re: [gutvol-d] Kevin Kelly in NYT on future of digital libraries
brad said:
If you haven't seen this, it's well worth the read.
kevin kelly is always good for a sweeping overview. in spite of the tone of the article, the only "newish" idea in it is the notion that "books will read each other" and become synergistically interlinked, and that idea is one that is both interesting and perplexing at the same time. how -- _exactly_ -- is this supposed to happen? neither links nor tags, in their current form anyway, indicate an association between two external entities. even the most basic of building blocks in that regard -- a clean "a.p.i." into the cyberlibrary -- is absent... heck, the official policy at project gutenberg is that people must _not_ "deep-link" into the _content_ of your books per se, but rather only to a catalog page. -bowerbird
Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
in spite of the tone of the article, the only "newish" idea in it is the notion that "books will read each other" and become synergistically interlinked, and that idea is one that is both interesting and perplexing at the same time.
how -- _exactly_ -- is this supposed to happen?
neither links nor tags, in their current form anyway, indicate an association between two external entities.
even the most basic of building blocks in that regard -- a clean "a.p.i." into the cyberlibrary -- is absent...
You're quite right. The article talks of scanning which is the first stage. DP/PG takes it to the next stage by turning scans into electronic texts, but there hasn't been anything that has stepped up to bat to take on the next stage. This is exactly what I've been working on these past few years. We'll be launching the spec (open and free) at the Extreme Markup Language conference in Montreal in August. At the same time we will provide an AJAX Web application, and Emacs based development environment a set of XSLT style sheets for converting into common formats, complete documentation and a set of test data which will provide examples and a data set for developing applications. I am now revising the paper which we will introduce at the conference and will send it out to anyone who is interested for feedback. When it's ready I'll send a blurb to the list with a berief description of the framework and see if anyone is interested in taking a look. b/ -- Brad Collins <brad@chenla.org>, Banqwao, Thailand
On Fri, 19 May 2006, Brad Collins wrote:
Bowerbird@aol.com writes:
in spite of the tone of the article, the only "newish" idea in it is the notion that "books will read each other" and become synergistically interlinked, and that idea is one that is both interesting and perplexing at the same time.
how -- _exactly_ -- is this supposed to happen?
neither links nor tags, in their current form anyway, indicate an association between two external entities.
even the most basic of building blocks in that regard -- a clean "a.p.i." into the cyberlibrary -- is absent...
You're quite right. The article talks of scanning which is the first stage. DP/PG takes it to the next stage by turning scans into electronic texts, but there hasn't been anything that has stepped up to bat to take on the next stage.
It is quite interesting that Kevin Kelly has ignored Project Gutenberg so throughly since Conde Naste has taken over WIRED, and WIRED used to mention PG several times a year, sometimes even in cover stories or in their timeline of the greatest Millennium events. A friend asked him why. . .he said it was due to space limitations. ~8,000 words? No problem mentioning The Billionaire Boys Club eBooks projects. ;-)
participants (3)
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Brad Collins -
Michael Hart