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Why Project Gutenberg Isn't There Yet
Posted by
timothy
on Tue Jan 28, 2003 08:17 PM
from the because-there-is-a-long-way-from-here dept.
from the because-there-is-a-long-way-from-here dept.
option8 writes "This wired article ('Any Text. Anytime. Anywhere. (Any Volunteers?)'), goes into good detail on why Project Gutenberg, and similar efforts, are far from creating a complete, free electronic library. A quote: "The mechanics of a universal library are simple. The tricky part: harnessing the free labor." Though it doesn't go into technology much, I expect there's a lot of potential in mass OCR tech and good speech recognition (faster to read a book aloud than to transcribe it correctly)."
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Why Project Gutenberg Isn't There Yet
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Speech recognition? (Score:4, Interesting)
The parent is "interesting"? (Score:5, Informative)
Come on mod's, read more carefully.
Re:The parent is "interesting"? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, for the best scanning speed you have to cut the binding off and use a sheet feeder. But even scanning 2 pages at a time will be far faster than reading the whole thing out loud.
So what is your point?
Re:The parent is "interesting"? (Score:5, Informative)
But as the GP said - a moot point since OCR'ing it and proofreading/fixing minor typos would be far quicker than either.
Re:speech recog works (Score:5, Funny)
Cost of labor? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cost of labor? (Score:5, Informative)
From their FAQ:
What books will I find in Project Gutenberg?
We cannot publish any texts still in copyright. This generally means that our texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as our Copyright Page explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)
So you won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.
These books are chosen by our volunteers. Simply, a volunteer decides that a certain book should be in the archives, obtains the book and does the work necessary to turn it into an e-text. If you're interested in volunteering, click here.
Re:Cost of labor? (Score:5, Informative)
Librarians? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the goal is a universal library, and there is a need for a work force, wouldn't a program iniated on the library level to utilizie librarians as a volunteer work force, perhaps as a side project they might be interesting in helping along? I think of it as SETI in the library world.. *shrug*
Distributed Proofreaders (Score:5, Informative)
http://texts01.archive.org/dp/ [archive.org]
Re:The REAL Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Nice try.
The constitution doesn't give them much wiggle room since it assigns Congress the right to regulate copyrights to their hearts desire.
It'd be nice on the surface if they jsut interepreted things just so we are happy, but in fact, they have to actually *follow* what is *written* in the Constitution, which is what they did with Eldred.
It all goes back to Congress. Congress is the problem here, not the courts, not Disney, no one else but Congress. And that leads back to the people.
Re:The REAL Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
However, *Copyrighted* works should eventually go into public domain. The point is that after you are dead, anything - be it a movie, song, cartoon, book, poem --- whatever --- serves a greater good to mankind than it could to its dead creator. I think that a decade or two is too short of a limit for copyright. If I write a book when I'm 20 years old, I should still be allowed to make money off the sale of that book when I'm 40. But when I'm in the grave, it servs me no use.
Now, it could be said that a person who works hard to create pieces of work like movies or books or songs should be allowed to bestow the revenue from use of that material after the original author is dead. If I write a book that still sells well 20 years after my death, my son and daughter should be allowed to benefit from this copyrighted item in my 'estate'.
But I think that indefinite extensions are rediculous. I would say that 100 years is bordering on ridiculous. I think that 75 years is reasonable. If I create something when I'm 25, the copyright will outlive me by as much as 25 years.
In fact, I would propose that copyright should be extended to the life of the creator plus 20 years **OR** 50 years. Whichever is less (so if you die two years after the copyright, the copyright is still in effect for another 20 years).
Re:The REAL Problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Some posthumous works may come out under a life-plus-X term that might have been cast aside under a life-plus-zero term. Life plus 50 is probably more than enough.
Life plus 70 is absurd and our so-called elected officials should be ashamed of going along with it. And may Sonny Bono *not* rest in peace.
I read lots of stuff off there! (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I've found the most value from the project is downloading and reading classics. I've downloaded works by people such as: Adam Smith, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Plato, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, Thomas More, and various other classic writers. I've found this resource indispensable. It provides high quality texts for free. I probably wouldn't read many works by these authors if I had to purchase them. I unfortunately, don't have the money to spend on many small works such as these (they're short, but sometimes cost $10-15). I also don't have easy access to a library and I like keeping a copy for my own personal use.
