Does anyone know what's going on with PG Canada and Faded Pages?
I donated page scans from several books to DP Canada many months ago. A couple of them have been finished and the books are on fadedpage.com but NOT on the PG Canada site: http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120626 http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120707 What puzzles me is that new books have been added to PG Canada recently, but not these. PG Canada has EPUBs for the books, and fadedpage.com only has text and HTML. I ran the HTML through Kindlegen so I could read the books on my Kindle and found that both had page numbers that the Kindle didn't know what to do with. In the Benchley book the page numbers were often as not stuck inside words that may have been hyphenated in the original. Does anyone know what's going on here? If it was up to me all the books would be on PG Canada's site only. James Simmons
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 5:38 PM, James Simmons <nicestep@gmail.com> wrote:
I donated page scans from several books to DP Canada many months ago. A couple of them have been finished and the books are on fadedpage.com but NOT on the PG Canada site:
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120626
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120707
What puzzles me is that new books have been added to PG Canada recently, but not these. PG Canada has EPUBs for the books, and fadedpage.com only has text and HTML. I ran the HTML through Kindlegen so I could read the books on my Kindle and found that both had page numbers that the Kindle didn't know what to do with. In the Benchley book the page numbers were often as not stuck inside words that may have been hyphenated in the original.
Does anyone know what's going on here? If it was up to me all the books would be on PG Canada's site only.
IIRC, PG Canada's clearance procedures and requirements are more restrictive than DPC's, which is why DPC has a separate posting site. http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=860552#860552 -R C
Robert, That does not seem to be the case with my submissions. The death dates of Robert C. Benchley and Raymond Chandler are easy to find, and I have donated books by both authors where I did the transcribing myself and you can find them in PG Canada but not fadedpage. James Simmons On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Robert Cicconetti <grythumn@gmail.com>wrote:
On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 5:38 PM, James Simmons <nicestep@gmail.com> wrote:
I donated page scans from several books to DP Canada many months ago. A couple of them have been finished and the books are on fadedpage.com but NOT on the PG Canada site:
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120626
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120707
What puzzles me is that new books have been added to PG Canada recently, but not these. PG Canada has EPUBs for the books, and fadedpage.comonly has text and HTML. I ran the HTML through Kindlegen so I could read the books on my Kindle and found that both had page numbers that the Kindle didn't know what to do with. In the Benchley book the page numbers were often as not stuck inside words that may have been hyphenated in the original.
Does anyone know what's going on here? If it was up to me all the books would be on PG Canada's site only.
IIRC, PG Canada's clearance procedures and requirements are more restrictive than DPC's, which is why DPC has a separate posting site.
http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=860552#860552
-R C
_______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
Best person to ask would be Mark Akrigg. He's always been fairly prompt at posting my submissions to PGC, but it may be that there's a posting backlog of submissions from DPC. (Mark's been busy the last few months with submission(s) to Canadian trade negotiators, which negotiations may threaten Canada's copyright term, by increasing it from life+50 to life+70.) fadedpage is DPC's display site, so books get posted onto it as soon as they're completed. Al -----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of James Simmons Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 2:38 PM To: Gutenberg Volunteers Subject: [gutvol-d] Does anyone know what's going on with PG Canada and Faded Pages? I donated page scans from several books to DP Canada many months ago. A couple of them have been finished and the books are on fadedpage.com but NOT on the PG Canada site: http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120626 http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120707 What puzzles me is that new books have been added to PG Canada recently, but not these. PG Canada has EPUBs for the books, and fadedpage.com only has text and HTML. I ran the HTML through Kindlegen so I could read the books on my Kindle and found that both had page numbers that the Kindle didn't know what to do with. In the Benchley book the page numbers were often as not stuck inside words that may have been hyphenated in the original. Does anyone know what's going on here? If it was up to me all the books would be on PG Canada's site only. James Simmons
On Sep 27, 2012, at 3:38 PM, James Simmons <nicestep@gmail.com> wrote:
I donated page scans from several books to DP Canada many months ago. A couple of them have been finished and the books are on fadedpage.com but NOT on the PG Canada site:
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120626
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120707
What puzzles me is that new books have been added to PG Canada recently, but not these. PG Canada has EPUBs for the books, and fadedpage.com only has text and HTML. I ran the HTML through Kindlegen so I could read the books on my Kindle and found that both had page numbers that the Kindle didn't know what to do with. In the Benchley book the page numbers were often as not stuck inside words that may have been hyphenated in the original.
Does anyone know what's going on here? If it was up to me all the books would be on PG Canada's site only.
