From tb at baechler.net Fri Apr 1 23:22:47 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Fri Apr 1 23:20:44 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> Hi. This is probably mostly for the webmaster, but I would like to get input from others on this list. Also, if you think this is off topic, I can move this discussion to the gutvol-p list instead. Has any progress been made with regards to making PG books available in Braille formatted files? There is at least one free Braille translator for *nix that I know of. I haven't seen this on the recode or bibrec pages. I would be willing to test the Braille output. I know of others who would probably also be interested. Probably a link on the recode page would be best, but it would be nice to see a link as part of the standard download links on the bibrec pages. That link could probably be a cgi program which would call the translator, NFBTrans, which would convert the file. I believe that it can be set to write to stdout, but it might be more convenient to have it create a separate file with the .brf extension for downloading. Here are a couple of issues to keep in mind. First, Braille only works with 7-bit, upper case files. NFBTrans will convert from mixed case just fine, but it is important that they are not 8-bit files. Braille does not support international accented characters. There are different Braille codes for other languages such as Spanish or German, but I don't know how well NFBTrans supports them. Besides it would be difficult to have an automated way of passing this information on the command line at the time of translation. Second, it will work only on plain text. It does not convert from html at all. Third, it might be best to have two links, one for a single file and one for multiple volumes. The reason why is that one printed page is about 3-6 Braille pages, depending on the size of the print and any illustrations. Many blind people now use special PDAs which can handle big files, but large files are bad for embossers. If someone downloads and tries to emboss a 300 page print book, it could easily be 900-1,000 pages in Braille. So, it is best to also make smaller files available. This is known as volumes. that same book could be downloaded in three Braille Volumes of 100-250 Braille pages each. That is much better for binding etc. I think the best way to do this is with the standard split utility. You can set it for X lines and that would be perfect. It would not indicate at the top of each new file that it is a subsequent volume in a set, but that can be added by the person doing the embossing if desired. I don't know exactly what the correct number of lines per file is, but I can check into that. Finally, after the translation to Braille options are set up and working, it would be nice if PG could have an official press release announcing this service. I know of several groups for the blind and many blind individuals who would be very interested. This is not as good of a solution as making books available in the new DAISY format, but I am not aware of a free html to DAISY converter, and I don't think that DAISY works on plain text at all. Once a master xml format is in place, conversion to DAISY would be even simpler, but I don't think there are any free tools. Really all that needs to be done is to integrate a script into the PG site that calls nfbtrans and generates the .brf file. The .brf can be sent to the browser for downloading. Windows users would probably have to right-click on the Braille links and save the files manually. It would not be much harder for the multiple volumes, just use a split utility on the .brf file and create a temporary page with each piece of the file linked so they can also be downloaded and saved. Does anyone have any thoughts on this? I don't mind testing or finding others to test, but I admit that my knowledge of cgi scripting is almost zero. I can compile nfbtrans easily enough, but I don't know how to integrate it into the recode facility or the PG site in general. From tb at baechler.net Fri Apr 1 23:23:05 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Fri Apr 1 23:21:01 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] opal-online.org Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401232258.01f91640@baechler.net> Hello all. I recently found this site and am wondering if PG could either work with them or make use of their services. http://www.opal-online.org/ One thing they offer is a voice over ip chat facility, so perhaps someone can make a presentation about what PG is and what they have to offer. They also offer podcasts of some programs so people can get an idea of what they offer. They might be for the blind, but I don't think they are specifically designed just to appeal to the blind. If someone wants to contact them and schedule a presentation, it might get PG some more publicity. If this link is already known or people determine that it is of no use, then my apologies for mentioning it. From marcello at perathoner.de Sat Apr 2 12:32:36 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat Apr 2 12:41:27 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> Message-ID: <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> Tony Baechler wrote: > Really all that needs to be done is to integrate a script into the PG > site that calls nfbtrans and generates the .brf file. The .brf can be > sent to the browser for downloading. Windows users would probably have > to right-click on the Braille links and save the files manually. It > would not be much harder for the multiple volumes, just use a split > utility on the .brf file and create a temporary page with each piece of > the file linked so they can also be downloaded and saved. Piping the files thru nfbtrans should pose no problem at all. Question: won't every blind computer user have this program on his PC already? Won't she be better able to tailor the output to her needs if the program is run locally? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From tony at baechler.net Fri Apr 1 19:31:41 2005 From: tony at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Sun Apr 3 13:18:50 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] opal-online.org Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401192829.0264c210@baechler.net> Hello all. I recently found this site and am wondering if PG could either work with them or make use of their services. http://www.opal-online.org/ One thing they offer is a voice over ip chat facility, so perhaps someone can make a presentation about what PG is and what they have to offer. They also offer podcasts of some programs so people can get an idea of what they offer. They might be for the blind, but I don't think they are specifically designed just to appeal to the blind. If someone wants to contact them and schedule a presentation, it might get PG some more publicity. If this link is already known or people determine that it is of no use, then my apologies for mentioning it. From gbnewby at pglaf.org Sun Apr 3 14:11:22 2005 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Sun Apr 3 14:11:23 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] opal-online.org In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401192829.0264c210@baechler.net> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401192829.0264c210@baechler.net> Message-ID: <20050403211122.GA31719@pglaf.org> On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 07:31:41PM -0800, Tony Baechler wrote: > Hello all. I recently found this site and am wondering if PG could either > work with them or make use of their services. > > http://www.opal-online.org/ > > One thing they offer is a voice over ip chat facility, so perhaps someone > can make a presentation about what PG is and what they have to offer. They > also offer podcasts of some programs so people can get an idea of what they > offer. They might be for the blind, but I don't think they are > specifically designed just to appeal to the blind. If someone wants to > contact them and schedule a presentation, it might get PG some more > publicity. If this link is already known or people determine that it is of > no use, then my apologies for mentioning it. Hi, Tony. This sounds worth pursuing. However, I don't think we have a "someone" working here :-) Please, feel free - and empowered - to introduce PG to them, and pursue any viable cooperative efforts. We do have a few ongoing discussions with librarians (i.e., for cataloging & for distributing MARC-format records), but they're not far along enough for the opal-online folks to just jump aboard. This looks like a worthwhile relationship to look into. -- Greg From gbnewby at pglaf.org Sun Apr 3 14:25:15 2005 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Sun Apr 3 14:25:17 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 10:32:36PM +0200, Marcello Perathoner wrote: > Tony Baechler wrote: > > >Really all that needs to be done is to integrate a script into the PG > >site that calls nfbtrans and generates the .brf file. The .brf can be > >sent to the browser for downloading. Windows users would probably have > >to right-click on the Braille links and save the files manually. It > >would not be much harder for the multiple volumes, just use a split > >utility on the .brf file and create a temporary page with each piece of > >the file linked so they can also be downloaded and saved. > > Piping the files thru nfbtrans should pose no problem at all. > > Question: won't every blind computer user have this program on his PC > already? Won't she be better able to tailor the output to her needs if > the program is run locally? I think I corresponded with Tony about this a couple of years ago. I had no less than three programmers working on "conversion on the fly" which would generate formats including Braille, MP3, and others from .txt, .htm or .xml source files. Unfortunately, none of these ever became complete enough to offer on the Project Gutenberg download site. I am still very much able to provide a programming platform (a Linux server, with plenty of space and a copy of the PG collection) to people who might want to develop a CGI, PHP, Web services, or other platform for this type of functionality. Most of the tools already exist (i.e., for .txt to HTML, or Braille), but it's still a complex problem due to the complex nature of our collection. (That is, lots of different files & formats to choose from.) While Marcello is correct that many blind or visually impaired computer users already have nfbtrans (or something similar), I still think a general purpose conversion on-the-fly between formats is useful. And, if we offer this functionality, then an option to convert to Braille via nfbtrans is a very easy addition. There are just a few options for the output....like all of the other transformation programs... Long-timers on this list are getting tired of me talking about conversion on the fly, I know. Plus, this inevitably leads to a discussion of eBooks being "born as" XML, which I have also tried to facilitate. People who are newer (or newly-energized!) are welcome to look at viable methods for delivering some of this functionality. Beware, though: it's a larger and more complex problem than you might guess at first. Some folks will even remember that I offered a "bounty" reward for completely functional applications. This offer still stands. -- Greg From marcello at perathoner.de Sun Apr 3 14:46:39 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sun Apr 3 14:46:22 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <4250643F.3080409@perathoner.de> Greg Newby wrote: > I think I corresponded with Tony about this a couple of years > ago. I had no less than three programmers working on "conversion > on the fly" which would generate formats including Braille, > MP3, and others from .txt, .htm or .xml source files. > > Unfortunately, none of these ever became complete enough to > offer on the Project Gutenberg download site. This is a matter of a few hours ... its almost the same as the file recode service. I just need somebody to work out the nfbtrans command line options that work best for our etexts. Anybody got a braille embosser to test? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun Apr 3 17:36:22 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Sun Apr 3 17:36:40 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] re: viable methods and completely functional applications Message-ID: <1e0.3956f0e4.2f81e606@aol.com> greg said: > People who are newer (or newly-energized!) are welcome to > look at viable methods for delivering some of this functionality. > Beware, though: it's a larger and more complex problem > than you might guess at first. perhaps it would help if you laid out the complexity of the problem. > Some folks will even remember that I offered a "bounty" reward > for completely functional applications. This offer still stands. perhaps if you were clear about the capabilities you want to deliver, rather than the means of obtaining them, you might have better luck. -bowerbird From gbnewby at pglaf.org Sun Apr 3 20:20:54 2005 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Sun Apr 3 20:20:56 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More PG spam being spread around In-Reply-To: <000a01c5352c$9790a780$0c9495ce@gw98> References: <000a01c5352c$9790a780$0c9495ce@gw98> Message-ID: <20050404032054.GA6488@pglaf.org> On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 08:29:50AM -0500, N Wolcott wrote: > Resellers of PG books have taken on a new target, Lulu.com. Thanks for sending this info, Norm. I talked with Lulu a couple of years ago, and have been in recent communication with them. I think the titles you found are just early experiments (though not hidden from public view, as they should be). I've told Lulu that our items must be clearly indicated as public domain. If we can agree on things (which seems likely - they've been pretty open to discussion, so far), I see POD as a viable option for people who want our stuff. Maybe a "buy it now" link in our catalog hits...maybe some other way of allowing people who want print to get it. Compared to other publishers and book resellers I've worked interacted with over the years, Lulu is unusually receptive to our demands and tendencies. This is probably because they have such diversity in their author base. Specific advice or demands or qualifications on how Lulu might sell our stuff would be welcome. It looks like they're using some templates for our content, so we could add a lot of general boilerplate. Plus, as I said, a clear statement that the whole book (cover to cover, including the covers) is public domain, and suitable for unlimited redistribution. -- Greg > Lulu offers POD publishing at zero up front cost, thus luring those who find free advertising for their spam. The postings I have seen so far both imply PG and Lulu are supporting thier spam. They advertise the quality of their texts as being from PG. One ofthem admits there may be errors. > > There is probably nothing for PG to do except to get Lulu to take the PG off their customer's postings. If they want to host 15000 books on their computers for free that is their business. I quote my post to the LuLu foruml I have posted 2 books to Lulu at 15 cent royalty with added content to the PG text and I do not mention PG in the blurb. My "quality" book may soon be submerged in a flood of lulu spam. > > Posting follows: > ------------------------- > Lulu offers a good service for self publishers who provide "content added" material. This offers the publisher to continually upgrade the product until it is in final form then market it through Lulu's various mechanisms. > > However recently public domain texts lifted from project gutenberg have been appearing on Lulu. The accomopanying blurb states that www.lulu.com and Project gutenberg have joined forces to offer you these long out of print books. The implication is that somehow Lulu and PG are supporting this effort. PG is trademarked and there is no right to use the name in advertising; enforcing the trademark is another thin however for an all volunteer organization. > > Software exists to move PG texts to a number of formats, ipod, ebook, etc including Lulu. So there is a real possibillity that most of the 15000 pg books could end up being hosted on Lulu. No review copy would ever be required, so the posting for the converter would be free. Lulu could end up hosting the entire pg corpus for free in a kind of publishing