So I find that Project Gutenberg is a very useful resource.
neurostarIf only (Score:4, Interesting)
I think copyrights got to be the biggest hurdle, publishing houses arnt easily going to be perswaded to put oh say the next harry potter book online for free and risk losing millions
If you do want to help (Score:5, Informative)
Distributed Proofreaders [archive.org]. Recently discussed [slashdot.org] on /. as well.
Re:If you do want to help (Score:4, Informative)
That's part of what DP does (Score:5, Informative)
That's basically what Distributed Proofers does. Except they OCR the book first, so the proofreaders just need to fix the OCR errors. Every page goes through two passes. Then the entire book goes into post-processing where a single person puts all the pages together, and checks for problems that the proofers didn't know how to solve (marked with an astrisk). Once Distributed Proofers finishes the book, they pass it on to Project Gutenberg where somebody reviews the whole text again.
Distributed Proofers currently has a problem. After the previous Slashdot announcement, they were overwhelmed with volunteers. The volunteers processed books so fast, they were running out of material to work on. Three or four people scan in most of the books. They have been slaving away trying to keep up with the proofers.
Distributed Proofers is also working on a standard to mark up the books to better preserve tables, illustrations, bold text, math, etc. I suspect that effort is being slowed due to the priority of keeping material on the site.
Re:That's part of what DP does (Score:4, Informative)
Distributed Proofers is also working on a standard to mark up the books to better preserve tables, illustrations, bold text, math, etc. I suspect that effort is being slowed due to the priority of keeping material on the site.
Three Little Letters:
T E I [tei-c.org]
TEI is to literature as DocBook is to documentation.
barbor or barber (Score:4, Funny)
Karma: Barber
Books Are Printed With Computers... (Score:5, Interesting)
So the point of this post is: why not ask publishers for the material? If it's already public domain, it's not like they'll lose profits, and maybe Project Gutenberg could let them put a little
kind of thing at the top of each book they donate. Plus, maybe it's a tax write off. I don't know. That said, I'd thing it'd be much easier to just type things in than OCR it or use Speach-To-Text.Re:Books Are Printed With Computers... (Score:5, Insightful)
Get manuscript from author.
This could be either handwritten or typed. If typed, it's likely to be in either plain text or Word format, but with a lot of errors.
If the manuscript's handwritten, farm it out to a typist.
We used to pay 0.5 yen a letter for English, 1 yen a character for Japanese.
Once it's data, edit.
I used to do my editing on a Mac with BBEdit, but this varies a lot between editors - some do it on (shudder) Word, where all the formatting gets in the way.
Reformat it to pass it to the DTP firm.
When I say 'reformat', I don't mean making things bold or italic - I mean cleaning it up so it's easy to do the next step, which is...
Print out and insert format directions.
The manuscript is printed out, and you go through it one line at a time adding things like "Line break here" and "Use larger font for this".
Proofs arrive from the DTP firm.
You go through the proofs, making corrections by hand (i.e., "Move this down one line", etc.)
The DTP firm passes you back the formatted data.
QuarkXPress is king here. You get the data in a finished form and pass it to the printers.
The printer produces the final proofs.
You can still make corrections, but these have to be done by the DTP firm, who then give you the updated data.
Last-minute corrections are made.
This depends on the printer, but quite often these are done by pasting the changes over the top of the printer film (i.e., they're not reflected in the data).
The book is printed.
Corrections after printing are usually done as described above (pasting changes over the film).
The problem with this is that the text data held by the editor is now out-of-date in all sorts of ways:
- It doesn't have the corrections made by the DTP firm.
- It doesn't have the corrections made by the printer.
- It doesn't have any formatting.
QuarkXPress can output the data in other forms, but it's still missing the last-minute changes and after-printing changes, and quite frankly once it's on the market, most publishing companies aren't interested in reworking the data to keep it as text for the next 90 years, so it can be released into the public domain.
WiReD (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd just like to point out that this is the third story from Wired to show up on slashdot today. And it's not even that bad of a story. I think this must mean Wired is cool again.
copyright information (Score:5, Informative)
1. Works first published before January 1, 1923 with proper copyright notice entered the public domain no later than 75 years from the date copyright was first secured. Hence, all works whose copyrights were secured before 1923 are now in the public domain.
