On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 12:07:00PM -0800, Michael S. Hart wrote:
I though we decided long ago to move most of the legalese to the end, just for these reasons. . .VERY hard on small screens.
We did. There is not a whole lot up top -- just the short paragraph legalese, and metadata. The "*** START OF" and "*** END OF" have been reliable indicators of where the eBook content starts for very many years (since at least #2000 or so). There are still hundreds of titles that have not been updated from the old-style, where legalese is up top. But this is a relatively small number. -- Greg
On Thu, 19 Nov 2009, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
Jim Adcock wrote:
Suggest if you want greater acceptance of PG books by the E-reader crowd, PG would be better off moving the bulk of the legalese to the rear of the E-books. Further, an naïve reader who doesn't really know or understand PG can be made very nervous about the PG legalese, even if only to be afraid to share E-books with friends -- which I think is not the intent of the legalese.
About 9% of gutenberg.org users come from India. I guess they might get pretty nervous about all that verbiage and maybe even wonder if they have indeed downloaded an *English* book?
Isn't it ironic that books snarfed from PG pop up everywhere with the legalese cleanly cut out? Because the PG license requires royalties but the cutting out is for free.
A simple pointer to the CC-Attribution-ShareAlike or CC-Public-Domain license and a single line: this book was produced by Project Gutenberg etc. would have done a much better job because:
- readers would not have been inconvenienced by endless scrolling, - readers would have actually understood the meaning, - the Project Gutenberg name and address would have been kept by at least some republisher and so - the 'electronic path' would have been kept open.
The PG license is nothing but a textbook example of how an organisation goes to great pains to just damage itself.
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