I forwarded this thread to the ebooksgratuits.com (ELG) head of project (CC'd). I roughly translated his reply. 1 - Communication ================= He would have appreciated to be contacted about those issues. He is not comfortable with English. He is open to answer any questions (in French): he believes people not fluent enough in French to communicate with him and his group in French may not be competent to deal about French-language literature. He has set up a webforum for PG/PGDP and ELG volunteers to share ideas, comments, etc.: http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/gizmo/ So far nobody went there but people active on both PG and ELG or having left PG for ELG. 2 - Project snapshot and statistics with respect to PG ====================================================== . 100 ELG books have been published on PG . 10 more will be soon . 30 in the works will eventually be 3 - Workings of ELG =================== He manages everything and takes legal responsibility for what the project does. In a nutshell, it is Canadian law (Life+50) but there are subtleties. Their website features books which are public domain in Canada but not in France. PG clearance ------------ Getting PG clearance is a work- and time-consuming job: ELG does not follow the same rules, they have their own rules (which don't match those of PG), they scan modern editions, etc. In order to get clearance, he must check whether there exists an old edition of the book (Gallica or else), whether it is the same, etc. The group vitality is very good: 70 to 80 active volunteers, 230 books published in less than 11 months, 200,000 books downloaded every month. He works on the the project a few hours everyday and has no time at the moment to deal with clearances. He agrees and would be happy anyone at ELG or PG wishes to take care of that, but would like this to be in collaboration with him. Publication on PG ----------------- Publication on PG: until now, after clearance, he did the conversions himself to the PG requirements for formats (TXT and RTF). He agrees anybody to help with that, in collaboration with them. Note: I will try to help on those two issues. I once did a program to transform his RTF into valid HTML. Now I will probably change it to produce valid TEI XML (which I will learn soon, as well as the various transforming etc. tools around it, when in a few weeks/months I start post-processing my first PGDP projects): http://www.eleves.ens.fr/home/blondeel/PGDP/ebooksgratuits/ On a regular basis, I also compile a list of French books available from different sources (PG, PGDP EU/US bronze/silver/gold, ELG, Gallica textetc.): http://www.eleves.ens.fr/home/blondeel/PGDP/catalog/ I run into the problem of unique classification of books and authors. For the moment, this is useful to lookup keywords or parts of names. I will include more sources in that little by little (the full Gallica scans and books not scanned yet; Bibliothèque Électronique du Québec, etc.) I will probably need to switch to a better database file format than HTML. 4 - Way ELG works ================= http://ebooksgratuits.com/faq.php?categ=%ABFabrication%BB+des+ebooks One person works on a full book at any stage, in her favorite tool (word processor). The different stages for the same book may be done by different people. Phase 1.2 is word by word comparison with the scan. They are very flexible because he is himself very flexible.