jon said:
It does beg the question, though, of what features, functions, user groups, etc., that we'd like the PG collection of, say, 2020, to support (or integrate with).
i have some ideas about that. so do you. and so do lots of other people. we can discuss it if you like. or not. might be nice. but it doesn't matter all that much to me, because i'm busy working to make my ideas a reality. the discipline of making them come alive while living under the constraint of creating source-code that a compiler turns into a working program gives me real-world feedback about whether my vision holds water. pudding is proof. as far as project gutenberg itself, that's up to the people steering that boat. i would hope they would listen to the founder. his vision brought them here. i know i can live with whatever michael does with his baby.
If anyone wants to know why I take various hard-nosed positions regarding PG collection development, they are largely based on meeting the requirements, as I understand them, for the above listed items. I want to see the PG collection, and any digital text collection, be able to meet the needs for most human endeavors, rather than being limited in scope.
except you're working in a vacuum. so you think a file-format is an answer. you will get a lot smarter once you start getting feedback from programmers about which of your ideas will really work, and which ones are just pipedream s. until then, you don't know what you don't know. unfortunately for you, i do... -bowerbird