Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:
The village schoolmaster in a third world village, who has two hours of electricity a day, one cellular phone for the entire village, and an obsolete laptop donated to him by a first world company with a connection from the phone to the laptop cobbled together by a gadget-minded Peace Corps volunteer or church or UN aid worker, doesn't give a squiddly about umlauts and grave accents.
True, if he happens to speak or teach English. If he happens to speak or teach any other language of the world he will care very much for accents, squigglies and umlauts. I wouldn't want to teach my pupils eg. French from a book without accents. And don't start me about schoolmasters who speak or teach Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hebrew, Arab, Vietnamese, Thai etc. Actually the 7bit craze at PG at some point went so far as to convert Chinese etexts to 7bit, completely mangling the text. Now suppose some Chinese reader did actually download one of those garbled texts and tried to make it work. Not good for the image of PG. Fortunately those bogus files have been tossed out since. Personally I hold that all the 7bit files of foreign books are useless and dangerous because people may get hold of them instead of the 8bit files they can use. Notice I said "can," not "could."
He just wants BOOKS that he can READ to his students during the two hours a day that the electricity is on.
In this case he should trade the notebook against a PDA with solar cell charger. Then he could read 24 hours a day. Ah, and, of course, he would have to download the HTML or PDB file, because the hard-wrapped TXT files are very hard to read on a PDA.
The cowboy who's going to be stuck all winter in a back-country cabin looking after a herd of cattle in a snowed-in high pasture, or the astronaut, or the submariner, or the scientists in a South Pole research station,
Acually the South Pole research stations have a pretty fat pipe and plenty of the latest and greatest in computer gadgets. Wish I had.
If we go back to the very basics, this is the goal of Project Gutenberg. It is no mistake that the very first things Michael posted were the most important documents of freedom.
You are very America-centric, aren't you? The most important documents of freedom are those of the French revolution (with accents). And if I were Chinese I would probably hold that the most important etc. etc. is Maos Red Book (unicode). Most importancy is relative. Michael posted those first because the computer he was on couldn't hold any longer texts.
An educated populace can be kept enslaved for only so long, and then the privy hits the fan.
Don't kid yourself. You can fool almost all of the people almost all of the time. The rest you shoot. Or, how do you explain that the most "civilized" countries of this world still use war as an instrument for "solving" international conflicts. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org