On Fri, 26 Feb 2010, Marcello Perathoner wrote:
The Free Software community says: "Release early, release often."
I was saying this long before they were. If you recall, Alice in Wonderland, our breakthrough eBook, appeared in 30 revised editions in just a few years leading our readers to the conclusion that they could come back any time and get revised versions of our eBooks. No one complained out in the real world, but eventually the insider complainers in PG decided there should be a final-- once and future--Alice in Wonderland. There were plenty of errors to go around in the early days, but it turned out that the biggest complainers were just an assortment of eBook insiders, but that the public was a big fan of both Project Gutenberg and of eBooks, and were happy to send us error reports and get the new editions. This whole idea/ideal of waiting, waiting, waiting for some "perfect" edition we could release has thus caused problems in the extreme that we would never have encountered if this final edition business had never gotten started. I don't know how many of you know PG history all that well, but the first editions of all of our early works had labels like "Alice in Wonderland 0.1" to "Alice in Wonderland 0.9" before they were ever "officially" released, simply because we all KNEW there would be errors to correct. I never believed in trying to START with "perfect" eBooks-- I just figured they would perfect themselves in growing up, through the natural process of our reader sending errors. Now we want to pretend there ARE no errors, even to points where our bigmouth says "perfect" in referring to this. This pretense is causing us HUGE problems and denying book access to thousands of titles we could release as "0.x." By the way, as for the count being 2,000 in excess, do not forget the 2008, or so, currently in "PrePrints." Counting those it is a little over 8,000.
Its the proprietary software producers that let you wait forever and then release crap.
Now, which of these is DP?
I would like to see PG & DP be a little less proprietary, a little less about who gets how much credit and a little more about getting the books out there ASAP and then work them up to a never ending Xeno's progress to perfection. Please. . . . I hope to be thanking you for your consideration, I'd like to get our CEO, Greg Newby, started testing this out in the near future, and we'll see how it works. Until we actually try it, all this is just conjecture.... Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg