On Wed, Oct 03, 2012 at 07:58:26PM +0100, Robert Gibbins wrote:
... PG is going to have to step up to the plate and think about standardising its HTML contributions.
And (ahem) from what I can see of their contributions, it's not totally clear to me that the current PG inner circle necessarily have all the experience and skills to do this on their own.
That's the thing: theoretically, we control the whole processing chain. And, we can enforce policy (especially automatically, but not only). The "let's cut to the chase" (attached) gives a good summary of where I think TPTB agree. Having some sort of checklist, policy, data flow, etc. that can help guide producers and also policy enforcement would be very helpful. This would clearly need to go beyond our current policy, which is basically that (a) HTML or RST or TEI should be submitted as a master, and (b) producers should use http://epubmaker.pglaf.org to make sure derivatives work well. ** We have a wiki at www.gutenberg.org, we have a mailing list, and we can use whatever other technologies we identify. I would enjoy seeing some sort of guide -- even for one format (HTML is the obvious choice) -- that we could provide to producers and WWers. ** We also have an open source project, epubmaker, for generating our derivative works. As well as access to kindlegen etc. There is every opportunity to improve these, or even replace. BTW, we also control the catalog. If there is a structured, scalable and maintainable way to point people at versions of PG books that live elsewhere (sort of a distributed PG "marketplace," like Amazon or buy.com), I'd be interested in putting it in place. There isn't a tyranny of "only stuff at www.gutenberg.org is good." Having a link "Alternate offsite versions" seems perfectly reasonable to me. BUT, tough to do in a structured, scalable & maintainable way. In particular, dealing with various situations where the offsite version moves or goes away. -- Greg