(This is the rule Project Gutenberg uses most often)
Works published from 1923-1977 retain copyright for 95 years. No such works will enter the public domain until 2019.
2. Works first created on or after January 1, 1978 enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the author is a natural person.
(Nothing will enter the public domain under this rule until at least January 1, 2049.)
3. Works first created on or after January 1, 1978 which are created by a corporate author enter the public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation whichever occurs first.
(Nothing will enter the public domain under this rule until at least January 1, 2074.)
4. Works created before January 1, 1978 but not published before that date are copyrighted under rules 2 and 3 above, except that in no case will the copyright on a work not published prior to January 1, 1978 expire before December 31, 2002. If the work is published before December 31, 2002, its copyright will not expire before December 31, 2047.
(This rule copyrights a lot of manuscripts that we would otherwise think of as public domain because of their age.)
5. If a substantial number of copies were printed and distributed in the U.S. prior to March 1, 1989 without a copyright notice, and the work is of entirely American authorship, or was first published in the United States, the work is in the public domain in the U.S.
6. (This rule is complicated, and is seldom applied). Works published before 1964 needed to have their copyrights renewed in their 28th year, or they'd enter into the public domain. Some books originally published outside of the US by non-Americans are exempt from this requirement, under GATT. Works from before 1964 were automatically renewed if ALL of these apply:
At least one author was a citizen or resident of a foreign country (outside the US) that's a party to the applicable copyright agreements. (Almost all countries are parties to these agreements.)
The work was still under copyright in at least one author's "home country" at the time the GATT copyright agreement went into effect for that country (January 1, 1996 for most countries).
The work was first published abroad, and not published in the United States until at least 30 days after its first publication abroad.
This means that we can't simply take electronic versions of modern texts and put them in the archive, because only out-of-copyright books are in there.
Distributed Proofreaders, Copyright (Score:5, Interesting)
In any case, the real obstacle to a useful electronic library isn't labor. It's copyright.
hmmmmmm (Score:3, Funny)
Um, Distributed Proofreaders (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Um, Distributed Proofreaders (Score:5, Interesting)
Way cool. I've been working there once in a while since the first
It's only a matter of time before someone with a relatively massive audience like NPR does a story on DP and then we'll see what it's really like to be slashdotted. I would like to see the international membership increase, as well.
I recommend it to anyone who reads. A page a day or a week or a month helps save another book. Most of these old books will become extinct if they are not saved to the web sooon.
Gutenberg (Score:3, Funny)
And while we're discussing the speech recognition for books, it wouldn't make sense for poetry, which uses alternate spellings sometimes. It also wouldn't make sense for at least one work that I can think of - Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, which is already up there. When Alice first looks at the poem Jabberwocky, it's backwards. Try saying that backwards faster than you can type it!
Re:Gutenberg (Score:5, Informative)
Before Gutenberg, there were printing presses, BUT you had to carve the master (the plate) for each page, and it could NOT be changed. Other folks had the IDEA of movable type, but what Gutenberg did was figure out a way to make it work (what he did was figure out how to make all the type the same length, so that when you press down, all the type comes in contact with the paper)
Movable type gives you one huge advantage - you can make up a bunch of sets of letters, and reuse them for many pages.
The total irony of this is that movable type is almost never used anymore - we make up a plate for each page. Of course, we are doing it with electronic movable type, but that is here nor there. Movable type started to go away with the Linotype machine - which made up one LINE of type at a time.
I think I still have an ingot of linotype metal around somewhere
Re:Gutenberg (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, he didn't even invent moveable type. The Chinese did that with wooden blocks much earlier and there were existing printing presses that used moveable blocks.
Are you sure about this? My understanding was that early (pre-Gutenburg) Chinese presses didn't have sorts, because with the sheer size of the Chinese writing system, they wouldn't have been efficient with the level of technology to produce wooden blocks. But I'm willing to be corrected (with a reference, preferably).
Anyway, see Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change [amazon.com] for a lot of the information that Mr. Orn describes. A more accessible book, The Nature of the Book [amazon.com], Adrian Johns, discusses some of this in the in the earlier chapters.
You can help (Score:3, Informative)
http://promo.net/pg/volunteer.html
Time to Request Digital Copies from Publishers (Score:5, Insightful)
size (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep, but Project Gutenberg is predicted to reach it's 10,000th book on, variously, Nov 10th, Nov 14th, Dec 10th or Dec 31st this year. It's growing quickly now.
plain text -- WHY?? (Score:4, Interesting)
But that's absolutely no reason why the source shouldn't be marked up. Marked up source can always be converted to ASCII, but you cannot derive semantic markup from ASCII.
