Bowerbird, my heartfelt thanks. This is exactly what I was looking for. On 2012-09-23, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
unless _all_ the p.g. powers-that-be _guarantee_ that won't happen to this project, it will be sunk...
(do _not_ let the blanket "yes" that greg always gives in response to any proposal _fool_ you... greg himself couldn't put his _own_ proposal into play back at the start of this year, once it came up against a too-deadly combination of (1) reality, (2) whitewashers, and (3) marcello.)
Maybe I am an optimist and hopelessly naive, but my hope is that all the PG powers-that-be are part of PG for the right reasons, that they recognise that a problem exists, and that they are keen that it gets fixed. From what you say, it cannot get fixed without buy-in from the WWs and Marcello to a specific course of action, so the problem is really one of generating consensus around a course of action. The concept of MS and RTT for 1000 texts is as simple, unambitious and uncontroversial a plan as I can think of that would still have the desired effect. The question then, to Marcello and any WWs reading this: could you, at least in principle, get behind this plan or a variation thereof sufficiently to make a pilot of 10 books a worthwhile enterprise?
1. maybe it's just me that's confused, but you don't seem to be very clear on whether you want to increase the quality of the text, or of the derivative formats.
I care about accuracy, and I care about typography. I want to make ebooks that make Amazon ashamed of itself. I know that with an MS, an RTT and Knuth's genius I can do a solo project that shames Amazon in a day or two. What I can't do is create the MS and RTT by myself. Selection of the correct MS requires true expertise from the group mind of PG. Creating an RTT with the highest possible level of accuracy within a reasonable timeframe requires, in my opinion at least, some sort of distributed proofreading. Therefore my focus initially is on the MS and RTT.
2. doing 10 books is more than enough to tell you whether you want to do any more... ... and perhaps most important of all, you will see just exactly how much p.g. _really_ supports you.
There seems to be a consensus around a 10 book pilot forming. Success would mean that 1 in 20 downloads would be of improved quality. Sounds good to me.
3. skip d.p. _entirely._ it's hard enough to battle through one bureaucracy; two is nigh impossible. you will _never_ get d.p. to buy into your changes, because it'll be afraid the behavior will generalize.
DP co-operation may not be as crucial as I once thought. Carlo has offered DP.it's services (thanks!) and Don has suggested DPCanada may be amenable. Greg has offered to point the PG volunteer hose where required. So we could likely work around DP non co-operation, but... Well... I think it is worth at least _trying_ to bring them on board. There are a lot of things in the DP workflow that I disagree with, but the people at DP are good people with good intentions, and they have been doing good work that more or less amounts to the MS to RTT transformation for a very, very long time. We would not be adding to or changing the DP workflow, we are just subtracting, and, given that we would avoid the bottleneck rounds, doing this work would actually help with one of their largest headaches, the balancing of rounds. Having said all that, I PM'd Louise a few days ago and she has given me a damned good ignoring, so I concede, sadly, that you are almost certainly right.
5. although the suggestion to go with first editions _sounds_ good, i'd be careful. when i've examined the changes made from one edition to the next one, it certainly appears that a lot of errors are corrected. so i'm inclined to think later editions will be "better". for instance, in "pride and prejudice", see this change:
Mrs. Long and her daughters must stand their chance; Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance;
i'm guessing whichever one came _later_ was _correct_. first editions appeal to collectors, not text-obsessives.
and Don wrote on another thread:
The longer I think about the job we're trying to do here, and the collection of books we're assembling, the more I conclude that the most important piece of the foundation upon which it's built needs to be your Step #1 - collect the page scans. Once the text has been contributed, it's just about unassailable in its original form unless the images of the source text are preserved and are accessible.
I think you and Don have hit upon the key issue here. I fully admit to having precisely zero knowledge or experience regarding book editions and availability of scans. I naively thought that "someone" would know which edition a given extant text was derived from and that it would be straightforward to find a decent scan given that knowledge. This is cleary very wrong. That we don't necessarily know the edition of the extant text raises the issue of which edition we lock in to. Who makes that decision? It is way above my pay grade, even if my knowledge allowed me to make a good one, which it doesn't. I conclude that Don is absolutely correct. The initial action of a 10 book pilot should involve nothing more or less than determining, in each case, which edition and hence which scan we are going to work with. If we can successfully do this as a group we can work out a way to do the rest. We need someone knowledgeable to guide this selection process and if necessary make a final executive decision in each case. I propose then that Greg either takes on this role himself or nominates someone, or a small group of someones, for it. Without this in place, I don't think any further progress will be possible. Cheers Jon