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 is a deliberate mis-statement of the facts. Glossary: "A dozen or two very outspoken volunteers": those who spoke up against Michael. "among 12 thousand": the rhetoric of the silent majorities is an instrument widely used in propaganda. The speaker stipulates the existence of a fictitious silent majority who are in favour of his ideas. This didn't work when used against the peace movement in the 80s and doesn't work now. The facts set right: "A dozen or two very outspoken volunteers" were contemplating the question if it was advisable to keep some files in the catalog database which cannot be read any more because the file format is proprietary and we could not get a copy of the reader program to distribute with the files. The question came up because a reader mistakenly downloaded those files for genuine ones and was asking us for the reader program, which of course we couldn't supply. Nobody was advocating to delete the files. Some people advocated writing a "proprietary file formats hall of shame" page using appropriate language and linking to the files from there as examples. This would have made the files more visible than they are now. Makes you wonder: which one of these proposals made Michael use the phrase "Orwellian Rewriting of History"?
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?
This rhetoric question is based on mis-stated facts. Simple answer: If somebody was to do the Britannica now, she would simply include a plain text version -- which, we know, will last forever. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org