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Re: the 4-1-1 on 4/11 on real page numbers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '11

21 Apr '11

jim said: > Jane Austen P&P is available in 4,800+ formats from > Amazon today alone, none of which agree on page > numbers. Page numbers are hopeless to use as cites. jim, listen closely to me: you are dense. you don't seem to realize it, but you are arguing my position, albeit quite clumsily. your "4800+ formats" position summarizes the problem, which, as i said, is inevitable. the next step, as i just told you, is that people will try to invent other ways to "point at" a particular passage to discuss. none of these methods will be compelling, and there will be widespread disagreement about which to utilize, thereby creating what social psychologists call "coordination trouble". which will bring about the third step, which i also just informed you about, which is to agree on a method of "canonical pagination". you're fixated on step 1 of a 3-step process. that's because you're dense, jim. d-e-n-s-e. and you also appear not to know that we have already discussed this particular instance here. it was back in september of 2007, when your good buddy marcello brought up the topic... just exactly like you, he pointed out that there are many editions of "pride and prejudice", and each of them differs in their pagination, thus he asked "which pagenumbers we should use?" the answer was simple: it depends upon which particular edition you are digitizing, and which edition you'll wish to refer people to, for dialog. you can see my response here: > http://z-m-l.com/go/pap/pride%20and%20prejudice(4).txt at the time, i found 4 different editions digitized online. so i said this; > if you're digitizing the 1844, use its linebreaks and pagebreaks. > if you're digitizing the 1853, use its linebreaks and pagebreaks. > if you're digitizing the 1870, use its linebreaks and pagebreaks. > if you're digitizing the 1892, use its linebreaks and pagebreaks. i also said this: > i put the scans of the first page on my site for your convenience: > http://z-m-l.com/go/pap/pride_and_prejudice(4).html so, once we evolve to step 3 of our 3-step process, we will adopt one of these 4 "canonical paginations" for "pride and prejudice" -- depending up which of the 4 editions we wish to use for our discussion -- and it will be necessary for the e-book that we use for our discussion to be able to attain that pagination. and if none of the 4800+ versions of the book up already can perform the task of attaining one of these paginations, we'll toss them into the garbage, and that will decide that. so this is what i was doing at 4:20 on 4/20, showing jim -- once again -- that he's dense... i must be dense too... but i'll learn... i'm gonna go get high now... -bowerbird

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the 4-1-1 on 4/11 on real page numbers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '11

21 Apr '11

a few months back, amazon began pushing out support in its kindle e-books for "real" page numbers, namely the page numbers taken from a print version of the book. > http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/amazon-adds-real-page-numbers-to-kin… it ends up that humans don't like the idea of a book as a formless blob of text. who knew? well, i did, for one... -bowerbird p.s. um, and no, i won't entertain your arguments once again. if you feel you must preach the doctrine of the formless blob, go yabber at amazon. thank you. have a nice day. peace out.

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Re: the 4-1-1 on 4/11 on real page numbers
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 21 Apr '11

21 Apr '11

ricky said: > Tell me a bit more about the "canonical paginations". > I suspect that in the long-run, there will be less needs > of different versions, and we will only need a handful > version of 'pride and prejudice' so we can all > reference to it and deep link into it. any pagination _can_ be "a canonical pagination" _if_ enough people agree to use it, and dialog around it... those different editions of "pride and prejudice" from the 1800s have stood the test of time, and they are now easy to point to, thanks to google, so they will certainly qualify as "canonical paginations", without any doubt... in the same way, different _editions_ of today's books will qualify too, if the author/publisher decides to bear the burden of mounting a "permanent version" online... being able to _link_ to a version, and _view_ it, and to _know_ with great _certainty_ that other people will be able to see the exact same thing is the crucial aspect... lots of people are now under some very strange illusions that books will be permanently "in flux" because we'll be constantly "updating" them. that is a recipe for disaster. even though you _could_ conceivably save every version, no one version will be able to muster a "critical mass" of people who're willing to make reference to it consistently. once we realize we can't build anything on shifting sands, we'll smarten up to a series of "editions" that is much akin to those paper-based "editions" we are well familiar with... all of this is just good old common sense. it's not difficult. -bowerbird

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the 4-1-1 on 4/20 on kindle library lending
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 20 Apr '11

