is the "_" between it and the " ^ " which > could be the French accent cironflex. . .not to mention the > lack of an accent aigue, etc. . . . There's no particular reason for the sorting, but the ' originally leaned right, which not only made `quotes' look right, but make it possible to be used as an acute accent, both designed to be backspaced over the character. If you used the " as diaresis and , as cedilla, you have German and all the Romantic languages handled. The use of backspace in this manner disappeared after ASCII was standardized, making the ASCII collection a little unusual. -- ___________________________________________________________ Sign-up for Ads Free at Mail.com http://promo.mail.com/adsfreejump.htm

1 0

7-bit ASCII, how many characters?
by Dennis McCarthy 28 Nov '04

28 Nov '04

A technical question: Exactly what characters make up 7-bit ascii? I presume it is 128 (2 to the 7th power). So logically any character I can generate by typing Alt+0000 thro' Alt+0127 (in MS Windows) is kosher in a 7-bit ASCII text. Specifically I want to know if I can us "|" (the character made by hitting Shift+backslash on a standard US keyboard, or Alt+0124). Generally, are the following (Alt+0000 thro' Alt+0127) always okay? ! " # $ % & ' ( ) * + , - . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = > ? @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _ ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~ --------------------------- Dennis McCarthy nihil_obstat(a)mindspring.com

7 6

"We're still keeping up with Moore's Law!"
by Michael Dyck 25 Nov '04

25 Nov '04

In today's gweekly Pt 1, Michael Hart wrote: > > We're still keeping up with Moore's Law! > Moore's Law 18 month percentage = 115% > Moore's Law 12 month percentage = 67% I don't understand how these percentages were calculated. 18 months ago (May 24, 2003), the "TOTAL COUNT" (incl PG Australia) was about 8044 (interpolating between 8021 on May 21 and 8075 on May 28), so doubling every 18 months would land us at 2 * 8044 = 16088 today. Today's actual count is 14,484, or 90% of the predicted amount. 12 months ago (Nov 24, 2003), the total count was about 10,517 (interpolating between 10,396 on Nov 19 and 10,565 on Nov 26). Doubling every 18 months means multiplying by 2^(12/18) = 1.5874 every 12 months, which would predict a count of 16695 today. Our actual count of 14,484 is 87% of that. So where do 115% and 67% come from? -Michael

2 1

Linking to page images
by Steve Thomas 25 Nov '04

25 Nov '04

Regarding the question of whether and how we should provide links to page scans, here's one idea which may have potential: Etext number 10072, "English Housewifery Exemplified", by Elizabeth Moxon, was produced from scans from Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona (it says so at the top of the text). It happens that Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona makes their scans available on the net, for free (apparently -- my Spanish is non-existent; might even be Catalan?) So I've added a note for this text ni the catalog, which reads: " Produced from page images available from Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona, at http://www.bib.ub.es/grewe/showbook.pl?gw58 " thus providing a link to the actual page scans for anyone interested. Is this a model to be followed? Of course, this raises the question of who is to add this information to the catalogue -- the link was not provided in the etext, I had to go look for it. Also, the link is not clickable. Ideally, you'd want the link to be active, but there's no place for this in the present catalog design. Steve -- Stephen Thomas, Senior Systems Analyst, University of Adelaide Library UNIVERSITY OF ADELAIDE SA 5005 AUSTRALIA Phone: +61 8 830 35190 Fax: +61 8 830 34369 Email: stephen.thomas(a)adelaide.edu.au URL: http://staff.library.adelaide.edu.au/~sthomas/ CRICOS Provider Number 00123M ----------------------------------------------------------- This email message is intended only for the addressee(s) and contains information that may be confidential and/or copyright. If you are not the intended recipient please notify the sender by reply email and immediately delete this email. Use, disclosure or reproduction of this email by anyone other than the intended recipient(s) is strictly prohibited. No representation is made that this email or any attachments are free of viruses. Virus scanning is recommended and is the responsibility of the recipient.

1 0

Re: [gutvol-d] documenting etexts
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 22 Nov '04

22 Nov '04

In a message dated 11/22/2004 2:03:48 PM Mountain Standard Time, joshua(a)hutchinson.net writes: Something just occured to me here ... Did you realize that Carlos (while very articulate in English) is not a native english speaker? Yes, I know that. Anne

1 0