Open Library Project Takes Flight 126
Aaron Swartz today announced the launch of the new Open Library project. The goal of the project is to produce the world's greatest library on the Internet free for anyone to use. Starting with the Internet Archive's book scanning project and organizing the insertion of new content via a wiki-type model the project seems to be off to a great start. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up today in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.
Awesome (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Go Disney.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Insightful)
C'mon, I would be fairly disappointed with a library of 21,000 real books even if it contained only fiction from random authors from 1900-2000. Gutenberg doesn't even have that much depth.
That's not to take anything away from them. But to make claims about it being a good selection based on "21,000 - gee that's a big number" is a bit ludicrous.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You do know how text is submitted to PG, don't you? It passes through the Distributed Proofreaders project, where a
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
So you won't find any work about Java, Ruby, nor Network Administration.
You may find such in http://en.wikibooks.org/ [wikibooks.org]
More of an IMDB than a library (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:1)
They are adding all sorts of new internet touches, like tags and metadata far in advance to what libraries have been keeping prev
Re: (Score:1)
>>the central clearing house for access to book information
Good luck to them, though they have an uphill climb ahead.
Putting aside LibraryThing for the moment, there already exists a central worldwide clearing house for access to book information: WorldCat [worldcat.org], operated by OCLC.
OCLC is a pretty sharp bunch, and very tied in to Google as well as Google Books. They have already done the collective cataloguing of more than 1 billion items (and that includes audio books, music, videos, etc., as well as
PG (Score:1)
Perhaps this is going to contain books still under copyright? I doubt the full text will be available, which makes this "library" pretty useless.
Re: (Score:1)
Mod parent up (Score:2, Informative)
The difference between this and other catalogs (Library of Congress, etc.) is that presumably you can customize it more.
In response to your question: (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:In response to your question: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyways, the good news is that libraries do exist, and aren't going away. If the electronic library is to exist, it should be pursued as an extension of existing libraries. In other words, we must ensure that electronic access to text grows out of the familiar library setting, not Napster. There are lots of ways to do this.
For instance, current library filing systems are really jus
Re:In response to your question: (Score:5, Insightful)
No, of course not, because they're protected by copyright law, which in turn grew out of article 1, section 8 of the constitution. Just there will never be a restriction on keeping and bearing arms... uh, oh, wait. OK then, like there will never be restrictions on speech... no, no, turns out there are plenty of those. Mmmm, ok, just like the feds can only take action on interstate commerce, because you know, that's an enumerated power they can't step outside... aw, no, they do that all the time. Well, it'll be like how they can't do searches or seizures without probable cause, oath or affirmation, and a warrant... oh... I guess that's no longer true. Well, of course they can't make ex post facto laws... except for the ones they've made, that is, you know, thinking of the children and such.
Wait. Why is it again libraries "aren't going away?"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from the already mentioned fact that all books aren't digitized, it may be because Internet access is not universal, the barrier to access is still high (computers aren't free, right?) and one of the few places that you can get free access and access to a device to do it is, of course, a library.
Re: (Score:2)
The truth of the book publishing business today is that the American public, on the whole, just doesn't read very much. Libraries, on the other hand, stock books -- multiple copies of books, in many cases. And there are thousands of libraries in America.
How do they get all those books? They buy them.
Each year, public libraries buy thousands and thousands of books -- books that individual readers aren't b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
anyway, book sellers generally like libraries, since they generate a lot of positive side-effects, at a more noticable level than p2p piracy typically does; people that wouldn't have bought a book read it and tell their friends, for example -- not to mention that libraries
Re: (Score:1)
>>a free library system today
Personally, I find it depressing that so many people don't know that there are free libraries operating. They are generally called "public" libraries. Publishers don't sue them out of existence because libraries buy the copies of the books they circulate, and the publishers make money from that.
Go to worldcat [worldcat.org], look up a book you like, and then type your zip code or city and state into the localization box - you'll probably find there's a copy near you that yo
Libraries don't get sued for infringement (Score:2, Interesting)
If an electronic library can find a way to obtain support as a literacy project, there are plenty of traditional avenues open. Suits against council literacy efforts don't go down well, at least in Europe.
Re: (Score:2)
Of course not, because they've paid for their copies. Makes a difference, doncha know?
Re: (Score:2)
There is no such word as "doncha," and if there is, there shouldn't be. It's "don't you." Two words, not one.
Re: (Score:2)
It's interesting you should note that. I would like to point out that it's actually three words: "do not you". The word "don't" is a contraction of "do" and "not", which has somehow found its way into spelling as well as in verbal usage.
The word "doncha" is common enough that I, a man who does not live in an english-speaking country, and does not have english as my first language, has been expose
Re: (Score:2)
Now, it is up to you to document that my post wasn't sarcasm, if you are to claim my post was sarcastic.
My eyes.... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Doncha wish your words had no apostrophe?
Doncha?
Doncha baby, doncha?
More Optimism, less cynicism (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps such a project would
Not a problem for Pirate Bay? (Score:2)
Or does it only apply to stealing popular movies and music?
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1)
>>a way to get access to science journals
Fortunately there is a way. Universities offer community cards to local users, usually for about $25 a year. With a community card, you can access science journals online, plus borrow from their book, music, etc. collections.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
I was so caught up in the superiority of my educated understanding, I made a newbie's error and forgot some basics of how HTML-formatted text works.
The capacity of the educated to be unaware of their moronitude knows no bounds!
Ahem.
(And yes, moronitude is not a word, I'm sure.)
Project Gutenburg (Score:2)
It's been around for years, and I thought it was pretty well-known.
Re:Project Gutenburg (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:1, Insightful)
Talk about sleazy.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, ma
Re:Project Gutenburg (Score:5, Insightful)
Your issue is more likely that there are a lot of crappily designed webpages out there.
If you're reading "large swaths of ordinary onscreen text", do this:
- Copy-paste in into any word processor
- Choose a nice, big font. (Small is good for UI, not for 400-page-novels.)
- Use a dark background. A page reflects light, a screen projects it. You do not want glaring white.
- Use 8-10 words per line.
- Profit! Err... less mental exhaustation, at least.
Pay extra attention to words per line. It's a key reason onscreen text is often hard to read. Too many words per line, and you'll have a mental overhead every few seconds trying to figure out which line you just read and which is next. Basically, books do it right and you want to display onscreen text at a similar width. Scrolling is easy these days, and wide lines is a remnant from when computers required a click-and-drag to scroll.
Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.
Heck, even slashdot defaults to a glaring white background and text stretched all over my 1920 pixels. Go figure.
Re: (Score:2)
Wide books and newspapers are divided into columns. There is a reason for doing this, but almost nobody seemed to think about that when they display text on screens.
For me, quite the coincidence to run across you comment. Just in the past few days I have taken to resizing my browser to half the width of the screen - like folding a newspaper - because I realized that my eyes tire when reading lines of text running the entire 1280 pixel width of my monitor. It seems to work out great - I am even reading S
Re: (Score:2)
In the case of
Of course, this isn't a very good solution for browsing because it seems to remove the style sheet every time the page changes and
Re: (Score:1)
In the e-book front Adobe Reader has the option to do this for text documents but not bitmap (honestly I have to take extreme steps to format most pdf documents to be screen readable, adjusting crop margins to kill
Re: (Score:2)
Moz/Firefox has a problem with ignoring system colours, but good old Netscape 3 does not -- so I get slashdot with the grey background I use everywhere else. Much easier on these aging, glare-sensitive eyes.
