roger said:
Bowerbird has warned against proceeding and I respect his historical perspective. Can we avoid the mistakes of the past attempts?
i "warned" against proceeding only because it will end up being something jon regrets... so, jon, here's what i can tell you... your goal is fine, but unless p.g. powers-that-be change what they have _always_ done in the past, the goal is not obtainable, and your work wasted. ask jim what happened when he redid a bad e-text... end-users basically ignored the new one for the old. unless _all_ the p.g. powers-that-be _guarantee_ that won't happen to this project, it will be sunk... (do _not_ let the blanket "yes" that greg always gives in response to any proposal _fool_ you... greg himself couldn't put his _own_ proposal into play back at the start of this year, once it came up against a too-deadly combination of (1) reality, (2) whitewashers, and (3) marcello.) so unless you're happy with the mere fact of "having done it", even though the downloads continue to accrue to the old flawed originals, you're better off simply walking away today... but if you wanna do it just for fun, go ahead! if you want more-specific advice, here it is: 1. maybe it's just me that's confused, but you don't seem to be very clear on whether you want to increase the quality of the text, or of the derivative formats. i suppose that you could care about both, but neither side is all that difficult to obtain, by means that are relatively straightforward, so i'm unsure why a big campaign needs to be mounted... but, you know, have at it, and all that rot. :+) 2. doing 10 books is more than enough to tell you whether you want to do any more... execute in 10-book chunks, for your sanity. that way you'll be able to stop without having to feel that you "failed" in your overall mission. it will also mean you don't have to recruit first; and later, if everything works well, your results will do the recruiting for you. (see also point 4.) and perhaps most important of all, you will see just exactly how much p.g. _really_ supports you. 3. skip d.p. _entirely._ it's hard enough to battle through one bureaucracy; two is nigh impossible. you will _never_ get d.p. to buy into your changes, because it'll be afraid the behavior will generalize. besides, you don't _need_ d.p. it's not the proofing that's the difficult part of this task, it's really not... all you need is a system to do "continuous proofing", and roger has already built such a thing. (so have i.) 4. as for volunteers, have p.g. route some your way. (that's how d.p. gets its volunteers.) that'll be a good test of the _true_ p.g. commitment to your project... you could also recruit from the unhappy volunteers who are in the process of abandoning d.p. nowadays, specifically p1/p2 proofers with years of experience. provide these skilled people with new appreciation! 5. although the suggestion to go with first editions _sounds_ good, i'd be careful. when i've examined the changes made from one edition to the next one, it certainly appears that a lot of errors are corrected. so i'm inclined to think later editions will be "better". for instance, in "pride and prejudice", see this change:
Mrs. Long and her daughters must stand their chance; Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance; i'm guessing whichever one came _later_ was _correct_. first editions appeal to collectors, not text-obsessives.
*** in summary... absolutely, many p.g. e-texts need to be improved! sadly, however, the p.g. bureaucracy often resists it. -bowerbird
On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 04:05:14PM -0400, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
... 4. as for volunteers, have p.g. route some your way. (that's how d.p. gets its volunteers.) that'll be a good test of the _true_ p.g. commitment to your project... you could also recruit from the unhappy volunteers who are in the process of abandoning d.p. nowadays, specifically p1/p2 proofers with years of experience. provide these skilled people with new appreciation!
This is a good suggestion and one I'm happy to help with. Three approaches, beyond soliciting some of the talent on gutvol-d: 1) A newsletter blurb. Just get me something (a few sentences, with an email or URL for follow-up) before the 1st Wednesday. 2) A mention on www.gutenberg.org. Lots of views. 3) DP recruits. Probably anyone could do this as well as me, but just post something in the DP forums mentioning the opportunity. -- Greg
ask jim what happened when he redid a bad e-text... end-users basically ignored the new one for the old.
Old bad version: 14629 downloads New "Fixed Version: 496 downloads So, given PG's webmasters' policy of continuing to "advertise" old versions over new versions, only about 1 in 30 customers will discover a "new improved" version. So, its not in practice possible to "fix" an old bad version by offering a new good version under the current PG system. If one is sophisticated and experienced with PG's system, one knows to look for the newest version of a text, or at least compare the newer versions to the older versions and see which is "best" for you - but most customers do not know to do this, nor how to get PG's system to show them these details.
Bowerbird, my heartfelt thanks. This is exactly what I was looking for. On 2012-09-23, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
unless _all_ the p.g. powers-that-be _guarantee_ that won't happen to this project, it will be sunk...
(do _not_ let the blanket "yes" that greg always gives in response to any proposal _fool_ you... greg himself couldn't put his _own_ proposal into play back at the start of this year, once it came up against a too-deadly combination of (1) reality, (2) whitewashers, and (3) marcello.)