spam. The books are listed with a royalty of $1 to $2. One is published with a $1.59 royalty, and claims that $1 will be contriputed to PG of every book sold. This leaves only 27 cents for the seller. > > Iin one case the publisher had re-copyrighted the book and in the other had listed it as Public Domain. Nothing wrong with this, but the copyright only applies to "new material" and certainly not the entire book. In one case a ISBN number was listed, so Lulu might have gotten some revenue from that if the ISBN is real. One of the books was listed as 5000 in sales, so I imagine that is how many Lulu has in its archive. It may soon get 14,999 more! > > Another feature with Lulu is you never know who is selling the book. Lulu distributes it, but the real seller is someone else, unknown. This may raise legal issues about ultimate responsibilitiy. > > People like myself who provide added content at no or minimal royalty will be unhappy to see our listing efforts buried in an avalanche of Lulu spam. At the very least Lulu should require permission before violating trademark laws. > > To see the books in this post, search for "Verne" on Lulu. > > The additional cost of hosting all these books could end up in forcing up front charges on Lulu providers or radically restructuring the way Lulu operates, neither of which is desirable in my humble opinion. > > I mention this as a discussion topic, as I feel it is an emerging problem. > > --------------------- > N Wolcott nwolcott2@post.harvard.edu > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From tb at baechler.net Sun Apr 3 23:24:30 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Sun Apr 3 23:24:50 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050403231750.047290a0@baechler.net> Hello. Surprisingly, many people do not have Braille translators. NFBTrans is the only free, open source translator I know of. Most cost many hundreds or thousands of dollars. In the case of PDAs, they can do translation but not reliably. There are many different types of Braille codes. There is Braille music, computer Braille, literary Braille and a special mathematics code. What we want is literary Braille since we are dealing with books. However, most PDAs and embossers would only output computer Braille which is harder to read and takes up more pages. If you look at a Braille embosser formatted file and compare it to the plain text, you will see that the Braille file is usually slightly smaller. That is because of contractions and other things to shorten words. For example, "sh" by itself in Braille is short for shall. "W" by itself is will. Unless such blind people are familiar with a command line or run Linux, most likely they wouldn't have access to a Braille translator and would probably appreciate Braille files being available directly from the PG download pages. I can query a few blind-specific mailing lists if you need more exact stats on how many people would be interested. It would certainly raise the reputation of PG if a press release was issued and the capability was implemented. At 10:32 PM 4/2/2005 +0200, you wrote: >Piping the files thru nfbtrans should pose no problem at all. > >Question: won't every blind computer user have this program on his PC >already? Won't she be better able to tailor the output to her needs if the >program is run locally? > > > >-- >Marcello Perathoner >webmaster@gutenberg.org > > >_______________________________________________ >gutvol-d mailing list >gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org >http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From tb at baechler.net Mon Apr 4 00:34:26 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon Apr 4 00:34:51 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> References: <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050404002144.01f89c80@baechler.net> Hi Greg. If you corresponded with me, I have no recollection of it. I would like to see this happen, but I don't remember any discussion with you. I am the first to admit that I am not a programmer. I appreciate your offer, and it would be useful for compiling and testing nfbtrans, but I have no idea how to set up a script that would produce Braille files on the fly. Also, you said that it would be very hard to create Braille output because of the many formats involved. I couldn't disagree with you more on this. All Braille needs is plain text. Currently, nfbtrans won't work with other formats except text and a few language source code files. Simply pipe the 7-bit plain text through nfbtrans and don't worry about the format. My understanding is that even a master xml format will still have a 7-bit equivalent. For non-text, just don't offer a Braille option. There is probably a way to translate mathematics, but I am not aware of it with nfbtrans and it would add complexity because the .pdf or .tex would first need to be converted to 7-bit ASCII. I think that if nothing else, PG should offer Braille output just because the motto is that the files should be able to be viewed by anyone with any equipment. In many ways, literary Braille is similar to very old formats in that it is only plain text and is all upper case. Yet that is still what many blind people use, including the US Library of Congress. I have a question. How is it that you come to the conclusion that most blind people already have Braille translation software? I have read stats that no more than 12% of the blind can read at all. Of those, I would guess that not many have the computer knowledge to use a command line program such as nfbtrans. It is still a DOS-based program unless you want to compile the sources under Linux. I am not sure if development is still being done. I am not currently aware of an official download site but I can check into this if this is something that we're willing to move ahead on. I would be happy to look at the Linux server Greg is offering, but again I am no programmer so unless it can be done in a one or two line script, I'm rather helpless. Also, nfbtrans has many, many command line switches. It is designed to format Braille books, so offers facilities for running headers, table of contents, etc. From gbnewby at pglaf.org Mon Apr 4 01:04:27 2005 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Mon Apr 4 01:04:28 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Enlightened self-interst In-Reply-To: <421F547A.1080007@zytrax.com> References: <421F547A.1080007@zytrax.com> Message-ID: <20050404080427.GA11773@pglaf.org> On Fri, Feb 25, 2005 at 11:38:18AM -0500, Ron Aitchison wrote: > Having discovered Jane Austen regrettably late in life I have > down-loaded a couple of novels and since I find the raw text format > unpleasant to read I have reformatted for my own use. > It seems to me since I have the ability to produce PDFs and OpenOffice > formats and even - heaven forfend - MS doc format should they be wanted, > it would be churlish not to make such an offer. > If you can point me at a standard for PDF, page width, font size etc, > etc., and let me know what formats you do want I would be happy to > undertake the small additional work for the two novels I have currently > downloaded. > I cannot supply DocBook at this time but hope to have that available > shortly. Hi, Ron. I don't think your offer ever got a response. Sorry about that! We would love to have HTML for our Austen titles that are missing it. Generally, we're a little cool on .doc, .pdf, .sxw, etc. due to fears for their longevity, and difficulty in applying fixes. In the future we hope to have much more XML, but are still working on getting the production stream moving for it. If you produce some new formats, please first consult the FAQ on production guidelines: http://gutenberg.org/faq Then, email pgww@pglaf.org and we'll arrange some good ways for you to get them to us (depending on how many you want to prepare, etc.). Thanks again for this offer! -- Greg > Regards > > -- > Ron Aitchison From tb at baechler.net Mon Apr 4 01:15:55 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Mon Apr 4 01:16:17 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <4250643F.3080409@perathoner.de> References: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050404011003.02c6c830@baechler.net> Hi. I can help you with this. Please give me a detailed list of what you want/need tested and I will ask people to look into it. I know of at least two mailing lists that would have blind subscribers interested in looking at this. Remember that we need to keep in mind that many people will use PDAs designed for the blind. There is no real difference except that they don't need formfeeds while embossers do and generally one big file works better than multiple volumes. For embossers, formfeeds are a help, but nfbtrans puts that in automatically once you set the page length. You generally want the page length at 25 lines and 40 columns. If you can put files somewhere for people to download and test or somehow find a way for people to experiment with various kinds of output, that would be best. I think there might be someone on one of the lists that uses nfbtrans and could help more with the switches. Unfortunately, even among the blind it's mostly a Windows world so few people know how to use the command line. At 11:46 PM 4/3/2005 +0200, you wrote: This is a matter of a few hours ... its almost the same as the file recode service. >I just need somebody to work out the nfbtrans command line options that >work best for our etexts. Anybody got a braille embosser to test? From shimmin at uiuc.edu Mon Apr 4 06:40:38 2005 From: shimmin at uiuc.edu (Robert Shimmin) Date: Mon Apr 4 06:40:41 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> References: <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <425143D6.4040909@uiuc.edu> I can offer little commentary about Braille, but as far as audio formats are concerned, I can say that the visually impaired persons I have known who listen to substantial amounts of text often listen to it at substantially faster-than-intended speeds, and some do some other transformations on the audio to help them better catch meaning at these high speeds. Such things seem to be idiosyncratic to the individual listener. A fairly 'raw' format, such as .wav, would I think be useful to such users, but lossy compression formats have been engineered around assumptions about listening conditions that simply aren't true for the practices of those who listen to recorded speech as a way of life, and may be of little practical value. -- RS From kouhia at nic.funet.fi Mon Apr 4 07:31:06 2005 From: kouhia at nic.funet.fi (Juhana Sadeharju) Date: Mon Apr 4 07:31:15 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Scanner vs. digital camera Message-ID: >From: Carlo Traverso > > Juhana> ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/sci/audio/devel/books/ > >Please, instead of putting there a big tar.gz file of 72MB, can you >put some individual images? Now there is, sorry. The images at the end of list are good for OCR testing. The images at the begin are test images: with/without flash, with normal/with "flower" focus. >Indeed, my attempts with a good digital camera (5Mpixels, manual >focus, uncompressed tiff output, a special mode for text, a >professional tripod, etc) have been poor. Canon EOS 300D, or perhaps newer EOS 350D would do the same. Nikon D70. Minolta Dynax 7D (european model name, US has different name). At least Canon and Nikon raw images have been converted with an open source software. See gphoto webpages for links and details. I'm not sure about the proper Linux interfacing. I should have it, because I would like to write a special software for digitization. (Canon has a proper SDK only for Windows.) Juhana -- http://music.columbia.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-graphics-dev for developers of open source graphics software From marcello at perathoner.de Mon Apr 4 09:13:01 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Mon Apr 4 12:39:25 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20050404011003.02c6c830@baechler.net> References: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> <5.2.0.9.0.20050404011003.02c6c830@baechler.net> Message-ID: <4251678D.5050705@perathoner.de> Tony Baechler wrote: > I think there might be > someone on one of the lists that uses nfbtrans and could help more with > the switches. Just ask some people to download a selection of PG files, run them thru nfbtrans and print a few test pages on the embosser or read them on the PDA. You should get at least a dozen or so different files from different producers done in different years. Formatting of PG texts has changed over the years. What we want is the set of commandline options that give the best results for most of the blind people out there. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From fielden3 at aol.com Mon Apr 4 13:22:03 2005 From: fielden3 at aol.com (Kent Fielden) Date: Mon Apr 4 13:22:35 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Scanner vs. digital camera In-Reply-To: <200503311452.j2VEqdn29068@posso.dm.unipi.it> References: <200503311452.j2VEqdn29068@posso.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <4251A1EB.8050704@aol.com> Carlo Traverso wrote on 3/31/2005, 6:52 AM: > Indeed, my attempts with a good digital camera (5Mpixels, manual > focus, uncompressed tiff output, a special mode for text, a > professional tripod, etc) have been poor. I am suprised to hear this. I use a Canon S230 3.2Mpixel pocket camera with results as good as my scanner for OCR for ABBYY FineReader 5.0. This is a relatively simple pocket camera. The one thing that took some real work is doing a good job of lighting the book. I now use 2 lights mounted on each size of the camera (currently 13 watt fluorescent task lights, but normal incandescent lights worked as well). I had no luck at all using the flash. I use automatic focus, no flash, close-up mode, with a long exposure time. I use a copy stand modified from a hand drill press to position the camera about 9" above the book. I take each page separately, a 2k x 1.5k JPEG for each 7" by 4.5" page, or almost 300 DPI. The OCR results for 600 DPI, taking a picture of 1/2 the page were no better than the full page results. Clearly, especially for our purposes, the quality of the original makes some difference. How do the pictures you took look to you? It has been my experience that if they looked like faithful reproductions, then they OCRed well. It may be that your expectations of results are higher than mine. If you are interested, I could send you a picture to see what I get. Kent Fielden From tb at baechler.net Tue Apr 5 00:31:28 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Tue Apr 5 00:31:47 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Braille files In-Reply-To: <425143D6.4040909@uiuc.edu> References: <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> <5.2.0.9.0.20050401230106.01f917d0@baechler.net> <424F0164.2000309@perathoner.de> <20050403212515.GD31719@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050405002544.04176330@baechler.net> Hi Robert. I agree with you and I am blind, so I'm glad you finally said it. I listen to text to speech at about 430 words per minute. That is slower than some people. I think it is great that PG has made some audio books available. However, to be blunt about it, I find them awful to listen to. They have low volume so are hard to hear and are very, very slow. I can't stand speech that slow! I know that the sighted public don't do well with computer speech, so I suppose it's necessary for them, but I would much rather have the speed set to at least 300 words per minute at the slowest. I wouldn't necessarily agree with you about raw wave files. I think mp3 is fine. One very big Internet radio station for the blind is ACB Radio. They are online at: http://www.acbradio.org/ They use mp3 exclusively, and at a rather low bitrate. I have no problem listening to it. In general, I don't like mp3. I collect old time radio and refuse to accept anything but raw wave files, but that is because it is of historical value and should be saved in the best audio condition possible. At 08:40 AM 4/4/2005 -0500, you wrote: >I can offer little commentary about Braille, but as far as audio formats >are concerned, I can say that the visually impaired persons I have known >who listen to substantial amounts of text often listen to it at >substantially faster-than-intended speeds, and some do some other >transformations on the audio to help them better