I've noticed that more and more people use a browser fullscreen, no matter how wide that is, then they wonder why they can't FIND stuff on the screen... When I d
Re: (Score:2)
I should have specified that I find the scanned books more eye-restful than not only the plain old screen, but also the ebook readers that I use, which allow me to select font, size, line length, page
Re: (Score:2)
And screen fonts aren't? That's just plain wrong. IMO, you're better off with a font that's been designed for on-screen use, at a font size and spacing that's appropriate for your monitor, viewing distance and eyesight. Reading a book in Arial 10 on your 20" 1600 x 1200 monitor will induce headaches. Switch to a font like Verdana, increase size to something like 14pt and things will get a lot easier.
The non-white background
Re: (Score:2)
For ebooks, I use a very configurable reader, that lets me pick font, size, page width, and background. With paper books, large fonts tire my brain out (I think because they induce slower reading speed than my norm, which is about 800wpm) but for ebooks and screen fonts, it seems to work the other way around. Might be partly that a book is 15" from my eyes, whereas the monitor is ideally about 4 feet away.
Unlike most folk, I almost never use maximized windows. On a
Re: (Score:1)
>>many of these old texts, especially popular fiction from the late 1800s, have been discarded by meatspace libraries, so are otherwise pretty much unavailable
I agree that this is a problem - "meatspace" (ick) libraries have space limitations, and they usually base their "weeding", or removing of books from the collection, on circulation statistics. Most people these days don't want to read old, obscure 19th century novels (I'm an exception, like you). I find them in used booksto
Re: (Score:2)
It bothers me greatly that libraries cul
Re:Project Gutenburg (Score:4, Interesting)
Older books are often hard to relate to without some context, and that sort of thing is what makes or breaks many editions of the "classics", IMO. If, when shopping for books, I pick up a copy of a book that was written more than 200 years or so ago, and it has no foot notes, most of the time I won't buy it. This is doubly true of translated works.
Wikipedia can usually stand in for an introduction, but there's nothing like footnotes to get you closer to an older text, and nothing that I know of provides that. If someone started a project to provide that kind of information for Project Gutenberg books, I'd get on board to help. Bonus points if they're also putting them in formats that don't suck (making plain text look good on the screen is a pain in the ass).
I'd start it up myself, but alas, I am poor (college). I'd definitely help out if someone else got it going, though.
Until someone does that, PG is practically useless to me.
Will this project do anything like that, or do you know of anyone who's doing this?
It seems to me that 500-1,000 really well-edited, footnoted, and formatted free books are better than 21,000 books worth of plain-text barf.
Re: (Score:1)
The goal of Project Gutenberg is to reproduce books as faithfully as they can. They stick to an out-of-copyright edition and reproduce about everything, including non-trivial errors (with a note explaining there is an error) and formatting, now that they produce HTML versions. At least it is the philosophy now at PGDP, which is the main source of books in PG. Earlier texts were less strict about it.
The ebook produced can then be used by other people if they want to create a new edition with footnotes, corre
Re: (Score:2)
If you have ever read a "Featured Article" quality Wikipedia entry, they will almost always have very extensive bibliographies, footnotes, and links to original source documents, so this statement that you are looking for this seems like you are missing something essential here.
Or that you are looking at older books that do
Re: (Score:2)
Footnotes can be downright necessary to getting much out of older works. Try reading just about any ancient Greek or Roman author, or Medieval, or anything before 1800 for that matter, and really understanding all of it without informational footnotes to clue you in to things. Hell, Shakespeare is full of vocabulary that most people will never encounter outside of those works, but that's an easy case where o
Re: (Score:2)
Annotated texts are exactly as you are describing them: They take an older work (say the '''Holy Bible''' to give a strong example of something very commonly footnoted and annotated) and add additional details including glossaries, alternative text, historical information from other sources, and speculative commentary about specific wording.
Another kind of very typical "b
Re: (Score:2)
I've been to wikibooks, but was under the impression that they were more concerned with writing from-scratch instructional books than anything else. The site seemed sparcely-populated and more than a little neglected the last time I looked at it, but they seem to have made good progress since then.
