What these numbers and comments do NOT reflect is that even after only a portion of processing if we make these available they will be in additional formats and/or improved quality. . .not to leave out that some people may find them here rather than not at all. It's not as if this is some kind of secret process we must hide-- mh On Fri, 26 Feb 2010, D Garcia wrote:
DISCLAIMER: The following _data_ comes directly from DP site statistics. All opinions following are my own.
Of the "8000" works "trapped at DP":
(rounded to nearest hundreds) 4100 from TIA. 700 from Gallica/BNF. 1000 from Google. 400 from the next 5 most represented online sources. (6200 in total.)
Those 6200+ works already are available to the public, at minimum in scanned pages form, and most of them with OCR available. The argument that these works are "trapped" is a red herring stemming from frustration over how long it now takes the DP process to produce a "finished" version of the text.
On Thu, 25 Feb 2010, Michael Hart wrote:
We have always invited people to take our completed books and redo them into their own editions, and hopefully resubmit them to redistribute.
If we do this for books that are done, why not for those undone?
PG is of course welcome to continue their status quo practice with respect to those completed texts. However, I know of nothing that entitles PG to take advantage of the efforts of the volunteers of a separate organization before the results of those efforts are freely and willingly offered to them.
Are we worried more about who gets the credit and getting books out?
Considering that the proposed scheme essentially serves to inflate PG's number of texts "available," with little significant benefit to the public, and with a real risk of significant detriment to DP as an organization and to its individual volunteers, can you honestly expect a reasonable person to take your question seriously?
There are (as is often pointed out on gutvol-d) hundreds of thousands of works in the various book scanning repositories, all "undone" as you would have people believe. If PG were truly interested in making large numbers of "undone" books available in "pre-print" then perhaps they should take advantage of their organizational clout and forge partnerships to have direct access to that material in all forms. But that would require effort.
What seems to have happened instead is that PG has decided that the DP in- process text, even though unfinished, is desirable low-hanging fruit, and *that* requires only minimal effort. All that's required is to convince the 'right' people at DP to either A) expend limited resources towards that end instead of where they're needed, or, B) stand aside and allow PG to take unreasonable advantage of what have so far been amiable terms of relationship.
Michael, I honestly respect your vision, but your ethic is sorely lacking at the moment.
David (donovan) _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d