On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Darryl Moore wrote:

Michael Hart wrote:

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Will there be a particular interest in doing eBooks in French?

Oh yea! I'm sorry to say I hadn't got around to thinking about this, but being Project Gutenberg CANADA it would almost be inappropriate not too.

Additionally I don't think we should necessarily draw the line at either french or english. Any eligible book in any language should be available. My suggestion would be to set the site up with french, english, and 'other' sections.

My apologies, I didn't mean to ignore all the other languages, but rather just to focus a little extra attention on French, and the possibilities of doing some eBooks with the people I met in France during my speaking tour there last February. For the record, I was born far enough north in the US that my best friend moved to Canada permanently, and I went to live with his family for a time. . .not that the US and Canada were all that different way out West at the time. . . .

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If so, would you be willing to cooperate with volunteers who actually live in France [and other French speaking countries]?

I'd love too. I have to admit up front that I don't speak a word of french. However if there are french volunteers who speak english, others who might be willing to act as intermediaries, or persons willing to communicate through language mangling online text translators, I'm all for it.

I think the formation of French Teams in all areas of PG Canada activities would be worthwhile. Obviously nearly anything that is public domain in France should be PD in Canada, but there might be a greater need for some experts for the French when getting eBooks from you. michael

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Andrew Sly wrote:

On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, Michael Hart wrote:

...

Will there be a particular interest in doing eBooks in French?

If so, would you be willing to cooperate with volunteers who actually live in France [and other French speaking countries]?

One volunteer (Renald Levesque) has been contributing many texts in French to PG, including Canadian ones, using pages scans from the Bibliothque Nationale du Quebec. I would imagine he is mostly responsible for the greatly increasing amount of French texts in PG. (For a long while, it seemed as though French and German representation in PG were staying quite consistantly close to each other in numbers, but now French has pulled ahead with 410 items in the catalog, while we have 315 in German.)

Brett's language program just reported this hour only: French(404) German(303) I'm wondering if it is either a few days behind in the way it is counting, or if it is just missing a few?

Also worth adding is that I have been in touch with the person who runs the "Bibliotheque virtuelle", which has some French Canadian texts digitized in rtf files. (http://www.fsj.ualberta.ca/biblio/default.htm) He has said PG is welcome to reformat any texts from there. I have copyright cleared a handful of them, and done the comparison needed at the library, but have stalled on actually getting the files ready for posting.

If you can send me an email address for the two people mentioned above, I will see what I can do to provide more assistance, and for your own efforts, as well. I also have contacts in France who might help, and in other locations.

Andrew

Michael