Hello. I would like to respond to a few points here that you mentioned. First, I am blind also so I have the same bias as you. We need to face facts. The PG collection is now so big that one DVD won't hold everything. You found that out with just including books from DP. Even if we throw away the pictures, audio, and everything except plain ASCII text, it's just not going to fit. I have experimented with this and as near as I could tell it would take at least 4-6 CDs when there were about 11,000 books. Allowing for growth being what it is, and again only including plain 7-bit ASCII as I have, I just see no way of doing this and keeping it maintained. It would be possible maybe for this moment, but in a year it won't be so this is something which needs to be considered now. Second, about the pictures. I see no reason not to include them on the DVD sets. They are not that large and are often necessary to the enjoyment of the books. Even for plain text novels, they can add something. For magazines, they can be essential since there are articles discussing them and it's expected that you will view them while you read the article. Look at Scientific American Supplement for this. I don't consider not including illustrations to be an option. Again, the fact is that even if we squeezed everything on one DVD and throw away html, accented texts, sound, and everything else, fairly soon it won't fit. Since we are now talking about either two DVDs or a double layer, we might as well include pictures, html, and accents. Besides, two DVDs look bigger than one even if the contents are the same. I suppose one possibility would be to offer two different DVDs, one with just plain text for the blind or others with old computers and another with pictures, html, and accents. People could pick what they wanted at the time they fill out the form and you could send them one or the other. Finally, about a new CD. I think keeping CDs up to date is much more important than people believe. I think that for CDs, we shouldn't worry as much about illustrations but should include zipped html. As someone pointed out, 7-zip for Windows is free and lets you view inside of zip files. Just create a page that comes up in the browser telling people that the files on the CD are zipped. Install the 7-zip package in the root directory first and have fun looking at the books. The problem is that you have to manually open each book and look at each image. They don't extract at the same time as they should since it makes a temporary directory and only extracts one file at a time. The XP unzip feature of Windows Explorer does allow extracting all files though and has similar functionality. Linux of course has an unzip utility too so we aren't excluding people. Even the Apple IIgs has an unzip program. The reason why we really need to make sure the CDs are kept current is that giving away a CD is very easy and almost anyone can use it. Many computers don't have DVD readers although the newer ones do. Also, if you release a new CD on a quarterly basis, people think that they are getting the very latest PG books sent to them in one nice form. That of course is true and that's the general idea, but I'm not sure that there would be enough books every quarter to fill a CD every time. Maybe release a CD every 1,000 books. That unfortunately would mean about 15 CDs not counting audio. However, I definitely think that CDs need to be very actively maintained to keep interest up in PG. People will come back if they know there is something new and if they don't have to hunt for it. Heck, splash the availability of the CD on the front page. That could be even better. I don't think the DVD needs to be kept as current. First, it is very difficult to download a 4.7 gb file and burn it. I would like to have all of PG on a DVD but I'm certainly not going to download such a huge file. Yes, it was split into pieces but they have to be recombined and that's way too much effort for me. Second, since we have the iso creator this can be done more on demand. Finally, we have lots of space to work with so if we add 2,000 or 3,000 books at a time it's not a big problem as it would be with a CD since they might not fit. The only thing I suggest on the CD is to break books down into categories. Folders like etext00 etc are not useful to the end user. Something even very broad like "fiction" and "nonfiction" would help. If it could be broken down further such as by magazine, mystery, gardening, etc that would be even better. I have used PG off and on since 1995 and I found it confusing to try to figure out what etext90 and etext91 were. I would much rather have had a nice CD set with works broken down by author or category. I know that _Oliver Twist_ is in a directory called Dickens instead of etext96. Likewise with Mark Twain. Maybe this is already being done, I don't know. I have everything locally so I haven't bothered with a CD image. Also, how hard would it be with the new iso creator to break it down by specific magazines? Have for example magazines/Atlantic_Monthly, magazines/Punch, etc. You could call them periodicals too I suppose. Of course also make sure to put GUTINDEX.ALL in the root so everyone knows how much is available. That's my two cents worth.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 You bring up another alternative I have considered. That is creating a multiple DVD set. The problem I see with this is in the free disc giveaway. Right now we send out a DVD and an extra disc for them to give to a friend. Adding more discs is obviously going to increase the costs while almost certainly doing away with the extra disc. It's the give away project I was thinking of when I was talking about cramming as many books on a DVD. Obviously, for the people who can download, we can create as many ISOS as we want. Thoughts? Sincerely Aaron Cannon At 12:02 AM 9/16/2005, you wrote:
Hello. I would like to respond to a few points here that you mentioned. First, I am blind also so I have the same bias as you.