They need publicity more than anything else, I'd say. If more learned individuals with a passion for their field and lots of free time (*cough*profes
Re: (Score:2)
The atmosphere does tend to be much less charged than on Wikipedia, and a much longer view to just about
Re: (Score:1)
question... (Score:2)
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page [gutenberg.org]
they have a great collection of ebooks online already and your free to grab and share them. I wish that they would have the base for this though in a country which doesn't have insanely long copyright laws, then it could really add value over gutenburg
Relevance? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
The Open Library is a database of books, which sometimes includes the full scanned text, and sometimes does not.
So if the same work was published a dozen different times, it would have an entry in The Open Library for each edition, and usually just one entry in Project Gutenberg assembled from all of the out-of-copyright printed editions.
wikipedia 2.0 (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Often criticized as a duplication of Project Gutenberg, it does have some unique documents that you can't find elsewhere, and is *much easier* to add new documents to this project than say PG or other free text websites. I like Distributed Proofreader's approach to text quality quite a bit, but this is an alternative.
Re: (Score:1)
This is for the other 99.99% of content.
Take flight? (Score:1, Insightful)
Mod me down if you must but it's annoying when otherwise intelligent people cannot write a simple sentence and the editors are so lax in their responsibilities.
I must be new here.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
v : run away quickly; "He threw down his gun and fled" [syn: flee,
fly]
taked from the Gnome's "Dictionary look up" panel widget. I have no idea which dictionary(-ies) is/are being used by it.
Not good (Score:1)
Not Project Gutenbeg (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I had a play with it and it is quite limited at the moment. I did manage to add a book, but there was minimal instruction on how to go about this, and uploading covers at the moment is not available (as far as I could determine in 5 minutes anyway).
Re: (Score:1)
This is exactly what I was going to say. It is basically an overview of books with links to Amazon or wherever. I forsee reviews, quotes, and links on par with IMDB. Only there is a benefit of being able to have full-text books too.
So it's not like a library at all? in a library I can -read- books. Atleast that's always been the main point for me to go :)
I fail to see how this will be anything better than gutenberg in that respect. Maybe the interface, but I'm not sure, it's all a bit too flashy for me.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The actual site ... (Score:2)
IPL? (Score:1)
Re:IPL? (Score:5, Interesting)
OpenLibrary is a lot more complete, for one .. searching on "Ogorkiewicz" in IPL yielded no hits, while OL gave me several. The Archive is well-connected to various institutions like the Library of Congress and Bibliotech, and is able to pull a lot of help from these other organizations into making a more complete service.
OpenLibrary is also a catalog of metadata, providing information for each book like physical format, publisher, ISBN#, number of pages, and so on. This metadata has a lot of holes for now, but hopefully that will change as publishers and/or people who own copies of these books fill in the blanks, much like the Internet Movie Database.
Finally, OpenLibrary has its own staff which is dedicated to working with Internet Archive partners to make this the most complete catalog on the planet. IPL is cool (I like it!) but it does not seem to be very actively maintained.
(disclaimer: I work for The Internet Archive, but I do not speak for it, and the OpenLibrary team is in a completely different department from mine so DO NOT treat this post as necessarily any more authorative or correct than any other slashdot post.)
-- TTK
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
>>searching on "Ogorkiewicz" in IPL yielded no hits, while OL gave me several
Worldcat [worldcat.org] yielded 80 hits, which could be refined by author and included works in which Ogorkiewicz' work is cited.
One thing new about it (Score:2)
<type 'exceptions.TypeError'> at
unbound method remove_node() must be called with LRU instance as first argument (got NoneType instance instead)Python
Web GET http://demo.openlibrary.org/search
Traceback (innermost first)
/1/pharos/code/production/pharos/infogami/ tdb/tdb.py in remove_node
...
node = LRU.remove_node(node)
▶ Local vars
A Library Card Tip (Score:2, Insightful)
Gutenburg (Score:1, Redundant)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm curious how they'll make money? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
>>My dream would be the Library of Congress becoming the online resource with ... links to where you can buy OR borrow them
WorldCat [worldcat.org] provides this, at least for the borrowing part. If you want to shop for a book you find there, you can copy the ISBN number from WorldCat's record to Amazon.com or your favored online bookseller (or Google Books, for that matter).