Re:plain text -- WHY?? (Score:5, Informative)
That's exactly why. Since 1971 a wide variety of encodings and markup languages existed. 32 years later the only system still trivial to read is plain old ASCII. Project Gutenberg is most interested in preserving the texts themselves. The texts are quite well preserved in ASCII. Sure, some formatting is missing, but it's relatively minor for the majority of books in question. And given the existance of this unformatted text it's alot easier to create formatted text than from scratch, so you even get a benefit there.
I think you're a bit confused on semantic markup. By and large publishers aren't interested in semantics of the documention, just the formtting.
Re:plain text -- WHY?? (Score:4, Interesting)
It could at least shift to unicode, so we can write in languages other than English (and English-with-no-accents, at that!).
just scan and compress (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a much more efficient way to make books available on the web, much more efficient than having volunteers painstakingly transcribe the text or correcting OCR mistakes.
OCR can be used for indexing scanned documents, but there is no need to do manual correction. DjVu can compress 300dpi black and white pages of text to 5-25KB. That's less than most HTML pages, and the images look just like the original book.
The Million Book Project at the Internet Archive uses DjVu (as well as other formats).
The open source implementation of DjVu is available on sourceforge [sf.net]
Downside to that method: (Score:4, Insightful)
Plain text, HTML, or XML are much more portable than compressed images. Which is at least partly why Gutenberg uses plain ASCII text; it's readable on literally anything with an alphanumeric display, and by all signs will be for decades, if not centuries or millenia. Good luck finding a GIF or BMP in 100 years, let alone formats nobody's even heard of. I have plenty of pictures I made only a few years ago on an Apple II that can't be read by anything, even when I get it off the 5.25" floppies. Yet I've read code and other things written on computers from the 70s and 80s. ASCII Just Doesn't Die.
Just daydreaming here. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think an interesting project would be public domain textbooks. Textbooks are grossly overpriced and contain information that is largely available for free. If a community of developers can create an OS like linux then the educational community should be able to come up with open textbooks.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
Transcribing? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like reading online! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am lured and lulled by the vast amount of easy information suitably tailored to my interests, all with an easy to use intuitive associational ( read hypertextual ) interface. But it is tiring, staring at a flickering glaring screen for hours, my eyes get dry, and I strain and get tired picking out fuzzy objects when I try to focus at distance. Its nasty and annoying.
Here is my point about this project. Nobody wants to read books on their computers. Well maybe some do, but I think the vast majority don't. Paper books are easily available and cheap. If you can't find the one you want in a local library or bookstore there are a multitude of ways of ordering them. You don't get tired looking at them, they are actually enjoyable. So why should there be a desire amongst the majority for e-books?
Don't get me wrong, I think its a good idea, but not one that I, nor I think the majority, will go in for until a better way is developped of presenting them. LCDs are an improvement, but they still are shabby. I don't think a project like this is going to see much public interest until some better presentation media is found. E-Paper will be needed before the E-book becomes a reality for most people. Some kind of little book-sized unit that you can hold and which will display on a matt - non-glaring, non-luminous surface.
Online Interface.. (Score:3, Informative)
In Search of the Perfect Library (Score:5, Interesting)
There seems to be an interesting recurring theme in human history - we constantly strive to build libraries but we have never yet built one that is quite "good enough".
The Great Library in Alexandria was a wonder of the ancient world until it got burned down as part of a domestic dispute between Mark Anthony and Cleopatra. I was amused to note that the local University recently received funding approval to rebuild it - grants committees move slowly.
In mediaeval times, monks were the guardians of knowledge and the various monasteries dotted around Europe were oases of learning and knowledge in those times. Knowledge was restricted to the few.
The original Gutenberg made it possible to create huge volumes (literally) of knowledge and disseminate it on a wide scale. Ever since, people in power have sought to control this technology - either through censorship, copyright, or even education (you have to be able to read before a book is of greatest use to you.)
In Victorian England, the mark of a scholarly gentleman was in the breadth of works he maintained in his private library.
