Sounds like a wonderful project! Even though PG can't host it, don't let that dampen your enthusiasm. There are lots of other ways to make the results available for free.
Some form of structured markup that allowed people to reformat and print to different sizes and devices in the future would be nice, rather than pdfs...
Agreed. Here's the challenge: if you make annotations within the existing PG files, then it's difficult to just see the annotations. If you keep the annotations separate, it's hard to see them in context. The ideal solution would be a tiny bit of automation (perhaps created by a student if techie stuff isn't your thing). Then you could keep the annotations separate, and just add small markers to the original text. Simple scripts could do things like: - format the annotations on their own - insert the annotations into the text, preferably with appropriate HTML wrapper that lets readers show/hide using CSS (style sheets) or JavaScript. As others have noted, HTML or the newer XHTML is ideal here. (If a specific "book" that you need doesn't exist in HTML, I'll bet some people here would help do at least a basic conversion.)
I've looked at the archive, and haven't found any discussion of this topic; any suggestions or advice about such a project (or where to look next) would be appreciated.
If you want to take a more ambitious approach, review the list for discussions on "PGTEI", "TEI" and "XML". But, effective use of these is likely to be more work. (It's not overly difficult given the appropriate technical background, so it depends on what sort of resources you have available.) Note for the record that highly-structured XML "originals" would let you "point" each annotation to the appropriate place in a document without altering the original (using XPATH). That's great in theory, but is again probably too much tech work for your project. (I'd be happy for an XPATH expert to show that I'm wrong; perhaps it's easier than I think to point to a specific location in a typical PG HTML file, presumably using Tidy and such to convert to XHTML.) -- Cheers, Scott S. Lawton http://Classicosm.com/ - classic books http://ProductArchitect.com/ - consulting