----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Hart" <hart@pglaf.org>

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Joshua Hutchinson wrote:

...

I do remember a discussion last month about a file format that is completely unaccesible (the reader no longer exists). There is one or two ebooks in the PG collection in this format. There was call to deprecate those versions into an OLD subfolder (or something like that) so that people coming to the site weren't confused.

Everyone refers to their own suggestions as "better". . .as "reform," etc.

Well ... duh! Do you honestly think people would suggest things that they think are "worse" than what is already being done? The test is whether OTHER people think those ideas are "better".

...

No one advocated deletion, only better cataloging.

As for "only better cataloging". . .the obvious thing is simply to point plainly to both versions, with a note that the Folio format requires a proprietary reader.

Allow me to use our very first ebook as an example of how we don't link to everything available on many things already. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1 As you can see at the above link, we have a link to different formats. However, we only show one edition of each one. For instance, the plain text version links to edition 12. However, if you go look at the etext90 directory, you'll see that there is an edition 11 available in plain text. We don't link to it, though. You see, we keep old stuff, but we don't have to link to it from the bibrec pages. That is all people were advocating in this particular case. We have a precedent of deprecating some things. Why is this particular case any different (especially since this has more potential to cause confusion)?

...

That is probably where Michael's dozen is coming from, because many people thought this was a sensible step to take (and basically only Michael thought it wasn't).

Actually, the dozen comes from various discussions we've had over time.

Fair enough. It wasn't clear in your original post what "dozens" were referring to. I apologize for putting words in your mouth.

Some of us try to remember the past as we plan for the future.

Rather a non-sensical thing to say in this context. No one advocated forgetting the past (i.e., deleting anything). They did advocate reorganizing how we access that past data. Josh