I'll respond to your concerns here, although I may just be repeating what others have said. First, the web site. In responce to people who wanted to find out about various details about Project Gutenberg, Jim Tinsely put together a sizable faq which you can find here: http://www.gutenberg.org/faq/ It goes into much detail about many aspects of volunteering for PG, among other things. It could be a little overwhelming because of the amount of information it contains, but such is the trade-off. If you are looking at preparing a text yourself, any word processor or text editor that can output standard plain text ought to be suitable. I could tell you what I use, and others on this list could do the same, but they would likely all be different. Next you mentioned copyright clearances. Are you using the interface found at: http://copy.pglaf.org/ Or are you emailing the images directly to someone? I think every person who is interested in PG is important. As you may have seen on this list, even those who may not have the good-will of many others still have their say. I, as well as others, responded to your previous message on this mailing list. If there were other messages you sent, are you able to check them to make sure the address was correct? Doing a whole book yourself as a first project is very much an uphill struggle. In the "old days" it was not uncommon for well-intentioned people to come to PG and then give up part-way through their first attempt. These days, it is usual to direct people to Distributed Proofing first, as that is a good place a to learn the basics of what we do, and can give you a start that can make your first book much easier. It also might help to realize that Project Gutenberg is a rather decentralized volunteer organization. Those of us involved all have "real-life" jobs and concerns to worry about, and still spend many hours doing our best to make PG work, though it sometimes is frustrating to do so. If you do feel that you are being ignored, please believe that it is not intentional. So, to sum it all up: Recomendation: Go spend a week or so proofing pages at distributed proofers. Alternate: If that does not appeal or is not workable for you, and you still want to do a book on your own, you are welcome to do so. Get ready to spend some time reading through the FAQ mentioned above, and to ask some questions. And do take it one step at a time (ie, asking about copyright clearances, and how the mailing list works, and file formats all at once might not be a good choice.) Thanks, Andrew On Mon, 3 Oct 2005 BunnyCAW@aol.com wrote:
You know, about 2 weeks ago, I tried to find out how to join your project and start entering a number of older books that I have in my possession. I tried finding instructions on how to do this on the web page, but found only muddy descriptions of how to go about it. There were no firm guidelines such as USE THIS FORMAT or HERE IS THE PROGRAM THAT WE TYPCIALLY USE. I tried to send scans to obtain copyright clearance only to have the message bounce. I tried resending them with the _at_ changed to @ and never got a reply from whomever was handling the clearances. So, since joining as a PROOFREADER was all that I could find info on, I joined this list. I submitted a couple of elementary questions such as what format to type these books into, etc. My message has NEVER appeared on this digest. All that HAS appeared is a bunch of people bickering and complaining about some arrogant twit. Can we all just GET OFF OF IT and do something constructive? How about someone clueing me in as to a very basic HOW do I reach this person who clears the books for copyright? And should the output of my text files be a TXT file? Or something else? (Then of course there are questions such as how you typically handle/format tables of contents and page breaks, how illustrations are typically treated, etc.) I know that one person is not THAT important, so I won't threaten to leave if I'm not answered, but you'd surely think that you all would welcome something else to do than to gripe about this Bowerbird person... As for me... I'm getting tired of waiting and being ignored.