Hi James, On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:38 PM, James Adcock <jimad@msn.com> wrote:
Please note that I agree 100% or more with your suggestions and with what you want to do.
** Does the project accept these kinds of improvements to text?
No, unfortunately.
** I see some talk of old and new editions in the books. ** Would such changes constitute new editions?
Yes and no. You are not allowed make repairs to damaged formatting decisions in existing editions unless you are one of the few "chosen" PG insiders in which case you get to party as you like -- and most of that partying just makes the situation worse. It is not permitted however, for the great unwashed masses to perform the same kind of partying, because, god forbid, you might make the situation better and that is not permitted. However, many of the old editions come from unfortunate choices of original edition of "donor" text, or they come from unspecified, and typically quite corrupt unknown sources. In this case you can make your own, better, version of these texts and submit them, such that Project Gutenberg will have a clean, uncorrupted version with known provenance, and with high-quality formatting which actually works with most ebook readers. This will take you a lot of time and energy if you don't have specialized tools to do these "versioning" efforts, and will still take you a fair amount of time and effort even if you do have the necessary "versioning" tools. In exchange when you try to submit your efforts you will find that the PG "whitewashers" will complain about how you are wasting their time making them double-check a submission for a book "they already have" [albeit in a highly corrupted form without provenance but they like that better] and if and when you get the whitewashers to accept your submission then the webmaster has a system of "negatively advertising" your new improved "correct" version -- with the formatting that actually works and with real provenance -- such that 99%+ of the real world users will unknowingly choose the old corrupt version of the book with the formatting which doesn't work.
** What are the preferred procedures?
I can't answer that question because whatever I do is by definition "wrong" ;-)
** Is this a good forum for general technical and policy questions regarding Gutenberg e-books?
This is it. Unfortunately long history has shown the PG [and DP] are more hide-bound than Andersen's "Old House" such that any such suggestions generate much heat and noise and no action.
Well, I hear you. I hope your experience is at one end of the spectrum (and not the other). But as I've observed in so many other projects and jobs, the problem ain't the hardware, and it ain't the software, and it ain't the firmware and it ain't the middleware. It's some other ware. I have mostly looked at some of the older books in the collection (for no particular reason). There, the most egregious problem is that the book was transcribed into ASCII, which inevitably results in some degree of data loss--sometime very unfortunate losses. Some human intervention would be necessary to repair that, but there are ways to reduce the amount of intervention required. I'm cognizant of necessity to keep a master copy, and build other formats from that. It's not clear to me what the preferred format of the master copy is, or should be. I am quite sure that very legible and attractive books could be automatically generated with a suitable base format. There are all sorts of technical possibilities -- again, this is not the problem. Besides that, I think some direction and clarity could be helpful regarding modern formats. Example: it seems that many e-books are formatted to retain the ASCII look-and-feel, at least regarding the Gutenberg project text. This is always pointlessly ugly, and is often totally illegible. A little thought, and some examples, clearly documented somewhere, would go a long way. Cheers!