Maybe I am an optimist and hopelessly naive, but my hope is that all the PG powers-that-be are part of PG for the right reasons, that they recognise that a problem exists, and that they are keen that it gets fixed. From what you say, it cannot get fixed without buy-in from the WWs and Marcello to a specific course of action, so the problem is really one of generating consensus around a course of action. The concept of MS and RTT for 1000 texts is as simple, unambitious and uncontroversial a plan as I can think of that would still have the desired effect. The question then, to Marcello and any WWs reading this: could you, at least in principle, get behind this plan or a variation thereof sufficiently to make a pilot of 10 books a worthwhile enterprise?
1. maybe it's just me that's confused, but you don't seem to be very clear on whether you want to increase the quality of the text, or of the derivative formats.
I care about accuracy, and I care about typography. I want to make ebooks that make Amazon ashamed of itself. I know that with an MS, an RTT and Knuth's genius I can do a solo project that shames Amazon in a day or two. What I can't do is create the MS and RTT by myself. Selection of the correct MS requires true expertise from the group mind of PG. Creating an RTT with the highest possible level of accuracy within a reasonable timeframe requires, in my opinion at least, some sort of distributed proofreading. Therefore my focus initially is on the MS and RTT.
2. doing 10 books is more than enough to tell you whether you want to do any more... ... and perhaps most important of all, you will see just exactly how much p.g. _really_ supports you.
There seems to be a consensus around a 10 book pilot forming. Success would mean that 1 in 20 downloads would be of improved quality. Sounds good to me.
3. skip d.p. _entirely._ it's hard enough to battle through one bureaucracy; two is nigh impossible. you will _never_ get d.p. to buy into your changes, because it'll be afraid the behavior will generalize.
DP co-operation may not be as crucial as I once thought. Carlo has offered DP.it's services (thanks!) and Don has suggested DPCanada may be amenable. Greg has offered to point the PG volunteer hose where required. So we could likely work around DP non co-operation, but... Well... I think it is worth at least _trying_ to bring them on board. There are a lot of things in the DP workflow that I disagree with, but the people at DP are good people with good intentions, and they have been doing good work that more or less amounts to the MS to RTT transformation for a very, very long time. We would not be adding to or changing the DP workflow, we are just subtracting, and, given that we would avoid the bottleneck rounds, doing this work would actually help with one of their largest headaches, the balancing of rounds. Having said all that, I PM'd Louise a few days ago and she has given me a damned good ignoring, so I concede, sadly, that you are almost certainly right.
5. although the suggestion to go with first editions _sounds_ good, i'd be careful. when i've examined the changes made from one edition to the next one, it certainly appears that a lot of errors are corrected. so i'm inclined to think later editions will be "better". for instance, in "pride and prejudice", see this change:
Mrs. Long and her daughters must stand their chance; Mrs. Long and her nieces must stand their chance;
i'm guessing whichever one came _later_ was _correct_. first editions appeal to collectors, not text-obsessives.
and Don wrote on another thread:
The longer I think about the job we're trying to do here, and the collection of books we're assembling, the more I conclude that the most important piece of the foundation upon which it's built needs to be your Step #1 - collect the page scans. Once the text has been contributed, it's just about unassailable in its original form unless the images of the source text are preserved and are accessible.
I think you and Don have hit upon the key issue here. I fully admit to having precisely zero knowledge or experience regarding book editions and availability of scans. I naively thought that "someone" would know which edition a given extant text was derived from and that it would be straightforward to find a decent scan given that knowledge. This is cleary very wrong. That we don't necessarily know the edition of the extant text raises the issue of which edition we lock in to. Who makes that decision? It is way above my pay grade, even if my knowledge allowed me to make a good one, which it doesn't. I conclude that Don is absolutely correct. The initial action of a 10 book pilot should involve nothing more or less than determining, in each case, which edition and hence which scan we are going to work with. If we can successfully do this as a group we can work out a way to do the rest. We need someone knowledgeable to guide this selection process and if necessary make a final executive decision in each case. I propose then that Greg either takes on this role himself or nominates someone, or a small group of someones, for it. Without this in place, I don't think any further progress will be possible. Cheers Jon
I want to make ebooks that make Amazon ashamed of itself.
Well, hey, in that regard you are already pretty much "good to go" because when PG tries to make a book for a Kindle, the end results are something that should make Amazon ashamed of itself. But, the reality is that neither Amazon nor PG are ashamed enough to submit to reasonable software standards that would result in PG book submissions which actually reasonably "work" for the end reader, and which do not appear to be unreasonably "scrambled" nor "corrupt."
participants (4)
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Greg Newby -
James Adcock -
Jon Hurst