Kinakuta (Score:3, Insightful)
Are there really any working data havens?
Vandalism controls? (Score:3, Interesting)
First thing I did on the site was pull up an entry for a book my university press publishes. It had no "Buy" option. I edited the metadata to add the ISBN-10 number for it, and voila, a Buy option.
It then took a certain amount of self-control for me not to go into various titles dealing with George W. Bush and enter the ISBN-10 of the storybook [amazon.com] containing "My Pet Goat". Purely as a proof of concept, you understand.
This is simply the Wikipedia vandalism problem writ large. What controls will OpenLibrary put in place to guard against it?
Some thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
They should republish the raw data the same way Wikipedia and even IMDb does. I for one am not going to contribute to any data collection project that I can't later use myself.
Their schema [openlibrary.org] doesn't differentiate between editions. If I understand it right, that means that for the 3000 existing editions of "Tom Sawyer" released over the years, by different publishers in different countries and languages, the book's description has to be replicated for each one. That can't be good. I don't have a quick solution to this myself. Sometimes (esp. with tech books), a new edition changes content significantly compared to the previous one, sometimes they're exactly the same.
Collecting the cover images is a great service. However, doesn't this infringe on the publisher's copyright? Is this still fair use? What about countries like Germany without fair use laws--will German books still be OK because the data is collected in the USA (I guess)?
Add a feature to upload book descriptions as XML. Suggest a DTD. I have a list of my book collection stored as an XML file, so have others (maybe not natively, but book collection management software usually has an export function). It should be possible to automate the process of adding book information already stored in some digital format.
There should be some category system to pick from. Some may put Tom sawyer into "Novel, USA antebellum", others into "Novel, USA 19th century".
Somehow connect this to Wikipedia. The more prominent books have article pages. Maybe data could be retrieved from it as well. There are currently Tom Sawyer articles in 16 or so languages.
The edit page should group items better: stuff everyone understands (year published, title) first, then those things only specialists know.
The edit page's descriptors shouldn't be images but text which links to an explanation page for the same reason. BISAC? LCCN? UCC13? I know, I can find out what those are with a search engine, but I shouldn't have to.
Prepare for i18n. I guess LCCN is a library of congress code number? Those types of libraries exist in other countries, too. Each book can have a gazillion codes. Make this another tuple in the database: (book_id, code_id, code_value) instead of (book_id, lcc_id, isbn10, isbn13, 10 other codes in the same record).
Also i18n: store language codes with all textual columns. A description is most likely going to be Hungarian for a book published in Hungary in Hungarian.
This complicates the schema a lot. Having very few tables is tempting, but it usually doesn't work well with the real world.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that. And developing these skills is not something very easy to accomplish either.
Re: (Score:1)
>>The kinds of skills necessary for doing actual cataloging work.... classifying and organizing knowledge... are so rare as to be a very precious jewel of a person if you ever do find somebody like that.
Well said. I am working on an MLIS degree (yes, Virginia, there are still new librarians being trained) and just having learned the baby steps of cataloguing, I can tell you that it is not simple, for many of the reasons cited above. Most cataloguing is "copy cataloguing" - replicating the data provi
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
One of the problems we (as project participants) are currently facing is an overwhelming need to somehow index the content that is currently on the website. With over 26,000 pages of content currently, about the only way that you can find anything is to perform a google search. That has some value, but there are limits on even
Change the name first (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Or just old, almost like James Joyce's work, which arguably nobody reads, but for Joyce at least, a lot of people talk about it.
And as for getting stuff...at least for now, the experience of an ebook is a lot less enjoyable to most people than that of a dead tree book. Dead tree books have portability advantages as well. So if someone likes a book they find on Open Library, they might well buy it on Amazon.