devastation on three fronts in japan... and american soldiers on three fronts in the middle east... so what is the project gutenberg list doing to distract itself? having a discussion about d.r.m., of course. _of_course._ *** anyway, i sure can't help in japan, or the middle-east, but nonetheless i refuse to waste any time on d.r.m. so how about a quick overview of the common purpose? project gutenberg is tooling along at around e-text #35650. notable recent entries include #33333, "the statute of anne", produced by michael hart. page-images were included, and this e-text retains the line-breaks from those original pages, even including the end-of-line-hyphenates. what a surprise. #34567 is "paradise bend", and it was produced by al haines. *** the "progress" of restructured-text through d.p. continues to be tortuous... it looks like rfrank has defected to pg-canada, where they don't have to pay the epubmaker toll to marcello. meanwhile, one person has created a "dp2rst" python script. i guess if you patch enough scripts into the workflow, you just might get something that provides a smooth transition. well, either that, or you just get a truly botched workflow... either way, d.p. seems to have chased away all the p1 people, yet it still has a hard time keeping text in that queue, which is something of a mystery. but there have ceased to be any discussions of any backlogs in the forums, so i guess they've solved all of those problems... i'm not sure how they did it. maybe someone there will record the solution for posterity. *** all joking aside, distributed proofreaders is closely upon its 20,000 title... it will come along in the next few weeks, and stands as a testament that d.p. is more interesting in doing new digitizations than fixing the errors in the existing ones. to think that i first suggested reviewing old titles and fixing the errors in them way back in december of 2003, when p.g. was celebrating its 10,000th title. little did i know then that the library's quality would seemingly _never_ be a concern... i made the suggestion again at #15,000, and then at #20,000, after which i realized it was fruitless, and basically gave it up. oh well, this is a volunteer organization, and the volunteers make the decisions as to where their priorities are, and if _i_ don't like it, then i should just get up off of my fat ass, right? right. so that's what i'm gonna do, go for a nice little walk... after all, it's a lovely spring day here in santa monica... :+) -bowerbird