Perhaps a new initiative might be Gutenberg@Home whereby any reader made an electronic copy of physical works by some convenient, nondestructive means. By keeping such a personal library private, one would not have to worry about copyright laws, even as currently framed.
How much of what is holding us back from building the perfect library simply our insistence on monetary-related restrictions? How long will it take us to realize that lengthy (in time) and complex or intensive (in resources consumed) PHYSICAL processes are the only ones to which we need to attach a value. Whatever happens inthe electronic world should be free and that the collation, assembly, verification, dissemination and application of the sum of human knowledge is one of the most important things that we could achieve?
STF
And not going anywhere soon.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this take on media longevity also prevents progress WRT Project Gutenberg. Too many people don't see the point, when they can have the Library of Congress backed up on disk one day but be looking at a screen full of garbage characters the next because someone accidentally yanked the power supply on the server or whathaveyou.
A single $5 paperback book can be propagated more reliably than tens of thousands of dollars worth of networks and storage, although the latter system can admittedly hold a whole library's worth of that single book. But think about the infrastructure required to maintain the latter system. Until we have better media, the costs aren't justifiable, IMHO. It's an idea whose time has not yet come.
Re:And not going anywhere soon.... (Score:5, Insightful)
One small book also takes up the space of a hard drive, and can't be redownloaded, or backed up. If my roof leaks, or I have a fire, it will cost me thousands of dollars to replace my books, and some will be hard to impossible to replace. If my hard drive crashes, I redownload the files from Gutenberg, and/or restore them from my backups.
Technological Breakthrough ( funny ) (Score:3, Funny)
Introducing the new Bio-Optic Organized Knowledge device - BOOK.
BOOK is a revolutionary breakthrough in technology; no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's easy to use. Even a child can operate it.
Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere - even sitting in an armchair by the fire - yet is powerful enough to hold as much as a CD-ROM.
[...]
BOOK never crashes nor requires rebooting. The 'browse' function allows instant movement to any sheet, forward or back, as one wishes. Many come with an 'index' feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval.
Portable, durable and affordable, BOOK is being hailed as a precursor of a new entertainment wave. BOOK's appeal seems so certain that thousands of content creators have committed to the platform and investors are reportadly flocking to the medium.
Stupid article. Project Gutenberg doing great. (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer to phrase it, "Thus Project Gutenberg has raced ahead at an amazing rate. In its 32nd year in existence, the collection has 6,267 etexts, averaging almost 200 etexts per year. That works out to about one book every other day. This is more impressive given that in the first twenty years of the projects existance the Internet didn't exist anywhere near the form we take it for granted today. The popularization of the Internet has just accelerated the rate the Project Gutenberg grows. With the help of Distributed Proofreaders [archive.org], a project that allows average people to donate small amounts of time to proofread just one page at a time, Project Gutenberg can expect to add over 400 etexts per year. Clearly Project Gutenberg is thriving."
If one demands that the library be born. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Patience, however, is a virtue. Libraries of public domain works *grow.* Every work added remains. Although it may take many years, even generations, as did the construction of the Giza plaza, over time The pyramid grows toward its apex, another pyramid joins it, a temple is added to the side, and so on.
That's part of the point of Project Gutenburg. Not just to provide an online library but to do so in an immutable manner that only grows over time.
Adding only *one page* to the project is valuable, and that addition remains and is added to by others.
Even brick and mortar libraries can take generations to build. A two hundred year plan only requires patience to complete.
That said, I'm going to take an even more contrarian point of view to the Wired article. The amazing thing I find about Project Gutenburg is how much is already in there. It's already at the point that I think few people could manage to read one half of the texts available in their lifetime, and finding a project to donate is complicated by the fact that the hardest part may not be performing the labor, but simply finding a project that interests you that *hasn't already been done.*
It's already a remarkable collection, and I've had to, on occasion, resort to it because my local library didn't have a lending copy of the work I wanted, but Project Gutenburg could give me free ownership of it.
KFG
Wired's failed logic... (Score:4, Interesting)
You are on the internet, talking about various companies/projects/organizations/events on the internet....SO PROVID THE DAMN LINKS!!!
The Wired article is about Project Gutenberg, but there is no link to it! There is a link to a children's books database, which is only mentioned in passing.
Get it together!
OCR might have a problem... (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm, imagine scanning a 500-year-old book hand-written in Cyrillic... forgetting for one second the damage that scanning might do to the book in the first place.
