Lee wrote:
I have been very impressed with the work that Mr. Frank has done at fadedpage.net. Is this a project we could leverage? Roger, would you like to join us?
Lee, you must mean the fadedpage.net of old, when it was a site to explore ebook production. That employed several advanced features that users found useful and could have been a prototype for a real site, but I coded it myself and ran it on a non-commercial, personal server. Neither the quality of the code nor the bandwidth to the hardware were scalable, and it wasn't my intention to run a full production site anyway. At the time, I thought some of what I learned might be useful to DP. I thought the features that really made a difference might be picked up by DP and possibly integrated. I don't expect that to happen. That's the old site. The current fadedpage.net is a test site with exactly two users so I'm guessing it's not the one you were referring to. Also, it is dedicated to the books that some deem not worth producing. I disagree with the proposed restriction to only "important books". The books I'd like to save on fadedpage are the ones written for young readers: the boys' and girls' series books that shaped the minds of young people before television--reading about "Automobile Boys" or "Radio Girls"--or the school stories. Not great literature, but that doesn't mean it's not an important part of our history. I think those other "important books" will be preserved just fine without my help. I'd like to take some small part of America's reading experience and present it to the modern reader in a better way than I've seen so far. Perhaps because I'm a high-school teacher, the series books and the school stories appeal to me. They are on the opposite end of the spectrum from the books proposed for the "start over" site. Finally, I note that a technical proposal was made for a new site. Even if I agreed with all the technical points, there is what feels like a showstopper to me that's equally if not more important. Running a cooperative workflow of volunteers involves motivating people. A leader of such an effort can't just tell them what to do, or sometimes even how to do it. They need to gain their good will, evoke their interests, stimulate their creativity, and communicate with them in an open manner. Who is going to do that in the proposed organization? I see the shortcomings of DP as well as anyone; they need not be enumerated here. Should there be other sites? Yes, I think so. Many of them. And though I'm strictly an amateur programmer, perhaps I'll be able to contribute to some site, somewhere. For completely different reasons it won't be DP and it won't be the "start over" site. So, Lee, thanks for asking but I'm not going to be part of the project as proposed. --Roger