On 10/12/11 3:01 AM, Juliet Sutherland wrote:
One thing I learned in all my time at DP is that there is always *someone* who finds even the most obscure books important. I've always felt that the "classics" will certainly be made available, if not by PG* then by various academic or profit-making organizations. What will be overlooked are the more obscure works. The things that only a few people will value but who will be extremely glad to have them available.
Hear, hear!
Changing the subject, I believe that one of the reasons the DP-EU and DP-Canada sites have not (yet) had the success of the original DP has to do with the difficulty in building a community of volunteers. Getting a critical mass takes time (last I looked, DP-Canada was making nice progress) and some other ingredient that I don't understand. Volume comes with number of volunteers. DP has many faults, it is true, not
A bunch of reasons, other than critical mass (which is obviously a factor), I can think of: - the last time I looked at DP-Canada and DP-EU their workflow was vastly different from that of DP. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, given the problematic workflow of DP. It is just that I find it hard to to remember what should be done in each stage of DP itself, let alone that I will remember the variations of Canada and EU. - in the case of PG-EU its sole reason for existence is the poor Unicode support at DP and DP-Canada. In terms of the size of the public domain, the 70+ countries have a public domain that can be described as a subset of the public domain of the USA and 50+ countries together. - unnecessary opaqueness, if these three variations of DP only would announce to their various communities what works are in progress at their sister sites, you'd see more cross-pollination. Regards, Walter