All Hail The Text! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, a while ago I copied a lot of the Project Gutenberg library, along with some others, and created etext.textfiles.com [textfiles.com].
In my experience, the reason a lot of people don't donate free time to transcription or other similar drudge work is because a lot of sites that encourage it steal it. Witness CDDB, and just wait to see how long before you pay for IMDB.
I tend to differ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever looked at the amount of material in Gutenberg's archives? When it comes to books and material written in english, that is in the public domain, I have to say, that Gutenberg offers almost everything of interest already.
The reason the Gutenberg project isn't hugely succesful is not the lack of text. Part of it might be the lack of formatting. Nobody want's to read 600 pages of a classic work on a computer screen in ASCII. Some may be masochistic enough to do it if it was in HTML. Personally, I still prefer it in book-form.
But even if it was properly formatted in several formats (including .pdf's in several sizes), it still is a lot of work to print it out, find a decent way to keep it together (no, ring binders isn't very appropriate for something you are going to read).
The main reason Gutenberg isn't succesful is because it is not what people want. People don't want to read or print out old literature in the public domain. They either want a nice edition that looks good on the shelf, or a cheap paperback to carry around with them . And most likely they aren't particulary into really old books (with a possible few exceptions which the Gutenberg project long since have covered).
It's not like the work the Gutenberg people are doing isn't important, or isn't of good enough quality or anything else. The simple reasons it's not heavily succesfull is because very few people are really interested. I'm sure much of the work the Gutenberg people have done will become important as soon as on-demand printing is more common and affordable.
Problems with speech recognition (Score:3, Interesting)
Was thinking about voice recognition today while lamenting that I haven't done more to type in my copy of The Queen's Necklace by Alexandre Dumas, copyright 1910.
Here are two problems that came to mindn why I probably won't be able to use voice recog soon:
1.) Works who have been lucky enough to actually have their copyright lapse are often pretty old works. Their English (let's use English just b/c it's the lang I'm using) isn't exactly today's English, and sometimes even spellings, etc, change. Try reading anything from the 1800s and before.
2.) Names (so any protracted dialog) and other tough-to-translate stuff is going to be a pain to proofread. My book in particular has quite a bit of French in it (lots of "Parbleu" and French names with crazy accents all over the place).
I'd like to say voice recog could produce a "new version" with "updated spellings", but I just don't think that'd fly.
So once voice recog is commonplace for, say, office use (still quite a ways off) and affordable (not sure there, but I haven't heard of a friend using it yet, even just to play) we'll still have a ways to go before we can get true literature into PG simply by reading.
As an aside, at the same time I've been thinking about simply taping me reading the book and donating *that* via mp3 (or Ogg or whatever the heck). For the time being anyone who wants can listen in the car, and as soon as voice recog is up to snuff, voila. Just run it on my recording, proofread (easier said than done), and you're ready to go!
bookwarez (Score:3, Interesting)
There are plenty of places on the net that one can find and download copyrighted works. Web sites, mail servers, IRC networks, and so on. I've used them extensively, myself. Many of the books I've downloaded, I own, and I got the electronic format for searching, reading on pocket devices, and so on. I think that this is fair - I've paid for the information once, and my sense of Fair Use tells me that it's okay to get this bits in this way.
I've also downloaded many, many books that I do not, nor will ever, own. (Some of these, I will probably never read.) Is this a copyright violation? Almost definitely. Is it ethically wrong? I don't think so. I would probably never buy a new copy of these works. If I hadn't downloaded them, I would have borrowed them from a friend, or a library, or bought a used copy, and sold it back later. None of these legal methods would have earned the author or publishers a cent. So, how are they different from downloading an electronic version? In my eyes, they are not.
I buy plenty of books - hundreds or dollars worth every year. I love to read. I support local authors, and independent publishers. I do not think my actions are criminal. If someone disagrees, tough. You won't stop me, or the legions of other electronic book traders. Ever. Sorry. If it helps, think of us as the "books" in Fahrenheit 451, keeping a distributed library available for public use, in the event that something terrible should happen someday. Eventually, one way or the other, copyright will go away, and the words will be truly free again.
(And anyway, I was just joking. I'd never knowingly violate copyright law. What am I, stupid?)
Tax funded... (Score:4, Interesting)
Really, information is the most important thing humanity has, and the people literally "Saving" the world are doing it on their free time.