We need to face facts. The PG collection is now so big that one DVD won't hold everything. You found that out with just including books from DP. Even if we throw away the pictures, audio, and everything except plain ASCII text, it's just not going to fit. I have experimented with this and as near as I could tell it would take at least 4-6 CDs when there were about 11,000 books. Allowing for growth being what it is, and again only including plain 7-bit ASCII as I have, I just see no way of doing this and keeping it maintained. It would be possible maybe for this moment, but in a year it won't be so this is something which needs to be considered now.
Second, about the pictures. I see no reason not to include them on the DVD sets. They are not that large and are often necessary to the enjoyment of the books. Even for plain text novels, they can add something. For magazines, they can be essential since there are articles discussing them and it's expected that you will view them while you read the article. Look at Scientific American Supplement for this. I don't consider not including illustrations to be an option. Again, the fact is that even if we squeezed everything on one DVD and throw away html, accented texts, sound, and everything else, fairly soon it won't fit. Since we are now talking about either two DVDs or a double layer, we might as well include pictures, html, and accents. Besides, two DVDs look bigger than one even if the contents are the same. I suppose one possibility would be to offer two different DVDs, one with just plain text for the blind or others with old computers and another with pictures, html, and accents. People could pick what they wanted at the time they fill out the form and you could send them one or the other.
Finally, about a new CD. I think keeping CDs up to date is much more important than people believe. I think that for CDs, we shouldn't worry as much about illustrations but should include zipped html. As someone pointed out, 7-zip for Windows is free and lets you view inside of zip files. Just create a page that comes up in the browser telling people that the files on the CD are zipped. Install the 7-zip package in the root directory first and have fun looking at the books. The problem is that you have to manually open each book and look at each image. They don't extract at the same time as they should since it makes a temporary directory and only extracts one file at a time. The XP unzip feature of Windows Explorer does allow extracting all files though and has similar functionality. Linux of course has an unzip utility too so we aren't excluding people. Even the Apple IIgs has an unzip program. The reason why we really need to make sure the CDs are kept current is that giving away a CD is very easy and almost anyone can use it. Many computers don't have DVD readers although the newer ones do. Also, if you release a new CD on a quarterly basis, people think that they are getting the very latest PG books sent to them in one nice form. That of course is true and that's the general idea, but I'm not sure that there would be enough books every quarter to fill a CD every time. Maybe release a CD every 1,000 books. That unfortunately would mean about 15 CDs not counting audio. However, I definitely think that CDs need to be very actively maintained to keep interest up in PG. People will come back if they know there is something new and if they don't have to hunt for it. Heck, splash the availability of the CD on the front page. That could be even better.
I don't think the DVD needs to be kept as current. First, it is very difficult to download a 4.7 gb file and burn it. I would like to have all of PG on a DVD but I'm certainly not going to download such a huge file. Yes, it was split into pieces but they have to be recombined and that's way too much effort for me. Second, since we have the iso creator this can be done more on demand. Finally, we have lots of space to work with so if we add 2,000 or 3,000 books at a time it's not a big problem as it would be with a CD since they might not fit.
The only thing I suggest on the CD is to break books down into categories. Folders like etext00 etc are not useful to the end user. Something even very broad like "fiction" and "nonfiction" would help. If it could be broken down further such as by magazine, mystery, gardening, etc that would be even better. I have used PG off and on since 1995 and I found it confusing to try to figure out what etext90 and etext91 were. I would much rather have had a nice CD set with works broken down by author or category. I know that _Oliver Twist_ is in a directory called Dickens instead of etext96. Likewise with Mark Twain. Maybe this is already being done, I don't know. I have everything locally so I haven't bothered with a CD image. Also, how hard would it be with the new iso creator to break it down by specific magazines? Have for example magazines/Atlantic_Monthly, magazines/Punch, etc. You could call them periodicals too I suppose. Of course also make sure to put GUTINDEX.ALL in the root so everyone knows how much is available. That's my two cents worth.
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participants (2)
-
Aaron Cannon -
Tony Baechler