catch meaning at these >high speeds. Such things seem to be idiosyncratic to the individual listener. > >A fairly 'raw' format, such as .wav, would I think be useful to such >users, but lossy compression formats have been engineered around >assumptions about listening conditions that simply aren't true for the >practices of those who listen to recorded speech as a way of life, and may >be of little practical value. From schultzk at uni-trier.de Tue Apr 5 00:37:44 2005 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J.Schultz) Date: Tue Apr 5 00:39:45 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Scanner vs. digital camera In-Reply-To: <4251A1EB.8050704@aol.com> References: <200503311452.j2VEqdn29068@posso.dm.unipi.it> <4251A1EB.8050704@aol.com> Message-ID: Hi, I have to see what my canon 20D will do in BW-mode. But far as resolution goes and OCR, you do not want to go any higher than 300 Dpi, because above 300 dpi the OCR starts to see the structure of the paper and makes mistakes. This is even more important with older books. Try just using 144 dpi this should give you the same results as 300 dpi. Keith. Am 04.04.2005 um 22:22 schrieb Kent Fielden: > Carlo Traverso wrote on 3/31/2005, 6:52 AM: >> Indeed, my attempts with a good digital camera (5Mpixels, manual >> focus, uncompressed tiff output, a special mode for text, a >> professional tripod, etc) have been poor. > > I am suprised to hear this. I use a Canon S230 3.2Mpixel pocket > camera with results as good as my scanner for OCR for ABBYY FineReader > 5.0. This is a relatively simple pocket camera. > The one thing that took some real work is doing a good job of > lighting the book. I now use 2 lights mounted on each size of the > camera (currently 13 watt fluorescent task lights, but normal > incandescent lights worked as well). I had no luck at all using the > flash. I use automatic focus, no flash, close-up mode, with a long > exposure time. I use a copy stand modified from a hand drill press to > position the camera about 9" above the book. I take each page > separately, a 2k x 1.5k JPEG for each 7" by 4.5" page, or almost 300 > DPI. The OCR results for 600 DPI, taking a picture of 1/2 the page > were > no better than the full page results. > Clearly, especially for our purposes, the quality of the original > makes some difference. > How do the pictures you took look to you? It has been my > experience that if they looked like faithful reproductions, then they > OCRed well. It may be that your expectations of results are higher > than > mine. If you are interested, I could send you a picture to see what I > get. > > Kent Fielden > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From joshua at hutchinson.net Tue Apr 5 05:20:05 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Tue Apr 5 05:19:57 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Scanner vs. digital camera Message-ID: <20050405122005.4FBE910989A@ws6-4.us4.outblaze.com> 144dpi is only going to work well with larger print books with very clean pages (read: modern fiction will usually work well at this DPI). You get into some of the older, smaller print stuff and 144 dpi is going to fail miserably and at times spectacularly. 300 dpi is the happy medium in most cases. Above that, stray marks on the paper can be misinterpreted at times by the OCR process. However, on some fairly small print books, 600dpi has been necessary. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith J . Schultz" > > Hi, > > I have to see what my canon 20D will do in BW-mode. > But far as resolution goes and OCR, you do not want to go any higher > than 300 Dpi, because above 300 dpi the OCR starts to see the > structure of the paper and makes mistakes. This is even more > important with older books. Try just using 144 dpi this should > give you the same results as 300 dpi. > > Keith. From geoff.horton at gmail.com Tue Apr 5 06:19:00 2005 From: geoff.horton at gmail.com (Geoff Horton) Date: Tue Apr 5 06:19:03 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Scanners vs. Cameras Message-ID: <94e5f59605040506195852fdf6@mail.gmail.com> I've posted a couple photographed books to DP, and while the results aren't perfect, they were legible. I used nothing fancy--a 4MP camera, hand-held (though I'm looking at ways to brace it, since shaky images are my biggest problem), a table lamp for light, manual exposure, auto-focus (set on close-up mode). I'm taking notes of what works and what doesn't, with an eye toward assembling a guide to photographing books for OCR (if such a thing doesn't already exist). I'll say up front that I've not been able to get flash photography to work. The page washes out completely. Geoff From nwolcott at dsdial.net Fri Apr 8 18:21:33 2005 From: nwolcott at dsdial.net (N Wolcott) Date: Sun Apr 10 08:19:06 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More PG spam being spread around References: <000a01c5352c$9790a780$0c9495ce@gw98> <20050404032054.GA6488@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <000d01c53de0$9cf68f20$8e9495ce@gw98> I've published 2 books of Jules Verne on LuLu. I think it is great for value added stuff; I added the French to one of the books, as far as I know it is the first dual language Verne text since the 1920's. The pictures I have inserted came out fairly well although a little improvement is needed, but they have not been reprinted since 1885. . 600 dpi does not make for the greatest illustrations. In any event this type of publshing is far superior to the Fredonia product, and if sold near cost as they are for $6-$8 are a much better muy than the Fredonia product at $20-$35 and others even higher. I think Lulu has found a nice niche market. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Greg Newby" To: "Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion" Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 11:20 PM Subject: Re: [gutvol-d] More PG spam being spread around > On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 08:29:50AM -0500, N Wolcott wrote: > > Resellers of PG books have taken on a new target, Lulu.com. > > Thanks for sending this info, Norm. I talked with Lulu > a couple of years ago, and have been in recent communication > with them. I think the titles you found are just early > experiments (though not hidden from public view, as they > should be). > > I've told Lulu that our items must be clearly indicated > as public domain. If we can agree on things (which seems > likely - they've been pretty open to discussion, so far), > I see POD as a viable option for people who want our stuff. > Maybe a "buy it now" link in our catalog hits...maybe some > other way of allowing people who want print to get it. > > Compared to other publishers and book resellers I've worked > interacted with over the years, Lulu is unusually receptive > to our demands and tendencies. This is probably because > they have such diversity in their author base. > > Specific advice or demands or qualifications on how Lulu > might sell our stuff would be welcome. It looks like they're > using some templates for our content, so we could add a lot > of general boilerplate. Plus, as I said, a clear statement > that the whole book (cover to cover, including the covers) > is public domain, and suitable for unlimited redistribution. > -- Greg > > > Lulu offers POD publishing at zero up front cost, thus luring those who find free advertising for their spam. The postings I have seen so far both imply PG and Lulu are supporting thier spam. They advertise the quality of their texts as being from PG. One ofthem admits there may be errors. > > > > There is probably nothing for PG to do except to get Lulu to take the PG off their customer's postings. If they want to host 15000 books on their computers for free that is their business. I quote my post to the LuLu foruml I have posted 2 books to Lulu at 15 cent royalty with added content to the PG text and I do not mention PG in the blurb. My "quality" book may soon be submerged in a flood of lulu spam. > > > > Posting follows: > > ------------------------- > > Lulu offers a good service for self publishers who provide "content added" material. This offers the publisher to continually upgrade the product until it is in final form then market it through Lulu's various mechanisms. > > > > However recently public domain texts lifted from project gutenberg have been appearing on Lulu. The accomopanying blurb states that www.lulu.com and Project gutenberg have joined forces to offer you these long out of print books. The implication is that somehow Lulu and PG are supporting this effort. PG is trademarked and there is no right to use the name in advertising; enforcing the trademark is another thin however for an all volunteer organization. > > > > Software exists to move PG texts to a number of formats, ipod, ebook, etc including Lulu. So there is a real possibillity that most of the 15000 pg books could end up being hosted on Lulu. No review copy would ever be required, so the posting for the converter would be free. Lulu could end up hosting the entire pg corpus for free in a kind of publishing spam. The books are listed with a royalty of $1 to $2. One is published with a $1.59 royalty, and claims that $1 will be contriputed to PG of every book sold. This leaves only 27 cents for the seller. > > > > Iin one case the publisher had re-copyrighted the book and in the other had listed it as Public Domain. Nothing wrong with this, but the copyright only applies to "new material" and certainly not the entire book. In one case a ISBN number was listed, so Lulu might have gotten some revenue from that if the ISBN is real. One of the books was listed as 5000 in sales, so I imagine that is how many Lulu has in its archive. It may soon get 14,999 more! > > > > Another feature with Lulu is you never know who is selling the book. Lulu distributes it, but the real seller is someone else, unknown. This may raise legal issues about ultimate responsibilitiy. > > > > People like myself who provide added content at no or minimal royalty will be unhappy to see our listing efforts buried in an avalanche of Lulu spam. At the very least Lulu should require permission before violating trademark laws. > > > > To see the books in this post, search for "Verne" on Lulu. > > > > The additional cost of hosting all these books could end up in forcing up front charges on Lulu providers or radically restructuring the way Lulu operates, neither of which is desirable in my humble opinion. > > > > I mention this as a discussion topic, as I feel it is an emerging problem. > > > > --------------------- > > N Wolcott nwolcott2@post.harvard.edu > > > _______________________________________________ > > gutvol-d mailing list > > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From marcello at perathoner.de Mon Apr 11 16:07:31 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Mon Apr 11 16:07:46 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Removal of /public/html/gutenberg Message-ID: <425B0333.7080509@perathoner.de> The old directory /public/html/gutenberg on ibiblio will be removed on April 14. If you did edit files in the old directory after Feb 23 you may have to copy them to the new directory /public/vhost/g/gutenberg/html . -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri Apr 15 00:09:45 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Fri Apr 15 00:10:21 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? Message-ID: <1c7.269b00b5.2f90c2b9@aol.com> last week, amazon bought booksurge, a p.o.d. company. yesterday, amazon bought mobipocket, a viewer-app. (franklin, who owned a lot of mobipocket stock, is going to make a couple million bucks from the deal.) do you people here realize what all this means? no, of course you don't. -bowerbird From brandon at corruptedtruth.com Fri Apr 15 00:38:19 2005 From: brandon at corruptedtruth.com (Brandon Galbraith) Date: Fri Apr 15 00:38:55 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? In-Reply-To: <1c7.269b00b5.2f90c2b9@aol.com> References: <1c7.269b00b5.2f90c2b9@aol.com> Message-ID: <425F6F6B.8010405@corruptedtruth.com> Bowerbird, I would assume this would mean that they're pushing forward into ebooks. Ebooks that are under copyright. Looks like a good thing though. The more people who have the ability to read ebooks which are under copyright, the more people who can read all ebooks (read: PG ebooks). Project Gutenberg continues pushing forward, amassing more material as said material falls into the public domain. Future books won't need as much effort from us then, since all we'll need to do then is provide server space (they'll already be in electronic format). In the end, PG goes from being an organization converting physical books to electronics ones into an organization that ensures the duration of Copyright remains a sane amount (not that it's sane currently, but you get the picture). How is this a bad thing? -brandon Bowerbird@aol.com wrote: >last week, amazon bought booksurge, a p.o.d. company. > >yesterday, amazon bought mobipocket, a viewer-app. >(franklin, who owned a lot of mobipocket stock, is >going to make a couple million bucks from the deal.) > >do you people here realize what all this means? > >no, of course you don't. > >-bowerbird >_______________________________________________ >gutvol-d mailing list >gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org >http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > > > > From davedoty at hotmail.com Fri Apr 15 06:16:19 2005 From: davedoty at hotmail.com (Dave Doty) Date: Fri Apr 15 06:16:22 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? In-Reply-To: <1c7.269b00b5.2f90c2b9@aol.com> Message-ID: >From: Bowerbird@aol.com >do you people here realize what all this means? > >no, of course you don't. Why are you still here, if you hate us all so much and hold us in such contempt? I've lost count of the times you've quit the list forever to go do it right somewhere else. Whatever happened to that? Dave Doty From cannona at fireantproductions.com Fri Apr 15 10:38:45 2005 From: cannona at fireantproductions.com (Aaron Cannon) Date: Fri Apr 15 10:40:02 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? In-Reply-To: <1c7.269b00b5.2f90c2b9@aol.com> References: <1c7.269b00b5.2f90c2b9@aol.com> Message-ID: <6.1.2.0.0.20050415121703.01d276d8@mail.fireantproductions.com> At 02:09 AM 4/15/2005, you wrote: >do you people here realize what all this means? > >no, of course you don't. No! Of course we don't! But I'm sure we can look forward to a long string of randomly punctuated messages where you tell us how completely stupid we are, followed by several messages which say something along the lines of, "I've had enough of this list. I'm going to unsubscribe soon." Proceeding this will come one or more ads for your blog, followed by some more "no really, I'm leaving this time, really!" messages. Then, finally, if we're extremely lucky, we'll get about 60 days of peace until you come back and start the whole thing over again. Those of you who are new to this list might think I'm exaggerating. Just stick around for a few weeks, you'll see that I'm not. Aaron Cannon -- E-mail: cannona@fireantproductions.com Skype: cannona MSN Messenger: cannona@hotmail.com (Do not send E-mail to the hotmail address.) From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri Apr 15 11:35:28 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Fri Apr 15 11:35:53 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? Message-ID: <1f5.7c89dab.2f916370@aol.com> aaron said: > No! Of course we don't! But I'm sure we can look forward to > a long string of randomly punctuated messages where you > tell us how completely stupid we are, followed by > several messages which say something along the lines of, > "I've had enough of this list. I'm going to unsubscribe soon." > Proceeding this will come one or more ads for your blog, > followed by some more "no really, I'm leaving this time, really!" > messages. Then, finally, if we're extremely lucky, we'll get about > 60 days of peace until you come back and start the whole thing over > again. randomly punctuated messages? -bowerbird From joshua at hutchinson.net Fri Apr 15 12:01:02 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Fri Apr 15 12:00:36 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? Message-ID: <20050415190102.BBA502F9FC@ws6-3.us4.outblaze.