What's wrong with Wired Magazine... (Score:5, Interesting)
They obviously publish articles written by people with their head up their asses.
Honestly, just what is Mr. J. Bradford DeLong thinking? To characterize Project Gutenberg as a failure is just imbecilic. From PG's own pages, 203 ebooks were released in October 2002. 1975 new books in 2002 (1240 in 2001). It's a lot of work to produce even one book, and PG is churning them out at a pretty good clip for an entirely volunteer effort.
Even as it is, I've found PG to be pretty damned useful. It's kind of nice to be able to grep the collected works of Shakespeare. Or Darwin. Or Conan Doyle. Or H. G. Wells. Or Jules Verne. Or Charles Dickens. Or Frank. L. Baum.
Despite advances in technology, scanning, OCRing and proofreading books remains a very labor intensive process, and it is a boring, often thankless process as well. The Million Book project wants to take a somewhat different approach to providing digital books: they actually scan the books and store them in DJVU format (a very nice format similar to PDF). They can do OCR on it to provide searchable text, but such text doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be effective. Most of the time you print and read the original scans. After all, some publisher went to the trouble of carefully typesetting the book and proofreading it once, why bother to do it all again?
I first became aware of this project and technology when I met Brewster Kahle as he drove the Internet Bookmobile around the U.S., going to libraries and schools trying to drum up interest in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. A compressed version of Alice in Wonderland in DJVU format is about 5 megabytes (the same as a single MP3) including the illustrations and fancy typesetting. He could print and bind a copy of it for about $2 in materials, on demand using an HP laser printer out of the back of the mobile. The binding isn't amazing, but consider the possibility of having literally any book in any small town library in any place in the world. It's an exciting idea, and one that technology is only making easier and cheaper. You can get a decent scanner for $100 (even one small enough to hook to a laptop and take to a library). You can scan a book in an evening. And after you do, the file can be converted to a simple, easy to use format that everyone can use. Forever. One evening. One person. One book.
Despite the setback of Eldred v. Ashcroft, more and more books are going to be made available by the true philanthropists of the world: the volunteers who give something of their own time to make the world a better place. I wonder what Mr. DeLong has done to make the world a better place...
Semi-official response from Project Gutenberg (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all for now. Thanks to all the supportive comments in this thread, and to all the constructive criticism. And remember, a page a day [archive.org] is all it takes to contribute!
Greg Newby, Director and CEO
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
www.gutenberg.net [gutenberg.net]
Re:Tex? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Tex? (Score:4, Funny)
Now that I think about it, I imagagine publishers face this very same problem when publishing a new edition of an old work, and I'd wager they have developed a few tricks to make the process easier.
If all else fails, I suggest we direct some time, effort, and old PCs into monastaries. Monks dig that tedious shit, hard style. Only one question remains, though... VI or Emacs?
Re:Tex? (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, what I generally use PG for are the classics - greek/roman literature, etc... I don't think Plato used UNIX.
It's all got to be somehow entered from dead-tree-format copy. Currently, that pretty much means typing up the entire book.
What's more. . . (Score:5, Informative)
That means *plain* ASCII. Plain ASCII means you could read it in edlin if you really had to.
This is a Good Thing.
This also means that if you wish to format any Project Gutenburg text, in HTML or TeX for publication, you start with a blank slate and can immediately start to work your own will upon the raw text.
This is also a Good Thing.
KFG
Re:What's more. . . (Score:5, Informative)
Strangely enough, people have actually addressed this, notably with the Gutenmark program to convert Gutenberg text into nicely formatted documents in a variety of markup formats (including PDF and TeX, using postprocessing filters).
See GutenMark home [sandroid.org]
It never ceases to amaze me that, when people see something that only addresses 90% of their own problem, they call it useless, rather than doing a web search to see whether someone has addressed the remaining 10% of their problem.
Gutenberg is an amazingly important project; I urge everyone to support it.
Re:Tex? (Score:3, Informative)
Project Guttenburg only does texts which are in the public domain, which currently mean pre-1923 editions (PG of Australia [gutenberg.net.au] has newer books) and, obviously, pre-1923 means that the only sources are print copies.
* pedantic point: it's the copyright holder's permission, which isn't necessairly the publisher, but usually is.
Re:other issues... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tex? (Score:5, Informative)