On Fri, Sep 10, 2004 at 07:47:23PM +0200, Carlo Traverso wrote:

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"Marcello" == Marcello Perathoner <marcello@perathoner.de> writes:

Marcello> Anybody fluent enough in French to answer this?

Marcello> I think he wants to set links to our pages. No Marcello> problem. He should use the canonical link form: Marcello> www.gutenberg.net/etext/12345

Yes, he asks the permission to have direct links to PG books. The PG policy should be stated in some obvious place, accessible from the front page. We have a robots link and not a link for "terms and conditions". We should state there how to link to PG books; for example, is linking to www.gutenberg.net/etext/12345/12345-h/12345.html permitted/forbidden/discouraged? So, should we answer "yes", or "yes, but", or "no, but", and on which basis? The exact question he poses is

"I am honored to ask you to be willing to authorize me to have direct links to some ebooks in your site".

The rest is a presentation of his site.

Here's a little blurb I send out, but we don't have it on the Web pages anywhere: Thanks for taking the time to request permission for a link to Project Gutenberg, as below. However, no such permission is required, and we do believe it is a poor precedent for Project Gutenberg to grant it. As you probably know, there have been a few legal attempts to block linking, especially "deep" linking. At least one legal case, in the UK, was won and one organization was subsequently blocked from deep linking to another. However, in the US there is neither a body of case law nor any state or federal regulations that we are aware of that would require permission to set up a hyperlink. Project Gutenberg does not encourage deep linking to our Web site and, in some cases, has actively discouraged it. But a link to the main page, http://www.gutenberg.net, would be most welcome, and will help to distribute our free electronic texts. Project Gutenberg has no interest or desire to grant permission to any site linking to us, as it would be a serious burden to our volunteer staff and set a dangerous precedent from a legal viewpoint. Thus, we would like to encourage you to link to Project Gutenberg. In addition, would be thrilled for you to download all 15000+ eBooks for your internal use (within the licensing restrictions you will find at the top of each eBook, see http://gutenberg.net/license). Also, note that it is our policy to not provide hyperlinks, ads or other materials on our Web site or in our FTP collection, except as it pertains to the collection itself. In other words, we will not reciprocate with a link to your site, or mention of your site. Finally, since you are interested in free etexts, we would like to invite you to visit our Volunteer's area at http://gutenberg.net to see how you or your organization could help in bringing great literature to the world without cost. Again, thanks for your interest in Project Gutenberg.

Marcello> -------- Original Message -------- Date: Fri, 10 Sep Marcello> 2004 09:46:59 +0200 To: webmaster@gutenberg.net From: Marcello> zemirline_mohamed <zemirline_mohamed@yahoo.fr> Subject: Marcello> Demande de liens pour pages d'auteurs

Marcello> Monsieur,

Marcello> J'ai l'Honneur de vous demander de bien vouloir Marcello> m'autoriser d'avoir des liens directs à quelques livres Marcello> électroniques de votre site. En effet, je prépare un Marcello> petit site pour les livres gratuits et votre aide me Marcello> serait d'une très grande utilité. Pour l'instant j'ai Marcello> un petit site pour les photos : "Tibhirine ou La Marcello> Nature": http://membres.lycos.fr/tibhirine Veuillez Marcello> croire Monsieur, en mon entière reconnaissance.

Marcello> zemirline_mohamed@yahoo.fr M.Zemirline

Marcello> -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.net

Marcello> _______________________________________________ gutvol-d Marcello> mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org Marcello> http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d

On Sat, Sep 11, 2004 at 05:08:04PM +0200, Marcello Perathoner wrote:

Greg Newby wrote:

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Project Gutenberg does not encourage deep linking to our Web site and, in some cases, has actively discouraged it. But a link to the main page, http://www.gutenberg.net, would be most welcome, and will help to distribute our free electronic texts.

This, I think, does not reflect "common usage". There are millions of deep links into the PG site, directly to the files or into the old (Pietro's) search page.

I disagree. Common usage at content sites, such as online newspapers, is for links directly to content to work for awhile, then to stop working as part of the document management process. But this is not an important disagreement, because I think we will agree on the rest:

Many of them are found inside newsgroups, blogs and reviews where changing them is impossible. I am trying to keep those old links working with redirects.

We should (and I have done so for some time) encourage links to the bibrec page in the canonical www.gutenberg.net/etext/12345 form instead of to the files.

Agreed. But the bibrec page has only existed for a few months. Writing a linking policy that says to link to the canonical etext/xxx location would help.

We also have a canonical www.gutenberg.net/author/Mark_Twain url that gives you all books by that author. This url is used on the wikipedia pages to get a current list of books vs. the often stale and uncomplete edited-by-hand lists. (I myself put in many of them.)

I didn't know about this one. Another reason to write a linking policy (you are guessing who I will nominate to write it, yes?).

Any user that gets on one of those pages can easily navigate to the root page, so it is not necessary to require deep linkers to also set a link to the root.

Yes.

Deep linking to the files, while harmless, is less effective than linking to the bibrec page. The user may not be aware that there are more formats to choose from, he may not be aware that there are newer versions and she may not see the huge amount of other material we have.

Deep linking to the bibrec is harmless. Deep linking to a particular eBook file (especially in the etext?? dirs) is perilous.

Bottom line:

- we should allow deep links to /etext/12345 and /author/Mark_Twain

Yes.

- we should discourage deep links to the files

Yes. That is what the earlier policy I sent was talking about; we didn't have the bibrec pages when I wrote it.

And further on, we should get our subject cataloging up to date so we can offer an url like /subject/Mystery.

Absolutely. If this all seems agreeable to people, we just need to write a "linking HOWTO" or somesuch. As others have said, we *DO* want people to link to us. But we *DON'T* believe people need to ask permission to do so (and I have on several occasions refused to fill out stupid forms some organizations send, asking permission to link to us). We *DO* want people to link to the bibrec pages, author pages, etc. But we *DON'T* want people linking directly to eBook files, because their locations can change. (This is less an issue with the post-10K directory structure, which is far more regular....but since we still have tens of thousands of files in the old directory structure, we should just discourage linking to files directly.) BTW, once we get some sort of conversion on the fly going, I expect URLs like this: http://gutenberg.net/etext/1234/1234.txt http://gutenberg.net/etext/1234/1234.pdf http://gutenberg.net/etext/1234/1234.mp3?maxsize=10m&speed=2x http://gutenberg.net/etext/1234/1234.htm?css=blueplaid&font=verdana and the like...where files we already have are delivered, but files we don't have are generated. I don't think I'd recommend people link directly to such URLs because (a) they depend on converters that might not always be available, or might require additional syntax, and (b) because such a URL is fine for individual use, but if you tell your friend such a URL then their choices for alternate formats are less likely to be evident to them. Further thoughts? -- Greg

Greg Newby wrote:

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Project Gutenberg does not encourage deep linking to our Web site and, in some cases, has actively discouraged it. But a link to the main page, http://www.gutenberg.net, would be most welcome, and will help to distribute our free electronic texts.

This, I think, does not reflect "common usage". There are millions of deep links into the PG site, directly to the files or into the old (Pietro's) search page.

I disagree. Common usage at content sites, such as online newspapers, is for links directly to content to work for awhile, then to stop working as part of the document management process.

I meant common usage for PG and sites linking to PG.

I didn't know about this one. Another reason to write a linking policy (you are guessing who I will nominate to write it, yes?).

I will write one ... later. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.net