On 10/12/2011 03:01 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.
My vision is to have every gadget on this earth sold preloaded with a corpus of the world's finest literature, in all languages. I'm not interested in having all classics somewhere on the net, I want all classics in one place, done the same way, so they can be handled as a whole corpus. I want a corpus that every company can pick up so that every new tablet, every new phone, every new tv set, every new mp3 player comes with a lifetime of the finest reading preloaded. Every person on this earth has a right to carry all public domain in his pocket.
*It does get frustrating to make new, better proofed, better illustrated versions of classics only to have the PG website continue to list the older, more problematic versions more prominently.
The PG website lists the most downloaded books first. If people don't download your `better proofed, better illustrated´ version, then there is something wrong with it. The older versions are done in a much simpler way and thus work much better on those devices people actually read books on. Note that many users don't go thru the PG search facility but thru search engines and links posted everywhere on the net, so the way PG lists books is not that important for book performance. The lesson here is: the crazy formatting of DP acts like DRM. It prevents those books from working on many devices. And people only post links to books that actually worked for them. Of course no one at DP wants to hear that, as it is much easier to blame PG. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org