al said:
It'll be interesting to see who, if anyone, steps up
yes indeed. but let's take a look back... *** imagine the year is 2004. p.g. just hit the magic 10,000. and bowerbird comes along telling you that you can use light-markup as your "master" to generate other formats. instead of throwing rocks at him, you actually listen, and even try it out, and -- lo and behold -- it actually _works_. from then on, the library is powerful and state-of-the-art. none of your people have to waste any of their time making .html versions, because that's done for them automatically... same with the .pdf versions, which were big in the early days, and various other formats which people wanted at some time. and because p.g. is the go-to source for _all_ of the formats, there's no niche for the repackagers to get a toe in the field... especially as the conversions become extremely well-honed. this means when google and internet archive start scanning, project gutenberg is the clear leader, so they both fall in line, because hey, there's no need to "fix it" since it ain't "broken", meaning those projects end up with very different workflows, which prioritize text over scans, and exalt cleaned-up o.c.r. moreover, when amazon decides to get in the game big-time, with the .mobi format they bought, p.g. is the place which has "been there, done that" all along, so p.g. remains out in front. plus, everyone knows -- they can see it with their own eyes -- that a plain-text format can still provide us with e-books that are beautiful, functional, and powerful, so there is no need to use clunky formats like .html or .xhtml or .epub or .whatever. further, since e-book authoring is a breeze -- because p.g. has paved the way to show how simple it can be -- self-publishing takes off sooner, so the money-grubbing corporate publishers go down faster, and we get a jump-start on a new cultural era. it's win-win for everyone, with p.g. up at the head of the class. that's what _could_ have happened. what happened instead is that many people here were stupid, and stubborn, and mean enough to form an attack-pack, and the result is a confused mess which persists to this very day... so i really hope you people -- and you know who you are! -- are proud of yourselves. because you messed up really badly. -bowerbird