On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 1:47 PM, Jim Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
OK, but how and when do you decide that the PP has actually moved on in life and is not really willing to finish up the book to which others have in good faith contributed their blood sweat and tears in the hopes of getting an honest to god book? Not to mention the possibility of a PP not working in good faith?
That's not a problem to be solved ranting; it's a problem to be solved by study of the statistics and talking to the PPers.
Is it possible to split the queues and the efforts into "esoterica" vs. "books that will be actively read?" Right now the "books that will be actively read" I am afraid are stuck in the queue behind "books that no one is actually willing to work on." I went there recently to try to help and it looked like "the powers that be" were trying to force through books that really no one wants to work on -- books that were really hard and not very interesting even to the people who volunteer their time to DP.
This is the funny thing; there's no connection between books that will be actively read, and books people want to work on. What books would be actively read: Euclid, Newton's Principia, the Oxford English Dictionary. We've had scans of the OED for years; no one has been willing to attack it. We can probably come up with a dozen usable scans of Euclid; no one is currently working on getting PG a complete copy of Euclid, because it's a total pain to work on. But you take some moldy old historical fiction or better yet some sci-fi story that hasn't been reprinted since it was first published, and they will rocket through DP.
The problem is NOT that there is "esoterica" vs. "books that will be actively read" -- the problem is that the "esoterica" takes so much time and effort compared to "books that will be actively read" that "esoterica" ends up swamping the other categories.
Bullshit. How long do you think the OED would take? That's a book that will be actively read. Why did "Dryden's Works (13 of 18): Translations; Pastorals" take two months to go through P2? If you're classifying the complete works of Dryden as esoterica, then what on Earth are you classifying as books that will be actively read? Certainly not the historical trash fiction that does blow through DP. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.