Hmm..... I've got a few commments. On Thu, 16 Dec 2010, John Redmond wrote:
I was not encouraged, but I was not deterred, either. And now suddenly the tenor of the discussions seems to have changed in light of the ereaders and the associated commercialism.
From my point of view, I have not seen a sudden change. Ereaders of various types have been around, and have made use of reformatted PG texts for years. On this particular mailing list, topics may come and go, and this one has cropped up again recently.
But there is suddenly a market for spiffed-up versions of the texts. And the money-spinners are happy to charge for them.
Surely the time has come for PG to offer at least some of the books in sexier formats. EPub seems suddenly to be inevitable, though I don't like it much, and I would much prefer to distribute PDF documents. But they are inevitably bulkier!
Epub files, (and a few other formats) have been automatically generated and presented on the catalog pages for some months now.
So there you are! The scripts are still in flux, but the results look encouraging. Anyone interested?
Many web sites take PG books and reformat them in all kinds of ways. You are welcome to do this as well. If you want to propose something to be used on gutenberg.org you probably want to talk to Marcello, the PG webmaster. --Andrew