July 2009 - gutvol-p - lists.pglaf.org

If you don't mind testing a program
by Paulo Levi 02 Aug '09

02 Aug '09

This is my reader with the Gutenberg indexing now. Its so very large because I'm including the tts and built index in the download. I'd like to know what do you think of the Gutenberg download (right click toggle Gutenberg). http://rapidshare.com/files/262224026/BookJar.7z.html Also after you tire of searching, i'd like to know how efficient is the reindexing process in other machines. So i'd ask you to delete what's inside the directory named cache, so that the next time the Gutenberg download list is accessed it reindexes.

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Isn't it strange that the creators have birth and death dates included in the tag?
by Paulo Levi 19 Jul '09

19 Jul '09

I suppose this is going to cause me problems later, since i'm using the open library webservice to fetch book covers, and its very sensitive to false information. I can't think of a way to remove it because of the seperator used, just about the worst possible choice since "," appears as delimiter of the first and last names. Not to speak of the names in french and latin or organizations that either don't have ",". The other possible match "-" also appears in names... possibly a regex like this "[0-9]+* (B\.C\.)? [0-9]+*" ? Then there are cases like "Sunzi, 6th cent. B.C." Bad metadata!

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Bizarre.
by Paulo Levi 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

What are the obligatory rdf triples? Apparently editors of collections have no predefined tag and ommit creator. What about books with various authors?

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Programmatic fetching books from Gutenberg
by Paulo Levi 16 Jul '09

16 Jul '09

I made a ebook reader (here) http://code.google.com/p/bookjar/downloads/list and i'd like to search and download Gutenberg books. I already have a searcher prototype using LuceneSail a library that uses Lucene to index rdf documents and only indexing what i want from the catalog.rdf.zip. Now i'd like to know how from the url inside the catalog i can fetch the book itself, and what are the variants for the formats. A example query result: author: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 url: http://www.gutenberg.org/feeds/catalog.rdf#etext1802 title: King Henry VIII So, i like to know how from the etext1802 number can i get a working url to download the book, and how to construct variants for each format. Thank you in advance.

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Re: Programmatic fetching books from Gutenberg
by John Mark Ockerbloom 16 Jul '09

16 Jul '09

(sending this time to the proper list address) Prior to etext #10000, Gutenberg filenames were strings that didn't have anything to do with the etext numbers (except that the number indirectly determined which etext* directory files would be in, since both the numbers and the etext* directories were tied to release date). As these early etexts get revised, they typically move into the new numerically-based-filename system. However, there are still slightly more than 6000 Gutenberg etexts that use the old-style filenames. Information about the filenames, new and old, is included in the RDF file. For instance, if you are interested in etext #3167, you'll find a metadata record for it early in the file in a pgterms:etext element with ID "etext3167". Later in the RDF file, you'll see two pgterms:file elements that have an isFormatOf relationship with the ID "etext3167". Those elements in turn specify information about the two files associated with that etext, including name, MIME type, length, and last-modified date. The name of the file, in particular, is in the rdf:about attribute of the pgterms:file element. In this case, you'll find that the two files associate with etext #3167 are in etext02/wsxpm10.txt and etext02/wsxpm10.zip (relative to the top-level Gutenberg text directory). If for some reason the RDF itself is too big for you to handle easily, it looks like it's auto-generated, so you could probably write a script in Perl or some other suitable text-crunching language to extract only the information you're interested in, in some more compact form. I have my own independent copy of some of this information, in my own format, which I assembled before the RDF directory was made available. But if I were to start over again, I'd probably just pull straight from the RDF. (And try to be more proactive about getting Gutenberg to fix its metadata at various spots instead of just fixing it on my end.) I hoep this helps. John

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