
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Michael Dyck wrote:
Michael Hart wrote:
there are at least a dozen or two very outspoken volunteers at Project Gutenberg among a dozen or two thousand of such volunteers, who would prefer to delete many of the original Project Gutenberg eBooks
... the removing refers to suggestions ... including eBook #100, the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
... the dozen comes from various discussions we've had over time.
Some of us try to remember the past as we plan for the future.
I'm trying to remember the past, but so far I'm not remembering it as you do. Could you be a bit more specific, to help jog my memory, and provide a basis for searching the archive? Could you name two or three other ebooks whose deletion was sought/recommended/suggested?
These conversations have appeared on various listservers, and over a long period of time, dating all the way back to the Bible #10, Roget's #22, the Bible #30, Sophocles #31, Jekyll and Hyde #42-43, The Gift of the Magi [no # at the time], Frankenstein #84 and 84a, and, of couse, the Complete Shakespeare #100. In more recent times such suggestions have appeared online and offline among the member of "The Book People," "The eBook List," "The PDA-eBook List" and I'm sure there were even more. In addition, there are often such discussions immediately before during and after the release of various items. We are currently discussing how to present the Mahabharata, which as long as the Bible and Shakespeare combined into one book. Some want to present it as a single huge file, while I, having written a paper on it in college, see a great value in presenting it both in a book by book format, as well as one huge file, for a wider range of useful searches. I certainly prefer to have both options available with Shakespeare and the Bible, and we have received many thank you notes for the works David Widger has so kindly prepared in a similar manner. Of course, there is a wide range of years and events between those two paragraphs I mentioned earlier, including all the Dante translations and editions, starting with those surrounding #1,000, and proceeding right up to today, when I received a message stating a new translation is now becoming available. I sent off the copyright permission request, and hopefully we'll have yet another Dante shortly. Those are just the ones off the top of my head, but I am sure we also talked about combining all the Benjamin Jowett translations, and many others, some of which combinations are created elsewhere for scholars to search, some of which come back to us, and some of which I am sure we never hear about at all. In the end everyone is free to create their own PG collection as want and I am sure that include a lot of things people have done that will never become popular, and some that will. Once we get some requests for any certain presentation we always want to give our readers what they want, in addition to what our volunteer base wants for themselves. Michael S. Hart