20 Apr '11

now, if you would rather talk about today's news, instead of warmed-up stuff from 2 months back, consider that amazon announced today that -- starting sometime later this year -- people will be able to borrow books from their local libraries by using their kindles... _or_ by using one of the free kindle apps, which you might recall run on a myriad of hardware... odds are that there is a free kindle app that will run on _some_ piece of equipment that you own. so if you are in the neighborhood of one of the 11,000 local libraries involved with the program, the world of electronic-books just got a lot bigger. a whole lot bigger. once again, amazon leads the way. thank you jeff. > http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle& ID=1552678 -bowerbird

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Advanced search in PG catalogue
by traverso＠posso.dm.unipi.it 06 Apr '11

06 Apr '11

How can I perform complex searches on PG catalogue? For example, I would like to search for file formats, notably TEI and RST files, for the purpose of finding examples. The only reasonable way that I found is to search the posted notes. Carlo

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!@! Our 30,000th eBook in English
by Michael S. Hart 03 Apr '11

03 Apr '11

We should be posting our 30,000th English eBook about a week from today, so if you have anything in the works that might make a good entre please let me know this week so I can prepare some press releases. Again my thanks to all those who helped us get so far!!!!!!! Michael

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Dandelion Cottage
by Marc D'Hooghe 01 Apr '11

01 Apr '11

To digitize for PG and Girlebooks.com, we are in search of Dandelion Cottage by Carroll Watson Rankin (first published 1904, Henry Holt). Anyone access to scans or able to do them? - let us know. There is a growing interest to have this one freely available. Thanks! -- Marc FreeLiterature.org <http://www.freeliterature.org>

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Volunteers Needed For Almanac Project
by Michael S. Hart 26 Mar '11

26 Mar '11

Volunteers Needed For Almanac Project As many of you know, I started working on the CIA World Factbooks long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and then our CEO, Greg Newby took them over in a new format, and then Al Haines did them in the most recent formt, but it appears that the format changing has not stopped, and Al is just a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of having to redo all his methodology, starting all over again in a very real manner. In addition, I have turned up a number of old almanacs dated back to nearly 150 years ago and also a number of Canadian alamancs. These are invaluable research tools for anyone wanting to see how things were long, long ago, and before the historic and political rewriters of the Winston Smith camp got their hands on the data. So. . .PLEASE let me know if you would be willing to take a look, and perhaps get some or all of these into our collection. Thanks!!!!!!! Michael

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Re: spring has sprung
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 24 Mar '11

24 Mar '11

jim said: > The famous title I reworked > still had at least a dozen "obvious errors" > that have never been fixed - even after > 100s of thousands of downloads one of those times where michael hart "solicited" my help and got no response was when he suggested that i could help on a project aimed at creating an e-text that was "error-free"... i rolled my eyes... first, there's no such thing, as michael himself has been quick to say all along. second, at some point in time, decisions have to be made that are not about "errors" per se, but which flow from the philosophy with which you are attacking the task at hand. for instance, when a specific chapter-header fails to match its entry in the table of contents, do you change one of them to _force_ a match? well, it depends on what you want to be doing... decisions like these become far more important than "correcting errors" very early in the process. third, and the main reason i rolled my eyes and decided to give no response is because i have already demonstrated -- countless times here, right on this listserve -- how to go about the process of creating an "error-free" digitization: by comparing two independent digitizations and resolving the differences between them. bingo. so i've been through the routine time after time, and now michael is proposing we do the routine? what a strange and curious request. i didn't get it. so rather than send back a reply saying "wake up!", i just opted not to say anything. at any rate, the reason i bring all of this up now is because here's a situation where they actually have two separate digitizations, and they did not even do a simple comparison of one against the other? that's stupid, to a degree that is embarrassing... and -- this is most telling of all -- not surprising. -bowerbird

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New Server vs. Kindle Third Generation?
by James Adcock 23 Mar '11

23 Mar '11

I have not been able to get PG to download books to my Kindle 3rd generation wifi-only machine since PG moved to the new server. I have confirmed that everything does still work on the 2nd generation machines, which includes the DX. I have also confirmed that my Kindle 3rd generation still works with all the other free websites such as feedbooks and freekindlebooks. www.gutenberg.org doesn't work at all on K3 -- ie home page doesn't display. m.gutenberg.org home page comes up but downloads don't work. "Magic Catalog" still works on K2s, but doesn't work on K3. Mimetype problem ? -- just a "shot in the dark" guess.

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