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: Bowerbird@aol.com > > aaron said: > > No! Of course we don't! But I'm sure we can look forward to a long > > string of randomly punctuated messages where you tell us how completely > > stupid we are, followed by several messages which say something along the > > lines of, > > "I've had enough of this list. I'm going to unsubscribe soon." > > Proceeding this will come one or more ads for your blog, followed by some > > more "no really, I'm leaving this time, really!" messages. Then, finally, > > if we're extremely lucky, we'll get about 60 days of peace until you come > > back and start the whole thing over again. > > randomly punctuated messages? > I'm sure that in your madness you see a method to your punctuation.... But to the sane, it looks pretty random. That, and it is obvious that your shift key was broken long, long ago. Josh From geoff.horton at gmail.com Fri Apr 15 12:02:41 2005 From: geoff.horton at gmail.com (Geoff Horton) Date: Fri Apr 15 12:02:49 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? In-Reply-To: <20050415190102.BBA502F9FC@ws6-3.us4.outblaze.com> References: <20050415190102.BBA502F9FC@ws6-3.us4.outblaze.com> Message-ID: <94e5f59605041512024943e243@mail.gmail.com> Can you all conduct your flame war in someone else's inbox, please? Regardless of how irritating some of us find others of us, it's not germane to getting material on PG, and that's what I'm here for. From joshua at hutchinson.net Fri Apr 15 12:08:02 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Fri Apr 15 12:07:31 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? Message-ID: <20050415190802.F39149E8CC@ws6-2.us4.outblaze.com> Boy, you must be new around here! Three messages would barely qualify as a border skirmish in the epic flame wars bowerbird has started. That being said, I do apologize and promise not to rise to the bait again this cycle. Josh ----- Original Message ----- From: "Geoff Horton" > > Can you all conduct your flame war in someone else's inbox, please? > Regardless of how irritating some of us find others of us, it's not > germane to getting material on PG, and that's what I'm here for. > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri Apr 15 13:25:19 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Fri Apr 15 13:25:41 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? Message-ID: <7a.7170d03f.2f917d2f@aol.com> brandon said: > How is this a bad thing? um, are you so naive as to "what this means" that you think i believe it to be "a bad thing"? that's kind of sad, in a humorous type of way... :+) *** dave said: > Why well, i fully understand your impulse to strike out at me. i've questioned your competence and intelligence, again, and that's never a nice thing to hear. the reason i do it anyway is because _i_care_ about electronic-books, and those of us who care about e-books and who _do_ realize what's up need to tell you to take your head out of your ass. but you are right in that i don't think enough of you to do any more than that, not any longer, does that surprise you? will this turn into another long flamewar? not a chance. with progress moving so fast, i can't waste my time here. just thought i'd drop a note here about recent developments. but, just to be clear, because you seem to be confused, i will never leave this listserve _entirely_, but instead will return here on occasion to give y'all wake-up calls... forewarned is forearmed; acquaint yourself with your delete key if you really feel a strong need to protect your undisturbed sleep. heck, even better, apply some backchannel pressure to greg newby to "moderate" me -- again -- and absolve me of this onerous duty... > Whatever happened to that? good question, dave, thanks for asking it... :+) you can join the beta-test for my viewer. but you knew that. i don't feel the need to show you all my cards until you guys have thrown _considerably_ more chips into the pot first; when i leave this table, i will take your whole stake with me. specifically, you'll need to: 1. put the time and energy into developing your markup format. 2. do the work of developing procedures to apply that markup. 3. pay the price in volunteers by implementing the procedures. 4. put the time and energy into developing conversion routines. 5. mark up the 20,000+ e-text "backlog" of the current library. once you have done all _that_, i'll be happy to show you exactly how you could've gotten the same benefits _without_ markup... but not _until_ then... :+) and so far, you haven't even gotten past step 1 yet... so _y'all_ don't have any time to waste in a flamewar either. thus i suggest we just let this thread die, and rest in peace... finally, i dunno what _you_ might be thinking, dave, but i'm thinking that my strategy of sitting back and waiting for the marketplace to peg a _big_ number on the value of a current "best-of-breed" viewer-program has just proven itself with a _very_ worthy dividend... -bowerbird From Gutenberg9443 at aol.com Fri Apr 15 14:00:31 2005 From: Gutenberg9443 at aol.com (Gutenberg9443@aol.com) Date: Fri Apr 15 14:00:46 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? Message-ID: In a message dated 4/15/2005 1:10:47 AM Mountain Standard Time, Bowerbird@aol.com writes: no, of course you don't. Yes. It means you almost certainly have Asperger's Disorder. Get in touch with a psychiatrist specializing in forms of autism and arrange to be evaluated for it. Unfortunately there's no cure for it, which is why I seem to wind up in so many flame wars that I never MEANT to get into, but once you know you have it you can occasionally remember to ask yourself, "Do I really want to say this, or does Asperger's want to say this?" Of course you MIGHT have paranoia with or without schizophrenia, or schizophrenia with or without paranoia, or you MIGHT have bipolar depression, but it's really hard to believe that you could succeed in being this obnoxious without SOME kind of mental illness. It definitely looks to me like autism or a related personality disorder, though. By the way, I OWN an e-publishing house. I distribute on FictionWise.com and on eBookWise.com, and I DON'T republish anything from Gutenberg. I feel very strongly that selling something that is easily available free is counterproductive and somewhat dishonest. I did post one thing on Gutenberg several years ago, with a note that it was copyright and could be used only for nonprofit purposes. That one I have now posted for sale, but I already owned the copyright. Ebooks are like videos: you can buy them, or rent them, or check them out from a library for free. You're seeing a war where there isn't one. Television didn't kill radio. Videos and, now, DVDs didn't kill television. E-book stores aren't going to kill Gutenberg. Your thinking is much too narrow; that's another reason I'm suspecting autism of some sort. That is all I have to say on this topic. I just came on to check emails. I have pneumonia and I am going back to bed now. Now go away until after you've seen a good psychiatrist. As it might take several months for you to get in, and then another six months before the psychiatrist is able to figure out what combination of meds will help you the most (I changed meds every two weeks for eight months), everybody else can have a nice long rest. Anne Do you like to breathe? Then save the trees! Begin a personal relationship with an ebook TODAY! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20050415/abe085a9/attachment.html From bowerbird at aol.com Fri Apr 15 16:40:14 2005 From: bowerbird at aol.com (bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Fri Apr 15 16:40:40 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] do you realize what this means? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <8C7102B9B68B0D0-CF8-F92B@mblk-r02.sysops.aol.com> anne said: > Asperger's Disorder anne, i've got to hand it to you! :+) your post is humorous in a humorous type of way! most entertaining thing i've read all week, and this has been an exquisitely entertaining week for me! let's hope everyone else is smart enough to realize that this is the _perfect_ way to end this thread! meanwhile, i hope you shake that pneumonia soon! -bowerbird From benbradley at frontiernet.net Sat Apr 16 20:33:13 2005 From: benbradley at frontiernet.net (Ben Bradley) Date: Sat Apr 16 20:33:36 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks Message-ID: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> It looks like a lively, lightly-moderated list here. As a long-term participant on Usenet as well as many email lists, this is nothing new to me and I feel perfectly welcome. :) My first question involves the book "On The Sensations of Tone" by Herman Helmholtz. I recently saw mention of it online and decided that since its copyright has long expired I might find it on the GP site. I don't see it, nor did I find the text elsewhere online, but further investigation (reading much of the PG FAQ) led me to this page with list of books in progress: http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html The relevant portion of that webpage is: Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von (31aug1821-8sep1894) The Mystery of Creation - Copyright cleared 23 Nov 1997 On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music - Copyright cleared 17 Sep 2003 How do I find the "real" status of this book, whose copyright was cleared seven months ago but is not yet online? If it's not actively being converted to text by someone else, I'd like to do it (as soon as I get my own physical copy). Apparently, I should email Mr. Price at the address indicated on that webpage to see what he might know, but I'd also like to know if I'm missing something in relation to this. Second question: Why are there two copies of Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" on the GP site? And a third: I just came across yet another copyrighted book online. All such books I've seen on the web are apparently put online legally by the author or with the author's permission. Is there a list of these books, perhaps as a part of an index of "all books online"? And yes, I know this is fairly tangential to the purpose of the GP, as most such authors generally choose to retain full copyright and have their books available ONLY on their sites, so they can have some control, such as using the site to advertise/selling physical copies of the book. From jtinsley at pobox.com Sat Apr 16 21:03:38 2005 From: jtinsley at pobox.com (Jim Tinsley) Date: Sat Apr 16 21:03:56 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> Message-ID: <20050417040338.GA19736@panix.com> On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 11:33:13PM -0400, Ben Bradley wrote: > It looks like a lively, lightly-moderated list here. As a long-term >participant on Usenet as well as many email lists, this is nothing new >to me and I feel perfectly welcome. :) > As a denizen of Usenet, you may feel even more at home in a while. :-) > My first question involves the book "On The Sensations of Tone" by >Herman Helmholtz. I recently saw mention of it online and decided that >since its copyright has long expired I might find it on the GP site. I >don't see it, nor did I find the text elsewhere online, but further >investigation (reading much of the PG FAQ) led me to this page with list >of books in progress: > >http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html > > The relevant portion of that webpage is: > >Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von (31aug1821-8sep1894) >The Mystery of Creation - Copyright cleared 23 Nov 1997 >On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of >Music - Copyright cleared 17 Sep 2003 > > How do I find the "real" status of this book, whose copyright was >cleared seven months ago but is not yet online? If it's not actively >being converted to text by someone else, I'd like to do it (as soon as I >get my own physical copy). Apparently, I should email Mr. Price at the >address indicated on that webpage to see what he might know, but I'd >also like to know if I'm missing something in relation to this. Nope. Not missing anything. Somebody's got it. They may or may not be doing anything with it. It's not queued up at DP. But seven months ain't nuthin' much. > > Second question: Why are there two copies of Thomas Paine's "Common >Sense" on the GP site? Same reason there are three Grimms, three Odysseys, three Iliads in English and one in French, seven or eight of Hamlet, two Valley of Fears, two Literary Tastes, and yadda-yadda. FAQ V.32 and R.36. Basically, if it comes from a different paper edition, we post it separately, and give it a new number. And BTW, it's always "PG", not "GP". > And a third: I just came across yet another copyrighted book online. >All such books I've seen on the web are apparently put online legally by >the author or with the author's permission. Is there a list of these >books, perhaps as a part of an index of "all books online"? Not that I'm aware of. You can quickly get the list of PG-posted copyrighted works (not necessarily titles) from GUTINDEX.ALL, but people put all kinds of stuff online and call it copyrighted but available for private use, and they don't necessarily register it with us or anyone else. jim From cweyant at twcny.rr.com Sun Apr 17 04:56:43 2005 From: cweyant at twcny.rr.com (Curtis A. Weyant) Date: Sun Apr 17 04:59:49 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> Message-ID: <42624EFB.3040900@twcny.rr.com> Ben Bradley wrote: > > And a third: I just came across yet another copyrighted book online. > All such books I've seen on the web are apparently put online legally by > the author or with the author's permission. Is there a list of these > books, perhaps as a part of an index of "all books online"? The Online Books Page (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/) lists both public domain and copyrighted books online. I'm sure it doesn't list ALL books, but it will help you find a good many. Curtis. From jmk at his.com Sun Apr 17 05:16:30 2005 From: jmk at his.com (Janet Kegg) Date: Sun Apr 17 05:16:41 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> Message-ID: <68k4615p9ouq8ls4km827mptereulu95ts@4ax.com> On Sat, 16 Apr 2005 23:33:13 -0400, you wrote: >http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html > > The relevant portion of that webpage is: > >Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von (31aug1821-8sep1894) >The Mystery of Creation - Copyright cleared 23 Nov 1997 >On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of >Music - Copyright cleared 17 Sep 2003 > > How do I find the "real" status of this book, whose copyright was >cleared seven months ago but is not yet online? If it's not actively >being converted to text by someone else, I'd like to do it (as soon as I >get my own physical copy). Apparently, I should email Mr. Price at the >address indicated on that webpage to see what he might know, but I'd >also like to know if I'm missing something in relation to this. Er, "cleared 17 Sep 2003" makes the clearance 19 months old, not 7. Would the book likely contain musical notation? If so, that challenge might account for it's sitting in someone's to-do pile for so long. I'd advise you to go ahead and do it yourself since the clearance is so stale. If you haven't already, you might want to wander over to Distributed Proofreaders (www.pgdp.net)--an inquiry about the Helmholtz book on DP's Content Providers forum might prove useful. -- Janet From joshua at hutchinson.net Sun Apr 17 10:57:19 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Sun Apr 17 10:56:17 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <68k4615p9ouq8ls4km827mptereulu95ts@4ax.com> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <68k4615p9ouq8ls4km827mptereulu95ts@4ax.com> Message-ID: <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> Janet Kegg wrote: >Er, "cleared 17 Sep 2003" makes the clearance 19 months old, not 7. >Would the book likely contain musical notation? If so, that challenge >might account for it's sitting in someone's to-do pile for so long. > >I'd advise you to go ahead and do it yourself since the clearance is >so stale. If you haven't already, you might want to wander over to >Distributed Proofreaders (www.pgdp.net)--an inquiry about the >Helmholtz book on DP's Content Providers forum might prove useful. > >-- Janet > > Also, an e-mail to David will usually result in him double-checking the status with the original person (he has access to that information). They may have disappeared from the face of the earth or just cleared it and then never got around to it... If it is an especially hard work, they may still be working on it. David can help you find out the current situation. Josh From Gutenberg9443 at aol.com Sun Apr 17 11:01:58 2005 From: Gutenberg9443 at aol.com (Gutenberg9443@aol.com) Date: Sun Apr 17 11:02:09 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks Message-ID: In a message dated 4/17/2005 5:59:55 AM Mountain Standard Time, cweyant@twcny.rr.com writes: Ben Bradley wrote: > > And a third: I just came across yet another copyrighted book online. > All such books I've seen on the web are apparently put online legally by > the author or with the author's permission. Unfortunately, that is not correct. An incredible number of pirated books, reasonably old or brand new, show up online. PG tries its best to avoid this practice, and I THINK all the in-copyright books on PG are legal, but other than that, the only way to be sure you're getting legal books is to go to the author's or copyright owner's Website or to go to a commercial ebook distributor such as FictionWise. BTW, a copyrighted book on which I own the copyright showed up on a commercial site three days after it was legally posted on PG. Anne Do you like to breathe? Then save the trees! Begin a personal relationship with an ebook TODAY! