[PGCanada] Introductions, etc.

Carlo Traverso traverso at dm.unipi.it
Tue Nov 9 14:44:37 PST 2004


>>>>> "Wallace" == Wallace J McLean <ag737 at freenet.carleton.ca> writes:

    Wallace> ----- Original Message ----- From: Carlo Traverso
    Wallace> <traverso at dm.unipi.it> Date: Tuesday, November 9, 2004
    Wallace> 2:43 pm Subject: Re: [PGCanada] Introductions, etc.


    >> Does this have a technical motivation? (for example, avoid the
    >> complications of UTF-8 being life+50) Or just to have a
    >> companion to PG-CA?

    Wallace> A legal one: Stuff that would be eligible for a
    Wallace> PG-Canada, and hence likely to draw even more Canadian
    Wallace> volunteers, can't always legally be done through
    Wallace> DP-INT. There are thousands of PD works under life+50 in
    Wallace> Canada that won't be eligible under the PG/DP American
    Wallace> copyright rules.  We could do them in an all-Canadian
    Wallace> site, but not the existing PG/DP site.

    Wallace> Or, we can funnel it all through DP-EU, assuming that
    Wallace> there are no further complications legally. Do they
    Wallace> operate under life+50, and if so where are they
    Wallace> depositing their texts?

They operate in serbia, life+50, the repository for non-PG clearable
texts will be the announced PG-Europa (serbia too), announced to start
in short time (this week maybe...). We have a backlog of posting for
all the texts that we have done under life+50 rules. I expect to
mutually mirror between the two sites.

    >> The effort to bring up a DP site is non negligeable, much more
    >> than overcoming the utf-8 barier; DP-EU still has space to
    >> grow, and will surely welcome new forces. For example, our
    >> waiting lists are empty, anything that you want to post is
    >> welcome. When DP-EU has grown, and canadian squirrels matured,
    >> detaching a canadian clone might be much easier. Currently, a
    >> division of efforts might create problems to both.

    Wallace> And on the other hand, an all-Canadian, or an
    Wallace> international non- national life+50 version of DP might
    Wallace> help draw more volunteers out of the woodwork.

one of the main focus of DP-EU is to allow non-western
alphabets. These include currently cyrillic, east-european (polish,
chech, romanian...) greek and arabic characters (urdu). Most work
however is done in english,(150 books) french(80) and serbian(140 books
in 8 months of operation).

A special emphasis has been posed into having user interfaces,
documentation and discussion forums in different languages (currently
13 languages).

Some of the more affectionate users of DP-EU are canadian, both
english and french speaking.

    Wallace> On the Project Gutenberg business itself, setting aside
    Wallace> the big and valuable and important work done by the DP
    Wallace> annex, a Canadian branch plant would allow the "Canadian
    Wallace> editions" of PG texts -- whether transferred from PG
    Wallace> where eligible, or created under life+ rules outside the
    Wallace> US -- to get (free) ISBNs for those editions. This may
    Wallace> have usefulness down the road, as has been discussed on
    Wallace> the DP forums.

ISBN would be great. I strongly support PG-CA, just DP-CA is IMHO a
little premature, until DP-EU is further grown.

Carlo





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