On 10/18/2011 06:03 AM, Roger Frank wrote:
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.
Why you'd want to preserve a book that takes longer to digitize than it took to write is beyond me. Those cringeworthy books were turned out by the hundreds by faceless writer farms. They read like Crisco recipes. Those bland, insipid books only prepare children for the bland, insipid television shows they will watch contentedly for the rest of their lives. Little boxes, on the hillside, ...
I think those other "important books" will be preserved just fine without my help.
I'm not interested in `preserving´ books. Google and IA already do that *much* better than we do. I'm not interested in long files of books that gather dust in some disused library basement. I'm only interested in books that people actually read. And not crappy books either, because there's no difference, reading a crappy book or watching a crappy show on tv. So while all important books may already be preserved, they are not as easy to get and download as PG books. I want a set of the best books of all kinds and languages to be downloadable to people's pockets with minimal effort and cost. And I want gadget producers and lots of other sites to offer that download.
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?
What good is a leader if she *doesn't* tell people what to do ??? Michael's way of (non)-leading has failed spectacularly. PG has collected a big heap of books -- that's true -- but the heap is too inhomogeneous to be of any real use. Nobody uses PG books as they are. Every site I know puts PG books into their own master format before redistributing them. Wikipedia instead, by enforcing strict guidelines -- vilified by many -- in a lot less time, has become omnipresent. It's hard to come across a site that doesn't link to wikipedia. Every advance in technology has caught PG with its pants down. The switch to HTML had to be done by manually redoing all the books, because plain text turned out to be non-processable. The HTML that DP has produced for years and is still producing does not work well on the new portable reading devices. The next advance in technology will leave PG out of the game completely because PG has failed to deploy the least of technological safeguards, eg. a master format that can be made to transform into other unheard-of-today formats -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org