spring has sprung

devastation on three fronts in japan... and american soldiers on three fronts in the middle east... so what is the project gutenberg list doing to distract itself? having a discussion about d.r.m., of course. _of_course._ *** anyway, i sure can't help in japan, or the middle-east, but nonetheless i refuse to waste any time on d.r.m. so how about a quick overview of the common purpose? project gutenberg is tooling along at around e-text #35650. notable recent entries include #33333, "the statute of anne", produced by michael hart. page-images were included, and this e-text retains the line-breaks from those original pages, even including the end-of-line-hyphenates. what a surprise. #34567 is "paradise bend", and it was produced by al haines. *** the "progress" of restructured-text through d.p. continues to be tortuous... it looks like rfrank has defected to pg-canada, where they don't have to pay the epubmaker toll to marcello. meanwhile, one person has created a "dp2rst" python script. i guess if you patch enough scripts into the workflow, you just might get something that provides a smooth transition. well, either that, or you just get a truly botched workflow... either way, d.p. seems to have chased away all the p1 people, yet it still has a hard time keeping text in that queue, which is something of a mystery. but there have ceased to be any discussions of any backlogs in the forums, so i guess they've solved all of those problems... i'm not sure how they did it. maybe someone there will record the solution for posterity. *** all joking aside, distributed proofreaders is closely upon its 20,000 title... it will come along in the next few weeks, and stands as a testament that d.p. is more interesting in doing new digitizations than fixing the errors in the existing ones. to think that i first suggested reviewing old titles and fixing the errors in them way back in december of 2003, when p.g. was celebrating its 10,000th title. little did i know then that the library's quality would seemingly _never_ be a concern... i made the suggestion again at #15,000, and then at #20,000, after which i realized it was fruitless, and basically gave it up. oh well, this is a volunteer organization, and the volunteers make the decisions as to where their priorities are, and if _i_ don't like it, then i should just get up off of my fat ass, right? right. so that's what i'm gonna do, go for a nice little walk... after all, it's a lovely spring day here in santa monica... :+) -bowerbird

to think that i first suggested reviewing old titles and fixing the errors in them way back in december of 2003, when p.g. was celebrating its 10,000th title. little did i know then that the library's quality would seemingly _never_ be a concern...
Well, to give an example case, I *did* rework a famous PG title, using a slightly different version, in part because I was frustrated by the original version implementation of some of the body text as an image. PG assigns a new number to the "new improved" version, PG "scores" same titles based on the number of downloads, customers see the old version has a huge number of downloads, and thus continue to download the "old broken" version rather than the "new fixed" version. Again, "quality" is literally in the eye of the beholder. It would be "nice" if PG customers could download a version appropriate for their choice of reader machine and actually read a PG book without the distraction of "major screw-ups." The famous title I reworked still had at least a dozen "obvious errors" that have never been fixed - even after 100s of thousands of downloads - presumably because the human mind patches over those errors so they never get seen. And the "text as image" problem doesn't get noticed because on the no-image versions of the text PG simply silently throws away part of the text [that part of the text implemented as image] so that customers never see as an error that which isn't there to be seen. Are these "major screw-ups"? Maybe not. What *is* a major screw-up , for example, is when PG automagically and consistently produces versions for a major reader machine with inappropriate and ugly paragraph formatting, book after book after book..

I used to use both new letters and new numbers when reworking eBooks. Totally new number if it was from a different paper edition. Same number, with an "a" after. . .to indicate error corrections.

participants (4)
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Bowerbird@aol.com
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James Adcock
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Jim Adcock
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Michael S. Hart