Greg Newby wrote:
Project Gutenberg does not encourage deep linking to our Web site and, in some cases, has actively discouraged it. But a link to the main page, http://www.gutenberg.net, would be most welcome, and will help to distribute our free electronic texts.
This, I think, does not reflect "common usage". There are millions of deep links into the PG site, directly to the files or into the old (Pietro's) search page. Many of them are found inside newsgroups, blogs and reviews where changing them is impossible. I am trying to keep those old links working with redirects. We should (and I have done so for some time) encourage links to the bibrec page in the canonical www.gutenberg.net/etext/12345 form instead of to the files. We also have a canonical www.gutenberg.net/author/Mark_Twain url that gives you all books by that author. This url is used on the wikipedia pages to get a current list of books vs. the often stale and uncomplete edited-by-hand lists. (I myself put in many of them.) Any user that gets on one of those pages can easily navigate to the root page, so it is not necessary to require deep linkers to also set a link to the root. Deep linking to the files, while harmless, is less effective than linking to the bibrec page. The user may not be aware that there are more formats to choose from, he may not be aware that there are newer versions and she may not see the huge amount of other material we have. Bottom line: - we should allow deep links to /etext/12345 and /author/Mark_Twain - we should discourage deep links to the files And further on, we should get our subject cataloging up to date so we can offer an url like /subject/Mystery. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.net