On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 at 08:06:39PM +0100, Robert Gibbins wrote:
I read Stevan White's recent appends about improving PG epubs with a certain amount of wry amusement.
Not at Stevan's append, which I thoroughly agree with, but at the fact that I wrote a fairly similar one about 18 months ago, which was more or less completely ignored by the PG decision makers. (And I am sure I wasn't the first person to do this, as BB kindly pointed out to me at the time.)
Your starting premise is that PG mainly focuses on ASCII, which is incorrect. I don't remember your proposal specifically, but most proposals for improvements actually involve one or two things: 1) Telling people what they can no longer do (i.e., limiting choices), or 2) Finding "someone" to do something -- write software, create standards, develop policy, etc. The usual answer from me, and from Michael, is that we will fully support and encourage your effort. It's never clear to me why this isn't satisfying. BTW, I am in the midst of planning a "Gutenberg Summit" for next spring, and anyone with an interest in PG will be invited. Stay tuned for details... maybe there will be some like-minded ideas that achieve critical mass, instead of feeling like a lone voice in the digital wilderness. -- Greg
Since that time I've come to realise that PG basically isn't interested in technology, but in books, and preserving them into the digital future.
The key PG technology policy, which seems to have originated from the late and much-lamented Michael S. Hart, is that the best way to do this is to require that all books should wherever possible be made available in a 'lowest common denominator' plain text format so that the books would be as universally accessible as possible.
Remembering back to the 1960's, when I started programming, I can understand why that was a pretty sensible decision at the time, although as someone who started out writing in EBCDIC, I probably have less faith in US ASCII as a lingua franca than many others do.
What I find a lot harder to understand is why the rule still stands today, when there is a much more universally known lingua franca called (X)HTML in which, with a certain amount of standardisation, it is possible to encode important parts of the book that can't easily be done with plain text.
Basically PG has failed to provide leadership in setting standards for HTML encoding of books, and that the result is that though, as Stevan said, the books are great, in reality anyone wanting to create an epub for their reading device cannot rely either on the PG HTML, or the generated epubs.
It seems to me that this is a major strategic failure of PG, which if it were a commercial organisation would by now have put it out of businesss.
How did this happen? Did PG really DECIDE to limit itself to being largely an ASCII text mine/museum, or did it fail to change?
Bob Gibbins
Dr. Gregory B. Newby Chief Executive and Director Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation www.gutenberg.org A 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization with EIN 64-6221541 gbnewby@pglaf.org