Michael Hart wrote:
However, 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 in favor of replacing them with something else, as opposed to just working on them to bring them up to the standards of the modern era of eBooks.
This sounds like an exaggeration to me. It's true that (on January 4th) D. Starner asked[1] if we could "get rid of" PG's World Library Editions of Shakespeare, and appeared to be in favour of doing so. See: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/2005-January/001133.html However, (a) I don't see that anyone agreed with the deletion. So that's one outspoken volunteer, not "at least a dozen or two". (b) I don't see anyone recommending the deletion of any other books. If there are posts I've missed that would support the assertion above, feel free to give links to the archive. Mind you, that's assuming that the outspokenness has happened on gutvol-d. Did it happen somewhere else? By the way, I'm curious as to why D. Starner would like to get rid of those editions. Are they particularly bad/questionable for some reason?
Would someone be willing to do all the work to donate a Britannica 11th to Project Gutenberg this year if they thought it would be removed from Project Gutenberg a decade after it was first included?
Yes, I would. And if you ask "Why would you go to all that effort, only to have the results deleted in 10 years?", I would point out that it would only be PG's copy that's deleted; the results of my work would live on, elsewhere on the web. -Michael