On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 06:18:33PM -0400, D Garcia wrote:
By way of forking the discussion, on Thursday 25 May 2006 at 01:10 am, Greg Newby responded to Jon Ingram with:
Woah there, cowboy.
I've been waiting for DP to provide raw page scans for *years*. This is something I discussed with Charles & Juliet years ago. The whitewashers are ready. iBiblio is ready.
And the volunteer is ready. I volunteered nearly two months ago to take up this task and am simply waiting on various action items from a few people. Charles always intended to have the scans from DP available to the general public whenever possible.
Responding to Joshua's point about the desired format, as well as Greg W's inquery. There were several messages and some proposals about the details of how to handle page scans. Stuff like whether individual pages should each have their own file, and what format... I will forward a message from Jim Tinsley about that in a moment, from July 2004. There was subsequent discussionn. I don't think we quite got closure, but will ask the WWs if they remember anything specific. My suggestion is to do a few dozen of these, and work out the workflow as we go. If you can upload a .zip or .tar or somesuch to the pglaf server via FTP (not via http://upload.pglaf.org), then email me, I'll push them to the archive. Let me know if you don't have the (non-anonymous) upload/outgoing password for pglaf.org. Ideally, zipped with the eBook #, and with everthing in a page-images, xxxxx-page-images/ subdir: 12345/12345-page-images/ that will allow our automated "push" script to put it in the right place. If things seem to work OK, I'll set things up so I won't need to intervene. I think it's fine to experiment with different ways of doing the images -- that will help us to know what's workable for our readers, and useful for other purposes. Rather than rehashing all of the questions, options and issues, I'd just as soon see some stuff get posted so we can invite folks to try it. (I'm not trying to quell discussion, just trying to avoid the discussion getting in the way of the work.) Thanks for stepping up and trying this! We do want to make images part of the regular workflow, but because the whitewashers tend to download the eBooks to their home/office systems for final processing, we'll probably want to have the page scans flow somewhat separately than everything else. Whoopee, this is great!! Yippee-ei-ayyyyyyyy!! -- Greg
I've also been pressing to get preprints from DP...scans before the postprocessing is done, to release "to the wild" before they're quite ready. (Last count there are over 800 of these.)
It's an interesting idea, but initially I'd like to focus on getting the existing projects in order. :)
If you could help to move things forward on either scans or preprints, I'd be very grateful! (Ditto for anyone else reading.) -- Greg
-- David