Is PG interested in hand-crafted epubs?

About a year ago, I bought myself a Sony Reader, downloaded some ebooks in epub format from gutenberg.org, and settled down to enjoy reading them. And I have enjoyed them; there's no doubt that most of the epubs ARE readable enough if your basic interest is to enjoy the prose in the book. And this way I've been able to re-read, for example some of the more obscure novels of Anthony Trollope, like 'The Belton Estate' and 'Ayala's Angel' which are not easily obtainable by any other means. However, as I've read I've gradually noticed more and more rough edges to the epubs which I've found more and more irritating. So, being a retired software engineer, I eventually googled the epub formats, bought the O'Reilly books on HTML and CSS and started modifying my epubs to make them work better on my Reader (which at some point was upgraded from a PRS-600 to a PRS-650). I won't at this point bore you with the details of the modifications I've made, save to say that: - in most cases it involved simplifying, for example breaking large complex pages, which the machine can't satisfactorily handle, into a number of smaller simpler ones and (occasionally) removing html which does layout rather than declaring the document's structure, etc. - it appears to me that what needs to be done is not technically demanding, but mostly involves a human making judgements on what the original book structure was. And the original prose in the book usually makes this pretty obvious to a human. Having done about half a dozen epubs this way, basically for my own purposes, I feel I should offer them to Project Gutenberg to distribute to other readers who might enjoy them. (Also I now feel I have the bones of a simple technique which could probably be applied to many more of Gutenberg's precious volumes with relatively little expenditure of effort per volume. No doubt what I've done needs to be refined, but if other people were interested it might be possible to start a sort of 'distributed epubmakers' process which could improve the readability of the epub files.) So the question I would like to ask PG is 'Is PG interested in adding hand-crafted epubs to its download pages?'. There don't appear to be any at present. Is this the right forum to raise this question? If not, could someone suggest where else I might raise it? I thought about Distributed Proofreaders, but they seem to be focused on producing new ebooks, whereas most of the books I want to read are already in the Gutenberg archive, just not that readable on an e-reader. Bob Gibbins

I have forwarded this to our CEO. Please let me know if you do not hear back that this has been handled within a few weeks. Many Many Thanks!!!!!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg

I would be interested in seeing the PG originals and the "hand crafted" versions of these particular epubs to see what is going on. Thanks -- jimad@msn.com
participants (3)
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Jim Adcock
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Michael S. Hart
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Robert Gibbins