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20050417/0a70caeb/attachment.html From collin at xs4all.nl Sun Apr 17 12:33:41 2005 From: collin at xs4all.nl (Branko Collin) Date: Sun Apr 17 12:21:55 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Reply comments on US issues raised by "orphan works" Message-ID: <4262D635.14434.13F7655@localhost> >From what I understand, no PG volunteer (not counting John Mark Ockerbloom) has posted a comment to the US Copyright Office's RFC about "orphan works". So now US copyright policy will be guided by comments such as Kristie Hubler's: "If people have access to my work without paying for it, and using it just to make a buck, it would be as if I were being raped, or having a child I bore ripped out of my arms, never to be seen again." It may very well be possible that PG volunteers have no opinion about orphan works. In that case, consider this e-mail message not sent. If you are concerned about orphan works, now is your last chance to be heard. You can send reply comments to the US Copyright Office until May 5, 2005. The rules are explained here: Initially some 700 comments were submitted. It's hard to read through all of them, so I suggest Googling for abstracts, looking for the usual suspects et cetera. There's an unused Wiki running at . I suggest you use that for sharing notes. Do not wait for an official PG position statement. Official statements are hard to draft, because they require consensus. Also, official statements tend to sound impersonal, exactly because they represent a consensus position. There is nothing wrong with sounding like you actually care (although I would leave the Hubler-style hysterics at home). -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl From donovan at abs.net Sun Apr 17 12:32:34 2005 From: donovan at abs.net (D Garcia) Date: Sun Apr 17 12:31:17 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <68k4615p9ouq8ls4km827mptereulu95ts@4ax.com> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <68k4615p9ouq8ls4km827mptereulu95ts@4ax.com> Message-ID: <200504171532.34484.donovan@abs.net> On Sunday 17 April 2005 08:16 am, Janet Kegg wrote: > Er, "cleared 17 Sep 2003" makes the clearance 19 months old, not 7. > Would the book likely contain musical notation? If so, that challenge > might account for it's sitting in someone's to-do pile for so long. > > I'd advise you to go ahead and do it yourself since the clearance is > so stale. If you haven't already, you might want to wander over to > Distributed Proofreaders (www.pgdp.net)--an inquiry about the > Helmholtz book on DP's Content Providers forum might prove useful. I wouldn't call that clearance "stale" exactly .. Juliet Sutherland for example has a huge number of clearances from 2003-ish that will eventually be scanned and processed. The 1997 one though I would definitely proceed on. Your point about those being more difficult or delayed due to musical content is certainly valid, though. Cheers! From prosfilaes at gmail.com Sun Apr 17 21:32:05 2005 From: prosfilaes at gmail.com (David Starner) Date: Sun Apr 17 21:32:23 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on GP and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <68k4615p9ouq8ls4km827mptereulu95ts@4ax.com> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> Message-ID: <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> On 4/17/05, Joshua Hutchinson wrote: > Also, an e-mail to David will usually result in him double-checking the > status with the original person (he has access to that information). > They may have disappeared from the face of the earth or just cleared it > and then never got around to it... If it is an especially hard work, > they may still be working on it. David can help you find out the > current situation. It's a good idea in any case. There are not particularly hard books that have got stuck in post-proofing at DP, or elsewhere, that there's no reason to redo the work that's already been done on them. From donovan at abs.net Mon Apr 18 15:21:51 2005 From: donovan at abs.net (D Garcia) Date: Mon Apr 18 15:20:38 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> On Monday 18 April 2005 12:32 am, David Starner wrote: > It's a good idea in any case. There are not particularly hard books > that have got stuck in post-proofing at DP, or elsewhere, that there's > no reason to redo the work that's already been done on them. Except that many of those "stuck" books are waiting on missing pages/images, etc. You may find that instead of redoing a book all on your own, you can be the person that provides that one last missing piece to allow the existing but incomplete work to be finished. From hart at pglaf.org Tue Apr 19 09:40:46 2005 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Tue Apr 19 09:40:48 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> Message-ID: On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, D Garcia wrote: > On Monday 18 April 2005 12:32 am, David Starner wrote: >> It's a good idea in any case. There are not particularly hard books >> that have got stuck in post-proofing at DP, or elsewhere, that there's >> no reason to redo the work that's already been done on them. > > Except that many of those "stuck" books are waiting on missing pages/images, > etc. Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. Michael From sly at victoria.tc.ca Tue Apr 19 10:43:21 2005 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Tue Apr 19 10:43:28 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, Michael Hart wrote: > On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, D Garcia wrote: > > > On Monday 18 April 2005 12:32 am, David Starner wrote: > >> It's a good idea in any case. There are not particularly hard books > >> that have got stuck in post-proofing at DP, or elsewhere, that there's > >> no reason to redo the work that's already been done on them. > > > > Except that many of those "stuck" books are waiting on missing pages/images, > > etc. > > Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? > > Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. > > Or, another possibility, given that many people don't look to closely, would be that someone has a copy of the book, sees that it is already in PG, and then moves on to something else... Andrew From fvandrog at scripps.edu Tue Apr 19 10:50:04 2005 From: fvandrog at scripps.edu (Frank van Drogen) Date: Tue Apr 19 10:50:11 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> Message-ID: <6.2.0.8.0.20050419104217.01edb008@mail.scripps.edu> >>Except that many of those "stuck" books are waiting on missing pages/images, >>etc. > >Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? > >Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. I think it would be a good idea to ask the audience of PG to help looking for missing pages. This would certainly increase the chance of recovering them, and us to post complete books. However, I am strongly opposed to posting incomplete books. If the public can not be sure whether the books they download are complete or not, they will move on to a place where quality can be guaranteed. I think in these kind of issues quality should prevail above quantity. Kind regards, Frank From bruce at zuhause.org Tue Apr 19 13:03:20 2005 From: bruce at zuhause.org (Bruce Albrecht) Date: Tue Apr 19 13:03:31 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> Message-ID: <16997.25608.758628.394332@celery.zuhause.org> Michael Hart writes: > > On Mon, 18 Apr 2005, D Garcia wrote: > > > On Monday 18 April 2005 12:32 am, David Starner wrote: > >> It's a good idea in any case. There are not particularly hard books > >> that have got stuck in post-proofing at DP, or elsewhere, that there's > >> no reason to redo the work that's already been done on them. > > > > Except that many of those "stuck" books are waiting on missing pages/images, > > etc. > > Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? > > Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. It's the Distributed Proofreader's policy not to post to PG when there are missing pages. They have a forum listing projects that are missing pages so that DP volunteers can see out the missing pages. Personally, I would not buy books from a publisher with a reputation for knowingly publishing books with pages missing, nor would I want to download from PG if it had a reputation for knowingly publishing etexts that are missing pages. From phil at hitchcock99.freeserve.co.uk Tue Apr 19 13:58:58 2005 From: phil at hitchcock99.freeserve.co.uk (Phil Hitchcock) Date: Tue Apr 19 14:01:00 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net><4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net><6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com><200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6.2.0.8.0.20050419104217.01edb008@mail.scripps.edu> Message-ID: <003701c54522$b6cfbf40$f3c2883e@freeserve.co.uk> > I think it would be a good idea to ask the audience of PG to help looking > for missing pages. This would certainly increase the chance of recovering > them, and us to post complete books. > > However, I am strongly opposed to posting incomplete books. If the public > can not be sure whether the books they download are complete or not, they > will move on to a place where quality can be guaranteed. I think in these > kind of issues quality should prevail above quantity. PG already issues books with missing pages, e.g. #11866. However it is stated at the beginning that certain specified pages are missing, so the reader knows what to expect. If the currently best available copy of a text, which may be several hundred years old, is missing a few pages, well that is unfortunate; but surely it is better to give people the chance to read the 99% that is available. Our great museums do not say, this pot has a few chips in it so we will not exhibit it. However, possibly there could be a list of PG works that require pages, so that there would be a higher chance of someone eventually contributing the missing pages. Philip. From grythumn at gmail.com Tue Apr 19 14:12:43 2005 From: grythumn at gmail.com (Robert Cicconetti) Date: Tue Apr 19 14:15:35 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <003701c54522$b6cfbf40$f3c2883e@freeserve.co.uk> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6.2.0.8.0.20050419104217.01edb008@mail.scripps.edu> <003701c54522$b6cfbf40$f3c2883e@freeserve.co.uk> Message-ID: <15cfa2a5050419141222f2a8ad@mail.gmail.com> On 4/19/05, Phil Hitchcock wrote: > PG already issues books with missing pages, e.g. #11866. However it is > stated at the beginning that certain specified pages are missing, so the > reader knows what to expect. If the currently best available copy of a text, > which may be several hundred years old, is missing a few pages, well that is > unfortunate; but surely it is better to give people the chance to read the > 99% that is available. Our great museums do not say, this pot has a few > chips in it so we will not exhibit it. The main reason to avoid incomplete projects at DP is a lack of resources, both of skilled people and technical resources. In fact they go together; the Post Processing backlog at DP is causing a chronic shortage of disk space. If a project has to sit on the server for 6 additional months waiting for 2 pages, that is not good. Also, by posting an incomplete work, you add to already heavy PP work load. I've got an incomplete project sitting around waiting on two pages.. but someone has already volunteered to take pictures of the missing pages from the special collection at a nearby university. The existing system is fairly slow, but it does work in many cases. Now if something is extremely rare, and all known copies have the same defect, by all means post it IMO. But otherwise I suggest holding out for a complete work. R C From prosfilaes at gmail.com Tue Apr 19 14:42:56 2005 From: prosfilaes at gmail.com (David Starner) Date: Tue Apr 19 14:43:07 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> Message-ID: <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> On 4/19/05, Michael Hart wrote: > Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? > > Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. If you look at book 13921, you'll notice that it's missing pages 98 and 99 ("[Seiten 98 und 99 fehlen!]", embedded in the middle of the text). How many readers have jumped forward to offer the missing pages? If it had been kept at DP, we could have found the pages and added them. But once it's on the shelf, nobody worries about it anymore. I've found as a general rule, once a book is posted, the odds of anything getting done on it drop vastly. It gets moved to the completed pile, and new books take its place. From nwolcott at dsdial.net Wed Apr 20 07:27:21 2005 From: nwolcott at dsdial.net (N Wolcott) Date: Wed Apr 20 07:29:38 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law Message-ID: <006b01c545b5$5f083e20$b09495ce@gw98> What is the impactof the new copyright passed by the house yesterday on the likes of PG, Ockerbloom, and other sites, not to mention the minions. ??? N Wolcott nwolcott2@post.harvard.edu -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/attachments/20050420/450e5411/attachment.html From davedoty at hotmail.com Wed Apr 20 08:34:28 2005 From: davedoty at hotmail.com (Dave Doty) Date: Wed Apr 20 08:34:35 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law In-Reply-To: <006b01c545b5$5f083e20$b09495ce@gw98> Message-ID: >From: "N Wolcott" >What is the impactof the new copyright passed by the house yesterday on the >likes of PG, Ockerbloom, and other sites, not to mention the minions. ??? Since you were'nt more specific, I had to hit the web to try to figure out which law you were talking about. The only thing I could find that seemed to fit the bill was this: http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5677232.html In a nutshell, it allows prison terms of up to three years for possessing even a single copy of a work that hasn't been commercially released, regardless of whether it has been shared. It has not a jot of impact on PG, unless we're planning on putting prerelease copyrighted works on the site, and I missed that discussion. This isn't a "copyright law" in the sense of changing copyright standards in any way, it just increases the penalty for what was already a violation. Since PG is extremely conscientious about copyright, this doesn't matter to our work (it may or may not matter to individuals.) It does show a general attitude of clampdown, but I think we were all already well aware of that pervasive attitude in virtually all governmental bodies these days. Dave Doty From hart at pglaf.org Wed Apr 20 10:05:12 2005 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Wed Apr 20 10:05:14 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 19 Apr 2005, David Starner wrote: > On 4/19/05, Michael Hart wrote: >> Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? >> >> Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. > > If you look at book 13921, you'll notice that it's missing pages 98 > and 99 ("[Seiten 98 und 99 fehlen!]", embedded in the middle of the > text). How many readers have jumped forward to offer the missing > pages? If it had been kept at DP, we could have found the pages