----- Original Message ----- From: Carlo Traverso <traverso@dm.unipi.it> Date: Monday, November 29, 2004 4:28 pm Subject: Re: [PGCanada] eBooks in French
"Michael" == Michael Hart <hart@pglaf.org> writes:
Michael> Will there be a particular interest in doing eBooks in Michael> French?
Michael> If so, would you be willing to cooperate with volunteers Michael> who actually live in France [and other French speaking Michael> countries]?
We had a meeting in Paris last saturday, exactly on this issue, to arrive at a coordination of all francophone PG-like projects. The outcome might be a site in french, located in Canada, and a close coordination of PG/DP activities in french with http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ ; PG clearance procedures are currently the main obstacle to having more french books in PG, with clearance tailored on Life+50 we could reach 1000 in a short time.
There are several non-DP, non-PG efforts in Canada: http://www.uqac.uquebec.ca/zone30/Classiques_des_sciences_sociales/ http://jydupuis.apinc.org/ http://www.bnquebec.ca/numtextes/accueil.htm The first might be amenable to co-operation and co-ordination. The second, from my dealings with him, wouldn't be. Someone else may have better luck in opening a dialogue. The third, through Rénald Lévesque and other DP volunters, has already contributed some works to DP/PG by providing scans that were stored at the BNQ as PDF files. I was actually going to start work on this title before I noticed Rénald had beaten me to the punch: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/0/3/14030/14030-h/14030-h.htm Life+50 does open up a good number of works, but the PG/US rules, with everything pre-1923 up for grabs, also open up the use of what must be at least several hundred, if not thousand, Canadian books in French alone; that's not even considering other francophone countries (most of which are life+70); or non-monographs, esp. magazines and other serials. I find the main problem for a lot of European imprints and the existing DP site is the infuriating lack of a publication date anywhere in the front or end matter. I would have picked up a lot of books in LOTE, including French, at recent sales; as it was I had to restrict myself to material that was either dated, or very very clearly pre-1923.