Offering technology to power better typography for Project Gutenberg
Hi, Not sure I'm writing to the right place, but previous attempts at different addresses didn't work out. My name is Florian, and I work at http://www.vivliostyle.com I think the incredible collection of books the Gutenberg project has collected over the years is a great treasure, and would like to make a little contribution to the project, not in the form of additional books, but in terms of software improve the online reading experience, making the Gutenberg project more accessible to readers. My company is building a javascript engine that can augment what browsers can do in terms of layout and typography, with a focus on paged media and other typographical features usually more associated with print and PDFs than with the web. It can be used to power an in-browser paginated (but still responsive) view of the document, or to generate PDFs with rich typography. I've made a basic demo to showcase the in-browser paginated experience. http://florian.rivoal.net/demos/gutenberg/ We would be happy to provide this to the Gutenberg Project royalty free and to work with you to set it up. Is this the right place to discuss this idea? Best regards, -- Florian RIVOAL 取締役、Chief Commercial Officer Vivliostyle
Hi Florian, This mailing list is kind-of low-activity. I like your presentation, and (given my experience with javascript), I assume it can be added in quite an unobtrusive way to our ebooks. Still, I think there won't be much enthusiasm on Project Gutenberg, basically because we have tried to make our ebooks independent from active content, for two main reasons, longevity and security. Longevity means that we only work with standards that are extremely well settled, and expected to be still widely understood many years in the future. It took PG many years to even consider HTML, and even today, for this reason Javascript is not allowed. Second, end-user safety is often compromised by things as scripting; to take away any hesitation by potential users that the ebook might harm their device, no active content is allowed. Furthermore, I want to give a third consideration: Although your script looks beautiful, it is fairly slow to load even on my desktop computer; many users are on mobile devices with low-end processors, and thus are probably better served with non-active HTML, or one of the generated alternative ebook formats (such as ePub), although I admit those formats also leave things to be desired in presentation. Nothing in this of course prevents you from building a site that takes all of PG ebooks, and present them in this way. Jeroen. On 2015-12-24 04:30, Florian Rivoal wrote:
Hi,
Not sure I'm writing to the right place, but previous attempts at different addresses didn't work out.
My name is Florian, and I work at http://www.vivliostyle.com
Cross-posting from the PGPD discussion list, with modifications. Normally, I am opposed using Project Gutenberg as a tool for activism, but in the case of the Trans Pacific Partnership, we are dealing with an existential threat to PG, and we need to make as many people aware of this as quickly as possible. For this reason, I propose to put ugly, not-to-be-ignored banners on our site and in all our books, warning about this, and only remove them when TPP is shelved. This way, this disgusting treaty and its nasty consequences will quickly reach a public of millions. To see a sample of what I am proposing, a rework of one book that will be affected by this, I posted to PG about 14 years ago: http://gutenberg.ph/previews/bingham/IncaLand.html, basically adding the following text to the header: ===================================================================== WARNING THIS BOOK MIGHT DISAPPEAR FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG This book, which has been in the Public Domain since 1997 due to copyright term expiration, is due to be retroactively placed back under copyright restrictions until 2027 if the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) Agreement is turned into law in the US. This treaty is highly problematic in many ways, but is a severe threat Project Gutenberg’s collection of free eBooks, as it might force us to remove this and many other books from our collection, which means many thousands of man-hours work being put to waste, and our mission irreparably harmed and set back for decades. However, it is not yet too late to avert this disaster. Please tell Congress to vote no on the TPP, and help the EFF in its fight against this toxic deal. Please forgive us the use of this ugly banner. It will disappear once this threat is averted, or will go down with this book. ===================================================================== A more generic banner could be added to books not affected by TPP. I believe the retroactive extension of copyright is unconstitutional in the US and, since treaties cannot trump the constitution this will be challenged in the Supreme Court; experience with challenges against the CTEA in 1995 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldred_v._Ashcroft) has shown that it is very hard to explain that even in that forum. (Note that at that time, there was no claw-back of already expired copyrights, as will likely be the case with TPP). P.S. I will from now on concentrate on books threatened by the TPP, to get as many books through this the DP system as possible before this threat might materialize. I will also encourage everybody to keep copies of PG's collection locally. It is easy to use rsync to download all books. A collection of all .zip files on PG servers is about 100GB, and about 5GB can be gained by re-compressing them with 7z)
participants (2)
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Florian Rivoal -
Jeroen Hellingman