Hi, I'm new here. I hope this isn't out of place. I'm working on a Mac OS X program for reading Gutenberg e-texts. It occurs to me that it would be useful if there were something for Gutenberg e-texts akin to the CDDB database for MP3s. It would hold information about e-texts, keyed to the Gutenberg filename. The sort of information stored would be things like long-format titles, author's name, information about the Gutenberg file if it's a revision, information about the original source text, etc. This would all be useful for developers of ebook readers, or web interfaces to the Gutenberg texts. This information is often available in the files themselves, but it would be difficult to extract it through software. It might be extended to include character lists for novels or plays, synopses, summaries, connections to other works, byte offsets to chapter starts, file-specific aids to parsing, and other useful bits of information. The information would be supplied by users, piece by piece, similar to the way people submit track listings to CDDB. Ideally, etext reader apps would have a UI for entering and uploading new information. There'd be no change to the Gutenberg files themselves. The meta-info would all be kept apart from the e-texts. So the format need not change, old texts wouldn't need updating, and the files would remain universally compatible. If the user has an etext program which supports it, then after downloading a text, they would have the option download the meta-info from a separate 'gtdb' server. The program could then use the meta-info to enhance the user interface. Naturally, the "gtdb" database would be non-commercial, and in some non-proprietary format, and/or available as SQL dumps. So, my questions. 1) Is anyone working on such a thing already? 2) Has such a thing been discussed? 3) Does anyone else think it'd be a good thing? Thanks, Jon