Bowerbird, When I got my OLPC XO laptop as part of the "Give One Get One" promotion OLPC did (you pay for two laptops and receive one. The other one goes to a child somewhere) I was interested in using it for e-books reading. I was familiar with PG and archive.org but reading books on a desktop computer wasn't that appealing. The tiny XO makes a good e-book reader. I was disappointed that the Read Activity shipped with the XO was only good for PDFs. There are sites that convert PG books to PDFs and of course archive.org has PDFs, but by the time I found that out I had taught myself Python and wrote two Activities for reading: one for "plain text" books and another for CBZ's, a format used for comic books. After that I wrote an Activity that let you search the archive.org catalog and download the books you want in your choice of format. One thing several people asked about was books in languages other than English. They exist, but a teacher in OLPC needs to know how to create and publish e-books as well as find them. I had already written and published a book about programming Activities for the XO and this seemed like a good topic for a second book. The process for donating a book to archive.org is simple, and I've done a few: http://archive.org/search.php?query=nicestep PG was *much* harder, and I'm not just talking about the work of transcribing. Just figuring out the process was tough. I was especially frustrated trying to get Rule 6 clearances for some books I had that *probably* qualified, based on what research I was able to do. I did several books for PG before anyone told me about RST, which would have saved me a lot of work. I donated page images to DP two years ago and two books from those page images only recently became available. Every book I donated to PG or PG Canada is a book that has a special meaning for me. This meant that sometimes I needed to learn some advanced things to do the book, like Unicode characters and transliterating Greek letters. I got advice to the effect that I should leave such things to the experts, when it was clear to me that if I didn't do the work myself those books weren't going to get done. So yeah, I think PG needs some better HOWTO's than they have. James Simmons On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 2:08 PM, <Bowerbird@aol.com> wrote:
james said:
I had no idea the process would be as difficult as it turned out to be.
did you do any research about it first?
where did your expectations come from?
and since i know some of your false-starts, james, i think it's absolutely clear that project gutenberg needs to do a much better job of explaining this...
sending people to d.p. is an _awful_ strategy, since the workflow there works so badly for independents.
and, as i have shown, i developed a good workflow over 5 years ago, and documented it exhaustively...
who else here -- besides james, in his book on it -- has done _anything_ to also describe and document?
remember, putting "describe and document workflow" on a checklist _does_not_count_ as satisfying the task.
unless, of course, your only task is to make a checklist.
-bowerbird
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