On Sat, Feb 04, 2012 at 12:10:24PM -0800, Jim Adcock wrote:
BBgee... somehow i got the impression that -- under the rubric of "crowdsourcing" -- you were _soliciting_ "improved" versions of p.g. books, versions that were "fixed" and "tweaked" such that they gave people "better" experiences, either because they had had their typos and errors "corrected", or because they were "more friendly" with some hardware/software, or a combination of both those factors. i _also_ thought that you proposed to "host" these "new" versions, _and_ that the "best" one -- out of many that were "submitted", thanks to dedicated efforts by volunteers -- might get "folded back into" the p.g. library....
I don't have anything against discussion of markup, transformation mechanisms, master formats, DP, etc. But my emphasis all along in these discussion threads has been on tools to enable aggregation and redistribution of variants on our eBooks. This is because we get frequent requests to add such files into the PG collection, and have no good, standard, scalable way to do so. Plus, complaints about shortcomings of existing mobile formats. (Contrariwise, end users -- readers -- never complain to help@ concerning HTML, master formats, the PG (and DP) processing workflow, and other topics we've been hashing out. That's not to say such topics are not important, or are unrelated.)
What I heard Greg say was indeed he was going allow these various different "improved" versions to be posted targeting various platforms, and that indeed he said that WW'ers would have the option in the future of folding back *parts* of the new effort into the existing PG source files when they felt doing so would make a contribution. I don't think he ever said anything about totally replacing current versions with totally new versions in totally new source languages, and I certainly didn't hear him suggest that the current source file formats of the current books were going to be totally replaced with new source file formats.
That's a nice rephrasing of what I've been thinking of. This whole approach is, essentially, a layer over the existing set of files of the eBooks in our collection. We already have those files, and a way to receive and update them. We don't have a good way of handling variations on those files (notably, derived formats), including crowdsourcing backports.
... And I still don't see where people who want to post these "improved" versions targeting specific platforms can post their efforts where PG customers can find them, so, I guess, in practice, Marcello holds the keys to the fortress.
We've only been discussing this for a week or two. I encourage anyone wanting to do their own experiments to go ahead. Nothing that Marcello or anyone else did is deployed to www.gutenberg.org yet. -- Greg