and > added them. But once it's on the shelf, nobody worries about it > anymore. > > I've found as a general rule, once a book is posted, the odds of > anything getting done on it drop vastly. It gets moved to the > completed pile, and new books take its place. Then I suggest we keep some kind of notice for our own people that the book is incomplete, rather than simply ignoring books once they reach the public. It's not as if there is some "Digital Divide" that prevents us from trying to improve our eBooks from both directions. Why use this kind of reasoning to keep these books from seeing the light of day? Michael From distributedmel at gmail.com Wed Apr 20 10:16:19 2005 From: distributedmel at gmail.com (Melissa Er-Raqabi) Date: Wed Apr 20 10:16:36 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: If we are going to post incomplete books, the notice should not be just for 'our own people' but should be very clearly stated to the users of PG. Anything less is deceit, in my mind. Such books should go in a section for incomplete projects, and the end-user's help should be specifically solicited, creating a partnership with him, rather than putting him off by trying to pass off a 'broken' project as one in good condition. Melissa On 4/20/05, Michael Hart wrote: > > Then I suggest we keep some kind of notice for our own people > that the book is incomplete, rather than simply ignoring books > once they reach the public. > > It's not as if there is some "Digital Divide" that prevents us > from trying to improve our eBooks from both directions. > > Why use this kind of reasoning to keep these books from seeing > the light of day? > > > Michael > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > From jonathan_ingram at yahoo.com Wed Apr 20 10:22:28 2005 From: jonathan_ingram at yahoo.com (Jonathan Ingram) Date: Wed Apr 20 10:22:34 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: 6667 Message-ID: <20050420172228.65670.qmail@web41726.mail.yahoo.com> The current weekly announcement contains the following: > We have been invited to peruse the various eBook collections > of the Internet Archive for potential Project Gutenberg eBooks. > > http://www.archive.org > > Don't worry, many of the numbers listed are out of date, > but you should get all the files when you pass through > to the original sites. People on gutvol-d might be interested to know that at DP we're moving through a particular Internet Archive collection -- the Canadian Libraries archive -- in a relatively organised fashion. Those of you who are already signed up to DP can follow the progress of this by looking at the appropriate thread in our 'Providing Content' forum. For a summary of our progress, see here: http://tinyurl.com/77rj4 Incidentally, this also provides a nice summary of all the content of this particular Internet Archive collection. As you can see, we're making good progress, particularly on the English language texts. If any of you are already working on any of these texts outside DP, please post a reply to the DP thread, and I will update the information page to reflect the fact. This will avoid more than one volunteer working on the same text. -- Jon Ingram __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From joshua at hutchinson.net Wed Apr 20 10:42:31 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Wed Apr 20 10:41:00 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks Message-ID: <20050420174231.E03B99E780@ws6-2.us4.outblaze.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Michael Hart" > > Why use this kind of reasoning to keep these books from seeing > the light of day? > It is the difference between the ideal and the practical. Ideally, we could post the incomplete texts and someone would notice the missing pages, find them and add them. In practice, once it is posted, it takes an act of god for further updates to occur. At DP, we have a pretty good number of books that get fixed this way. Once it is posted, that number would virtually disappear. Josh From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed Apr 20 11:18:13 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Wed Apr 20 11:24:29 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law Message-ID: <1b8.119f8c03.2f97f6e5@aol.com> dave said: > It has not a jot of impact on PG right. > It does show a general attitude of clampdown, but > I think we were all already well aware of that > pervasive attitude in virtually all governmental bodies these days. so we ignore, and then shrug off, evil because it has become "pervasive"? "first they came for ___, but i did nothing because i wasn't ___..." some people can't see the forest for the trees. other people can't see the forest because they won't look past the end of their nose... -bowerbird p.s. and in the future, nobody will be able to see the trees because the corporations chopped 'em all down while we were busy nailing our eyes shut so we wouldn't see anything "pervasive"... From the43rdearlofcranberry at yahoo.co.uk Wed Apr 20 11:40:16 2005 From: the43rdearlofcranberry at yahoo.co.uk (Tom Day) Date: Wed Apr 20 11:40:25 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law In-Reply-To: 6667 Message-ID: <20050420184016.12311.qmail@web26609.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> I'm new to all this...is there some well-established reason why you seem to hate everyone on this list so much, and yet continue to subscribe to it? If I'm missing something obvious (I mean, I know there are people who are just born that way) then I apologise. --- Bowerbird@aol.com wrote: > dave said: > > It has not a jot of impact on PG > > right. > > > > It does show a general attitude of clampdown, > but > > I think we were all already well aware of that > > pervasive attitude in virtually all governmental > bodies these days. > > so we ignore, and then shrug off, evil because it > has become "pervasive"? > > "first they came for ___, but i did nothing because > i wasn't ___..." > > some people can't see the forest for the trees. > other people can't see the forest > because they won't look past the end of their > nose... > > -bowerbird > > p.s. and in the future, nobody will be able to see > the trees > because the corporations chopped 'em all down while > we were > busy nailing our eyes shut so we wouldn't see > anything "pervasive"... > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d@lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gutvol-d > Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com From ian at babcockbrown.com Wed Apr 20 11:07:17 2005 From: ian at babcockbrown.com (Ian Stoba) Date: Wed Apr 20 12:17:50 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <68d8d0b9d2f3a9f10002ae73dc7295f7@babcockbrown.com> On Apr 20, 2005, at 8:34 AM, Dave Doty wrote: >> From: "N Wolcott" > >> What is the impactof the new copyright passed by the house yesterday >> on the likes of PG, Ockerbloom, and other sites, not to mention the >> minions. ??? > > Since you were'nt more specific, I had to hit the web to try to figure > out which law you were talking about. The only thing I could find > that seemed to fit the bill was this: > > http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5677232.html > The bill has some other interesting provisions, notably allowing the use of third party technology to skip offensive material when a film is shown in a home: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,67269,00.html The use of devices like ClearPlay has been opposed by filmmakers who do not want their movies getting bleeped or pixellated. I think the most interesting question is whether a device like ClearPlay is in fact a circumvention device for DMCA purposes. If so, I think this is the first time the DMCA anti-circumvention provisions have been weakened by Congress. I'm not quite sure what to make of this just yet, particularly since it raises the penalty substantially for sharing materials that were never commercially released. I does make me slightly optimistic to see Congress realizing that the DMCA and other extensions of copyright do limit how people can use the works they purchase in the way they want. This email message may contain information that is confidential and proprietary to Babcock & Brown or a third party. If you are not the intended recipient, please contact the sender and destroy the original and any copies of the original message. Babcock & Brown takes measures to protect the content of its communications. However, Babcock & Brown cannot guarantee that email messages will not be intercepted by third parties or that email messages will be free of errors or viruses. If you do not wish to receive any further e-mail from Babcock & Brown, please send an email to opt-out@babcockbrown.com. From marcello at perathoner.de Wed Apr 20 12:41:02 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Wed Apr 20 12:41:14 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law In-Reply-To: <20050420184016.12311.qmail@web26609.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> References: <20050420184016.12311.qmail@web26609.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <4266B04E.1010204@perathoner.de> Tom Day wrote: > I'm new to all this...is there some well-established reason why you > seem to hate everyone on this list so much, and yet continue to > subscribe to it? If I'm missing something obvious (I mean, I know > there are people who are just born that way) then I apologise. See "The Showcase of Pudd?nhead Bowerbird" at: http://www.gnutenberg.de/bowerbird/ -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From brandon at corruptedtruth.com Wed Apr 20 12:44:43 2005 From: brandon at corruptedtruth.com (Brandon Galbraith) Date: Wed Apr 20 12:44:55 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law In-Reply-To: <4266B04E.1010204@perathoner.de> References: <20050420184016.12311.qmail@web26609.mail.ukl.yahoo.com> <4266B04E.1010204@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4266B12B.4080007@corruptedtruth.com> Marcello, That made my day. Thank you =) -brandon Marcello Perathoner wrote: > Tom Day wrote: > >> I'm new to all this...is there some well-established reason why you >> seem to hate everyone on this list so much, and yet continue to >> subscribe to it? If I'm missing something obvious (I mean, I know >> there are people who are just born that way) then I apologise. > > > See "The Showcase of Pudd?nhead Bowerbird" at: > > http://www.gnutenberg.de/bowerbird/ > > > > From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed Apr 20 12:59:28 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Wed Apr 20 12:59:41 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks Message-ID: melissa said: > If we are going to post incomplete books, the notice should not be > just for 'our own people' but should be very clearly stated to the > users of PG. i agree. it should be noted right there in the e-text itself. which, in the sole example given, was precisely the case... > Anything less is deceit, in my mind. well, "deceit" is a pretty strong word, with ugly implications. let's save that for where it applies, like with our government. > Such books should go in a section for incomplete projects, > and the end-user's help should be specifically solicited, > creating a partnership with him i agree. and have said as much in the past, several times, not just for the specific case of incomplete projects, but for the larger arena of which it is a subset -- error-correction... i even offered to set up a user-based error-correction system, which is _desperately_ needed by this ever-growing e-library. my offer was rebuffed. but melissa, since you're on this kick today, how about if _you_ offer to set up such a system. maybe they'll accept your offer. one task you'd do is to scour the library for incomplete e-texts. > rather than putting him off by trying to > pass off a 'broken' project as one in good condition. i don't believe anyone was ever suggesting that we should try to "pass off" a "broken" e-text as if it were "one in good condition". i believe michael was suggesting exactly what you've suggested, namely that we involve the end-users to help solve the problem. after all, all of "our own people" are end-user volunteers, right? the "missing pages wiki" over at distributed proofreaders is a start, but since that's only known to people at d.p. (and only some of them), it is no more than a start. make it bigger, melissa. take it public... -bowerbird From marcello at perathoner.de Wed Apr 20 13:10:47 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Wed Apr 20 13:11:07 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] please test pg website cache Message-ID: <4266B747.50409@perathoner.de> We are planning to speed up the pg website by deploying a set of squid cache servers. The first experimental squid cache is now online at: http://de.cache.gutenberg.org This site should look and behave exactly the same as the original www.gutenberg.org site. This site caches all static pages from www.gutenberg.org like the /browse/* and /etext/* pages. It does not cache dynamic generated pages like your search results. It does not cache the etext files. If you are located in Western Europe (especially Germany) you should notice some speed improvement over www.gutenberg.org. (This of course will be marginal unless a considerable number of people start using it.) This url is for testing only and will be removed once testing is complete, so don't publish this url on other web sites. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed Apr 20 13:14:04 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Wed Apr 20 13:14:16 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] New Copyright law Message-ID: <13d.11b07254.2f98120c@aol.com> tom said: > I'm new to all this...is there some well-established reason > why you seem to hate everyone on this list so much, > and yet continue to subscribe to it? it's simply not true that i "hate everyone on this list so much". to begin with, i know very few of the people here _personally_, and i wouldn't hold an emotion as strong as "hate" for anyone that i didn't know personally. in fact, i rarely "hate" anyone, even if i _do_ know them personally. life is too short for that. i'm certainly not gonna be putting up webpages about anyone. indeed, i have a fond feeling for most of the people here, just as i do for project gutenberg as an abstract entity, because the people here are one with me in the cause of electronic-books, which is why i subscribe to this listserve. i've been active in e-books for 25 years. why wouldn't i be here? i _do_ have some impatience with an inability or unwillingness to consider things in their broader context, a shortcoming that i see here on a not-infrequent basis, so i mount an attack on that. for instance, i still ain't seen one word on this list about the recent amazon purchases, and how they might affect the world of e-books. so i think you people here need a wake-up call. so i give it to you. you shouldn't take my posts personally though. unless you're one of the people putting up webpages about me. :+) as for the posts _today_, i'm just celebrating 4/20 with a little fun, and reminding dave (and you, and everyone else ) that whether or not i choose to post here is up to me... at least until greg bans me again... i'm also writing backchannels today, and posts to another listserve, about the issue of error-correction, so i thought i would post here too. i want to make it clear that i have _tried_ to communicate with y'all, even though there are many people here trying to get me to shut up... i have guts to say it to your face, even if you don't have guts to hear it. so, tom, now, do you want to talk about issues? or about me? and if you _do_ want to talk about me, one measly post ain't much. after all, i've got people putting up webpages about me... :+) > (I mean, I know there are people who are just born that way) i see... -bowerbird From jon_niehof at yahoo.com Wed Apr 20 13:54:25 2005 From: jon_niehof at yahoo.com (Jon Niehof) Date: Wed Apr 20 13:54:35 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: 6667 Message-ID: <20050420205426.73210.qmail@web41624.mail.yahoo.com> --- Bowerbird@aol.com wrote: > melissa said: > > If we are going to post incomplete books, the notice > > should not be just for 'our own people' but should be very > > clearly stated to the users of PG. > > i agree. it should be noted right there in the e-text itself. > which, in the sole example given, was precisely the case... But isn't that a form of markup? I thought markup was bad? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From ke at gnu.franken.de Wed Apr 20 13:52:09 2005 From: ke at gnu.franken.de (Karl Eichwalder) Date: Wed Apr 20 15:38:35 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <16997.25608.758628.394332@celery.zuhause.org> (Bruce Albrecht's message of "Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:03:20 -0500") References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <16997.25608.758628.394332@celery.zuhause.org> Message-ID: Bruce Albrecht writes: > Personally, I would not buy books from a publisher with a reputation > for knowingly publishing books with pages missing, nor would I want to > download from PG if it had a reputation for knowingly publishing > etexts that are missing pages. I bought incomplete books - they were cheap and I was mostly interested in the photographs. As long as incomplete books are properly described and listed, it would be useful to offer them for download. -- http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/ | ,__o | _-\_<, | (*)/'(*) Key fingerprint = F138 B28F B7ED E0AC 1AB4 AA7F C90A 35C3 E9D0 5D1C From distributedmel at gmail.com Wed Apr 20 15:58:55 2005 From: distributedmel at gmail.com (Melissa Er-Raqabi) Date: Wed Apr 20 15:59:09 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: I'm pretty busy right now, bowerbird, with post-processing complete texts for upload to PG--90 or so in the last 6-8 months. Melissa > > but melissa, since you're on this kick today, how about if _you_ > offer to set up such a system. maybe they'll accept your offer. > one task you'd do is to scour the library for incomplete e-texts. > From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed Apr 20 16:09:47 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Wed Apr 20 16:10:09 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks Message-ID: melissa said: > I'm pretty busy right now, bowerbird, with > post-processing complete texts for upload to PG-- > 90 or so in the last 6-8 months. i understand. :+) thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to come and give your recommendations on what project gutenberg should be doing. i appreciate hearing everyone's input twice as much as i like giving my own, because i have two ears and only one mouth. that's another reason i post every once in a while, because otherwise, y'all lapse into long periods of silence. but when _i_ post, there's a _reaction_... and thanks for post-processing all those e-texts. it's not a pretty job, but somebody's gotta do it... -bowerbird From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed Apr 20 16:17:06 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Wed Apr 20 16:17:25 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] speaking of missing pages Message-ID: speaking of "missing pages", i got this today... -bowerbird ------------------------------------------------------------------- Fresh from London's "Independent" Some possibly very exciting news: Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome By David Keys and Nicholas Pyke 17 April 2005 For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure - a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible. Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed. In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia. They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels, the originals of which were written around the time of the earliest books of the New Testament. The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance". Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, described the new works as "central texts which scholars have been speculating about for centuries". Professor Richard Janko, a leading British scholar, formerly of University College London, now head of classics at the University of Michigan, said: "Normally we are lucky to get one such find per decade." One discovery in particular, a 30-line passage from the poet Archilocos, of whom only 500 lines survive in total, is described as "invaluable" by Dr Peter Jones, author and co-founder of the Friends of Classics campaign. The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world. The previously unknown texts, read for the first time last week, include parts of a long-lost tragedy - the Epigonoi ("Progeny") by the 5th-century BC Greek playwright Sophocles; part of a lost novel by the 2nd-century Greek writer Lucian; unknown material by Euripides; mythological poetry by the 1st-century BC Greek poet Parthenios; work by the 7th-century BC poet Hesiod; and an epic poem by Archilochos, a 7th-century successor of Homer, describing events leading up to the Trojan War. Additional material from Hesiod, Euripides and Sophocles almost certainly await discovery. Oxford academics have been working alongside infra-red specialists from Brigham Young University, Utah. Their operation is likely to increase the number of great literary works fully or partially surviving from the ancient Greek world by up to a fifth. It could easily double the surviving body of lesser work - the pulp fiction and sitcoms of the day. "The Oxyrhynchus collection is of unparalleled importance - especially now that it can be read fully and relatively quickly," said the Oxford academic directing the research, Dr Dirk Obbink. "The material will shed light on virtually every aspect of life in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, and, by extension, in the classical world as a whole." The breakthrough has also caught the imagination of cultural commentators. Melvyn Bragg, author and presenter, said: "It's the most fantastic news. There are two things here. The first is how enormously influential the Greeks were in science and the arts. The second is how little of their writing we have. The prospect of having more to look at is wonderful." Bettany Hughes, historian and broadcaster, who has presented TV series including Mysteries of the Ancients and The Spartans, said: "Egyptian rubbish dumps were gold mines. The classical corpus is like a jigsaw puzzle picked up at a jumble sale - many more pieces missing than are there. Scholars have always mourned the loss of works of genius - plays by Sophocles, Sappho's other poems, epics. These discoveries promise to change the textual map of the golden ages of Greece and Rome." When it has all been read - mainly in Greek, but sometimes in Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic, Arabic, Nubian and early Persian - the new material will probably add up to around five million words. Texts deciphered over the past few days will be published next month by the London-based Egypt Exploration Society, which financed the discovery and owns the collection. A 21st-century technique reveals antiquity's secrets Since it was unearthed more than a century ago, the hoard of documents known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri has fascinated classical scholars. There are 400,000 fragments, many containing text from the great writers of antiquity. But only a small proportion have been read so far. Many were illegible. Now scientists are using multi-spectral imaging techniques developed from satellite technology to read the papyri at Oxford University's Sackler Library. The fragments, preserved between sheets of glass, respond to the infra-red spectrum - ink invisible to the naked eye can be seen and photographed. The fragments form part of a giant "jigsaw puzzle" to be reassembled. Missing "pieces" can be supplied from quotations by later authors, and grammatical analysis. Key words from the master of Greek tragedy Speaker A: . . . gobbling the whole, sharpening the flashing iron. Speaker B: And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle's songs, that wakes up those who are asleep. Speaker A: And he is gluing together the chariot's rail. These words were written by the Greek dramatist Sophocles, and are the only known fragment we have of his lost play Epigonoi (literally "The Progeny"), the story of the siege of Thebes. Until last week's hi-tech analysis of ancient scripts at Oxford University, no one knew of their existence, and this is the first time they have been published. Sophocles (495-405 BC), was a giant of the golden age of Greek civilisation, a dramatist who work alongside and competed with Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes. His best-known work is Oedipus Rex, the play that later gave its name to the Freudian theory, in which the hero kills his father and marries his mother - in a doomed attempt to escape the curse he brings upon himself. His other masterpieces include Antigone and Electra. Sophocles was the cultured son of a wealthy Greek merchant, living at the height of the Greek empire. An accomplished actor, he performed in many of his own plays. He also served as a priest and sat on the committee that administered Athens. A great dramatic innovator, he wrote more than 120 plays, but only seven survive in full. Last week's remarkable finds also include work by Euripides, Hesiod and Lucian, plus a large and particularly significant paragraph of text from the Elegies, by Archilochos, a Greek poet of the 7th century BC. From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed Apr 20 16:42:57 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Wed Apr 20 16:43:15 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks Message-ID: <2b.7193db38.2f984301@aol.com> jon said: > But isn't that a form of markup? i don't know. periods are markup, some people say. and blank lines between paragraphs. even the space between two words. so i don't know. define it however you want. > I thought markup was bad? who told you that? markup, depending on how you define it, is whatever it is. it's not bad or good. it just is. having to _apply_ markup -- especially heavy markup -- takes a lot of time and energy, so that can be _costly_. but if it delivers _benefits_, though, especially benefits that cannot be obtained another way, then it _might_ be cost-efficient. you have to put it on a scale and weigh it. costs are bad. benefits are good. so you find the balance... if i could wave a magic wand, and have the entire library marked up, in x.m.l. or some other form of markup, i would love it. why not? or, alternately, if someone else is willing to do all that heavy markup for me, while i sit back and drink beer, i would love that too. why not? but if y'all are gonna sit around, for year after year after year after year, all the while intending to do x.m.l. markup, but never actually getting any done, what's the point? myself, i like my markup to be "invisible" -- to be _zen_. like spaces between words, blank lines between paragraphs. to _facilitate_ my understanding of the intent of the author. (illustrated by the underscores i just used to indicate italics, so you'd know that my intention was to emphasize that word. of course, it's nice if your viewer-program would _convert_ an underscored word to an italicized one when displaying it, as some viewer-programs will -- like ubook, for instance -- but in the absence of that, i'll trust your imagination to do it.) all of which has absolutely nothing to do with the case here. if there are two pages missing inside an e-text, _say_so_. say it right where they're missing, at the top of the e-text, on the webpage that lists all the e-texts with missing pages, in the newsletter, and anywhere else where you believe that it might come to the attention of someone who can and will _provide_ those missing pages. all of this is in keeping with a systemic effort to incorporate end-users as _co-creators_ and _co-owners_ of their planetary digital library. you dig? because the quickest way to get 20 million books digitized is for 20 million people to do one book each, then check one other. now _that_ would be distributing the workload! if anyone else wants to converse with me, today is your day. it won't be 4/20 tomorrow, so speak up now if you want... -bowerbird From gbnewby at pglaf.org Wed Apr 20 22:10:24 2005 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Wed Apr 20 22:10:26 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 04:42:56PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > On 4/19/05, Michael Hart wrote: > > Any reason not to post them with a comment that these pages are missing? > > > > Readers would thus be encouraged to help find the missing pages. > > If you look at book 13921, you'll notice that it's missing pages 98 > and 99 ("[Seiten 98 und 99 fehlen!]", embedded in the middle of the > text). How many readers have jumped forward to offer the missing > pages? If it had been kept at DP, we could have found the pages and > added them. But once it's on the shelf, nobody worries about it > anymore. > > I've found as a general rule, once a book is posted, the odds of > anything getting done on it drop vastly. It gets moved to the > completed pile, and new books take its place. I feel like I might be stepping on a hornet's nest, so please try to be gentle with me: My questions are two: 1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long after proofreading was complete did this happen?) 2. I'm aware there are a sizeable number of books at DP that have completed proofreading, yet are not yet uploaded to the PG servers. What proportion is awaiting missing pages, versus other types of delays. I want to offer two things, also: a) We can run requests in the newsletters for particular items. These go out to > 6K subscribers, and we might get some positive responses. I think Branko Collins was looking to provide some regular DP content to Michael Hart for the newsletter - or, just email stuff to Michael or me. b) ditto for the gutenberg.org Web page: a "wanted" area (with lots of changing content -- drawn from a list of titles missing pages) would probably get a lotta clicks. -- Greg From gbnewby at pglaf.org Wed Apr 20 22:17:44 2005 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Wed Apr 20 22:17:45 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <15cfa2a5050419141222f2a8ad@mail.gmail.com> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6.2.0.8.0.20050419104217.01edb008@mail.scripps.edu> <003701c54522$b6cfbf40$f3c2883e@freeserve.co.uk> <15cfa2a5050419141222f2a8ad@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <20050421051744.GF6638@pglaf.org> On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 05:12:43PM -0400, Robert Cicconetti wrote: > On 4/19/05, Phil Hitchcock wrote: > > PG already issues books with missing pages, e.g. #11866. However it is > > stated at the beginning that certain specified pages are missing, so the > > reader knows what to expect. If the currently best available copy of a text, > > which may be several hundred years old, is missing a few pages, well that is > > unfortunate; but surely it is better to give people the chance to read the > > 99% that is available. Our great museums do not say, this pot has a few > > chips in it so we will not exhibit it. > > The main reason to avoid incomplete projects at DP is a lack of > resources, both of skilled people and technical resources. In fact > they go together; the Post Processing backlog at DP is causing a > chronic shortage of disk space. If a project has to sit on the server ... I'm posting here, in case discussion has stalled or this message didn't get to the right person previously: We're perpetually ready to acquire additional hardware for DP. I can also offer lots of off-site networked storage for backups, "holding" items, etc., etc. There have been numerous short discussions about this, but it sounds like most DP folks are busy doing other things, and haven't had cycles to work on expanding infrastructure. So, in case this helps, I want to reiterate that funding for DP's hardware/network/backups/storage infrastructure is available. > for 6 additional months waiting for 2 pages, that is not good. Also, > by posting an incomplete work, you add to already heavy PP work load. Just a quick note that for posted eBooks such errata/additions can go to the errata list (errata AT pglaf.org). They don't need to go back to the PPer (though in some cases they might need to). The errata team is also overworked, of course... If we do a lot of this, and it involves starting with OCR & proofreading, then I agree it's non-trivial no matter who gets the page scans. But if we can get the scan/page donor to supply proofread text, it's much easier. -- Greg From grythumn at gmail.com Wed Apr 20 23:34:02 2005 From: grythumn at gmail.com (Robert Cicconetti) Date: Wed Apr 20 23:34:20 