James Simmons _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
[I am posting this on behalf of Simple Simon at DP-Canada/FP, who is not a member of this list. --Roger] Dear James: Thank you for donating book scans to DPC. We have completed two of the projects that you provided, “Farewell My Lovely” and “Inside Benchley”, and posted them to Faded Page. That is where all of our completed eBooks get posted these days. If Project Gutenberg Canada is interested in picking up a book that goes to FP, they either “harvest” the book, or request the raw files from us. I’ve noticed that this happens about 10% of the time, but I don’t perceive any coherent pattern in the type or age of book they choose. We created FP so that we would have access to (indeed control of) a display site that has a clearance policy consistent with that of Distributed Proofreaders Canada. PGC was not posting all the books we sent them, and the “backlog” grew slowly over a period of about a year, to the point that almost 200 completed DPC eBooks remained unposted. This was not tolerable, and we are gradually “retrieving” those eBooks from the “waiting for posting” queue, and posting them to FP. We also wanted to provide many features for readers that are simply not available on any of the PG sites, and to make the site extremely user-friendly and simple to use. I invite you to check out the design and features of FP (and we’ve only just begun—many additional features will be added as the months go by). Finally, we’ve stripped away most of the “overhead”—clutter and pages that have accumulated over the years at the PG sites that are, we believe, of low interest to readers, and to DP volunteers as well. PG Canada adds epubs for some of its posted books, but we are still sorting out our FP approach to epub technology. Once we do, we’ll go back and add an epub version (and likely other formats as well) to every eBook on the site. The problem you noted with the Benchley book’s epub version is simply one of the problems that can occur with “incomplete” epub conversions. PGC used an “automatic” epub converter utility, and the results are very standard, but the converter reacts inconsistently to eBooks containing “non-standard” features. Unfortunately, some epub converters, when applied to HTML files without any customized attention from a PPer, produce strange results, like the embedded page numbers you mentioned. Finally, we have plans to “harvest” eBooks that are public domain in Canada from respected eBook archives like PG-US, so that the collection of FP will be much larger in a year or two. This program is just getting under way—unfortunately, we’ve found that some of the (early-produced) eBooks on PG-US require considerable work to bring them up to the consistent standards we apply to all DPC products. I hope this response goes some way towards explaining the apparent inconsistencies between FP and PGC postings. Cheers Simple Simon Site Admin—DPC and FP
Roger, Thanks, this clears up a lot. I understand the reasons for Faded Page, but I'm a little frustrated because the logical places to look for free e-books are the various PG sites. I agree that the PG Canada site is a mess. Running Faded Page's HTML through Kindlegen produces books that are at least readable. The formatting isn't everything I'd like, but it is better than a lot of the PG stuff. James Simmons On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 1:58 PM, Roger Frank <rfrank@rfrank.net> wrote:
On Sep 27, 2012, at 3:38 PM, James Simmons <nicestep@gmail.com> wrote:
I donated page scans from several books to DP Canada many months ago. A couple of them have been finished and the books are on fadedpage.com but NOT on the PG Canada site:
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120626
http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20120707
What puzzles me is that new books have been added to PG Canada recently, but not these. PG Canada has EPUBs for the books, and fadedpage.com only has text and HTML. I ran the HTML through Kindlegen so I could read the books on my Kindle and found that both had page numbers that the Kindle didn't know what to do with. In the Benchley book the page numbers were often as not stuck inside words that may have been hyphenated in the original.
Does anyone know what's going on here? If it was up to me all the books would be on PG Canada's site only.
James Simmons _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
[I am posting this on behalf of Simple Simon at DP-Canada/FP, who is not a member of this list. --Roger]
Dear James:
Thank you for donating book scans to DPC. We have completed two of the projects that you provided, “Farewell My Lovely” and “Inside Benchley”, and posted them to Faded Page. That is where all of our completed eBooks get posted these days.
If Project Gutenberg Canada is interested in picking up a book that goes to FP, they either “harvest” the book, or request the raw files from us. I’ve noticed that this happens about 10% of the time, but I don’t perceive any coherent pattern in the type or age of book they choose.
We created FP so that we would have access to (indeed control of) a display site that has a clearance policy consistent with that of Distributed Proofreaders Canada. PGC was not posting all the books we sent them, and the “backlog” grew slowly over a period of about a year, to the point that almost 200 completed DPC eBooks remained unposted. This was not tolerable, and we are gradually “retrieving” those eBooks from the “waiting for posting” queue, and posting them to FP.
We also wanted to provide many features for readers that are simply not available on any of the PG sites, and to make the site extremely user-friendly and simple to use. I invite you to check out the design and features of FP (and we’ve only just begun—many additional features will be added as the months go by). Finally, we’ve stripped away most of the “overhead”—clutter and pages that have accumulated over the years at the PG sites that are, we believe, of low interest to readers, and to DP volunteers as well.
PG Canada adds epubs for some of its posted books, but we are still sorting out our FP approach to epub technology. Once we do, we’ll go back and add an epub version (and likely other formats as well) to every eBook on the site. The problem you noted with the Benchley book’s epub version is simply one of the problems that can occur with “incomplete” epub conversions. PGC used an “automatic” epub converter utility, and the results are very standard, but the converter reacts inconsistently to eBooks containing “non-standard” features. Unfortunately, some epub converters, when applied to HTML files without any customized attention from a PPer, produce strange results, like the embedded page numbers you mentioned.
Finally, we have plans to “harvest” eBooks that are public domain in Canada from respected eBook archives like PG-US, so that the collection of FP will be much larger in a year or two. This program is just getting under way—unfortunately, we’ve found that some of the (early-produced) eBooks on PG-US require considerable work to bring them up to the consistent standards we apply to all DPC products.
I hope this response goes some way towards explaining the apparent inconsistencies between FP and PGC postings.
Cheers
Simple Simon Site Admin—DPC and FP _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d
participants (4)
-
Al Haines -
James Simmons -
Robert Cicconetti -
Roger Frank