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <15cfa2a505042023341fbeb5f7@mail.gmail.com> On 4/21/05, Greg Newby wrote: > On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 04:42:56PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > > On 4/19/05, Michael Hart wrote: > I feel like I might be stepping on a hornet's nest, so please > try to be gentle with me: > > My questions are two: > > 1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing > pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing > pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long > after proofreading was complete did this happen?) Nobody really keeps track. There is a hundred lines of changelog in the forums on the missing pages wiki that could probably provide some information, but not every book goes through there. The second post in that thread is a list of volunteers and the libraries that they have access to; you can PM those people directly, or request the book yourself through ILL, or find a copy on ebay, or.. Worldcat and the library list is a very effective combination. > 2. I'm aware there are a sizeable number of books at DP that have > completed proofreading, yet are not yet uploaded to the PG servers. > What proportion is awaiting missing pages, versus other types of delays. There are ~25 books listed on the missing pages wiki; several have been claimed by someone. There are 636 books waiting for a post processor to claim them, 1600 claimed for post processing, 126 waiting for verification, and 175 being verified. Note that current policy is that incomplete books should not be uploaded to DP. R C From traverso at dm.unipi.it Thu Apr 21 00:04:38 2005 From: traverso at dm.unipi.it (Carlo Traverso) Date: Thu Apr 21 00:02:08 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <15cfa2a505042023341fbeb5f7@mail.gmail.com> (message from Robert Cicconetti on Thu, 21 Apr 2005 02:34:02 -0400) References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> <15cfa2a505042023341fbeb5f7@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> It is much better if the incomplete projects remain at DP: when pages are found, DP updates both the text and the images, so that, when these will be made available, these will be complete too. However a page at PG with a list of current requests might be very useful. A page with a line for book, with a link to a description of the problem. When fixed, the line will be moved to a different position for a while, with thanks. Of course the page could be useful for non-DP too; and may contain requests for books in PG that need maintenance. Carlo From marcello at perathoner.de Thu Apr 21 03:54:00 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Thu Apr 21 03:54:25 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <42678648.8050906@perathoner.de> Bowerbird@aol.com wrote: > that's another reason i post every once in a while, > because otherwise, y'all lapse into long periods of > silence. but when _i_ post, there's a _reaction_... Face it, provoking a reaction isn't the same thing as saying something significant. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From M.J.Farmer at bham.ac.uk Thu Apr 21 02:44:18 2005 From: M.J.Farmer at bham.ac.uk (Malcolm Farmer) Date: Thu Apr 21 04:30:35 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] speaking of missing pages In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <426775F2.2@bham.ac.uk> Bowerbird@aol.com wrote: >speaking of "missing pages", i got this today... > >-bowerbird > >------------------------------------------------------------------- > > >Fresh from London's "Independent" > >Some possibly very exciting news: > > >Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may >rewrite the history of the world > > >Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing >long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome > > I saw a feature on UK TV a year or more back about the half incinerated library found at Herculaneum. Those scrolls basically looked like charcoal briquettes, but could be make flexible by wetting with solvents, and prised carefully apart to put under a camera. They showed someone with a multispectral camera stepping through wavelengths till he arrived at one where 'charred papyrus' had a different reflectivity to 'charred papyrus+ink'. There was such an expression of delight on the researcher's face as he saw the text coming up on screen and described what he was reading.... So this technique has been around a while, long enough to be shown in use on television. I'm surprised it's taken so long to get attention from the press. Pretty cool technique, though, and worthy of a writeup. From joshua at hutchinson.net Thu Apr 21 05:18:51 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Thu Apr 21 05:20:06 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks Message-ID: <20050421121851.26D2F4F521@ws6-5.us4.outblaze.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Cicconetti" > > On 4/21/05, Greg Newby wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 04:42:56PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > > > On 4/19/05, Michael Hart wrote: > > I feel like I might be stepping on a hornet's nest, so please > > try to be gentle with me: > > > > My questions are two: > > > > 1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing > > pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing > > pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long > > after proofreading was complete did this happen?) > > Nobody really keeps track. This is true. But, let me offer this completely personal, anecdotal evidence. I've added 691 projects to the DP queue in the last couple years. Granted, many of them are still in the queue waiting to be release (maybe 25% or more). Out of those nearly 700 projects, 2 have been held up by missing pages. The first one was about a year and half ago and I can't remember anymore how that one was resolved. The other just cropped up last week. The images were taken from Cornell's Making of America project and they had one page scan in twice, overwriting one page. An e-mail sent to their administrators promised that they would fix it soon. I'm giving them until next week before I bug them again. If my numbers are any indication ... around 0.29% of our projects will come up missing a page. I have a feeling it is a actually a point or two higher, but I could be wrong. Josh From vze3rknp at verizon.net Thu Apr 21 06:14:07 2005 From: vze3rknp at verizon.net (Juliet Sutherland) Date: Thu Apr 21 06:13:56 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <20050421121851.26D2F4F521@ws6-5.us4.outblaze.com> References: <20050421121851.26D2F4F521@ws6-5.us4.outblaze.com> Message-ID: <4267A71F.5070603@verizon.net> Joshua Hutchinson wrote: >----- Original Message ----- >From: "Robert Cicconetti" > > >>On 4/21/05, Greg Newby wrote: >> >> >>>On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 04:42:56PM -0500, David Starner wrote: >>> >>> >>>>On 4/19/05, Michael Hart wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>I feel like I might be stepping on a hornet's nest, so please >>>try to be gentle with me: >>> >>>My questions are two: >>> >>>1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing >>>pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing >>>pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long >>>after proofreading was complete did this happen?) >>> >>> >>Nobody really keeps track. >> >> > >This is true. But, let me offer this completely personal, anecdotal evidence. > >I've added 691 projects to the DP queue in the last couple years. Granted, many of them are still in the queue waiting to be release (maybe 25% or more). Out of those nearly 700 projects, 2 have been held up by missing pages. The first one was about a year and half ago and I can't remember anymore how that one was resolved. The other just cropped up last week. The images were taken from Cornell's Making of America project and they had one page scan in twice, overwriting one page. An e-mail sent to their administrators promised that they would fix it soon. I'm giving them until next week before I bug them again. > >If my numbers are any indication ... around 0.29% of our projects will come up missing a page. I have a feeling it is a actually a point or two higher, but I could be wrong. > >Josh > > > I have put nearly 1200 books through DP of which 876 have been posted to PG. The majority of those are ones that I have scanned, so I have control over dealing with things like bad scans. I have a handful of project (~5) that have problems with bad or missing pages. 3 of them are from the Million Books Project and were processed before we knew we had to be very careful about checking those scans. The others are from periodicals. I also have 3 books that I've scanned but not put on DP due to missing pages (I'm quite sure I'll run across another copy of those books reasonably soon). I know of another 4-5 cases where material was cut off on the scan (or on the actual page) and was obtained by other volunteers so that the project could be finished. I've had a couple of items where the material is so obscure that I've told the PPer to just mark the missing parts (usually just a piece of a page) and post it. Bulletin de Lille (a French twice-weekly newspaper published by the German occupiers of Lille during WWI) is the example that comes to mind. My impression is that missing pages/text are not a big problem in percentage terms at DP. But they do happen often enough that we have a procedure for dealing with them. We have some volunteers who have been remarkably responsive and helpful in finding missing pages or checking obscured text and who deserve unending thanks. I'm quite certain that these problems are more likely to be successfully resolved within the DP system, where we have methods for tracking them, than they would be if posted to PG where there is not yet a systematic way to find and work on them. JulietS DP Site Admin From jon_niehof at yahoo.com Thu Apr 21 07:51:17 2005 From: jon_niehof at yahoo.com (Jon Niehof) Date: Thu Apr 21 07:51:23 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] speaking of missing pages In-Reply-To: 6667 Message-ID: <20050421145118.6074.qmail@web41623.mail.yahoo.com> --- Malcolm Farmer wrote: > So this technique has been around a while, long enough to be > shown in use on television. Indeed; have a look at Ars' take: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050420-4827.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From shimmin at uiuc.edu Thu Apr 21 08:36:46 2005 From: shimmin at uiuc.edu (Robert Shimmin) Date: Thu Apr 21 08:36:53 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <4267C88E.8020403@uiuc.edu> > 1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing > pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing > pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long > after proofreading was complete did this happen?) My experience as a DP projet manager is that if I simply put a page request up for grabs, I might get a bite, and I might not; I feel the half-life of these "passive" requests might be measured in months. If I am more proactive, and look through library catalogs to identify a library that claims to have the book I need a page from, and then ask a fellow DP-er who might have access to that library, I get better results. My experience is that if I ask two or three people, at least one of them will be willing and able to make the scan at their convenience, and they usually find it convenient to do so within a week or three. So, if a person is willing to put the legwork into locating the book, they will probably get results. Not quickly, but not glacially slowly, either. > 2. I'm aware there are a sizeable number of books at DP that have > completed proofreading, yet are not yet uploaded to the PG servers. > What proportion is awaiting missing pages, versus other types of delays. Who knows? Other issues that hold books up are a small fraction of illegible text, needing to locate a classicist or speaker of a foreign language, and the project being Just Plain Hard (like doing html for a project with over 300 images). -- RS From jhowse at nf.sympatico.ca Thu Apr 21 13:33:17 2005 From: jhowse at nf.sympatico.ca (JHowse) Date: Thu Apr 21 09:02:51 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <4267C88E.8020403@uiuc.edu> References: <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.0.20050421131953.00a5cec0@pop1.nf.sympatico.ca> >>2. I'm aware there are a sizeable number of books at DP that have >>completed proofreading, yet are not yet uploaded to the PG servers. >>What proportion is awaiting missing pages, versus other types of delays. > >Who knows? Other issues that hold books up are a small fraction of >illegible text, needing to locate a classicist or speaker of a foreign >language, and the project being Just Plain Hard (like doing html for a >project with over 300 images). Plus the fact that we are all volunteers on PG, and most of those prefer to do the proofreading, not the Post Processing. I am going as fast as I can and I'm sure that goes for the other PPers. :D JHowse ================================================================================ "I'm not likely to write a great novel or compose a song or save a baby from a burning building...but I can help make sure that there is an electronic library of free knowledge available for future people to access."--jhutch. Preserving History One Page at a Time!! Celebrating our 6600th book posted to Project Gutenberg Join Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/c/ ================================================================================ From hart at pglaf.org Thu Apr 21 11:26:33 2005 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Thu Apr 21 11:26:34 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <4267C88E.8020403@uiuc.edu> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> <4267C88E.8020403@uiuc.edu> Message-ID: On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Robert Shimmin wrote: > >> 1. What is the approximate success rate & timetable for getting missing >> pages for books in DP? (I.e., how many books are stalled for missing >> pages, and how many have had their pages found/restored, and how long >> after proofreading was complete did this happen?) > > My experience as a DP projet manager is that if I simply put a page request > up for grabs, I might get a bite, and I might not; I feel the half-life of > these "passive" requests might be measured in months. > > If I am more proactive, and look through library catalogs to identify a > library that claims to have the book I need a page from, and then ask a > fellow DP-er who might have access to that library, I get better results. My > experience is that if I ask two or three people, at least one of them will be > willing and able to make the scan at their convenience, and they usually find > it convenient to do so within a week or three. > > So, if a person is willing to put the legwork into locating the book, they > will probably get results. Not quickly, but not glacially slowly, either. If you would send me such requests for inclusion in the Newsletter, that might help. When we put requests for such materials in the Newsletter, we usually get a response within a week about about half the time. This goes up to about 3/4 if we leave the request in for a month. Michael From hart at pglaf.org Thu Apr 21 11:47:50 2005 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Thu Apr 21 11:47:51 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4262A37F.5020109@hutchinson.net> <6d99d1fd05041721326f39efb7@mail.gmail.com> <200504181821.51488.donovan@abs.net> <6d99d1fd05041914426b0436ac@mail.gmail.com> <20050421051024.GE6638@pglaf.org> <15cfa2a505042023341fbeb5f7@mail.gmail.com> <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Carlo Traverso wrote: > > It is much better if the incomplete projects remain at DP: when pages > are found, DP updates both the text and the images, so that, when > these will be made available, these will be complete too. > > However a page at PG with a list of current requests might be very > useful. A page with a line for book, with a link to a description of > the problem. When fixed, the line will be moved to a different > position for a while, with thanks. > > Of course the page could be useful for non-DP too; and may contain > requests for books in PG that need maintenance. Is there any reason these projects cannot be kept at DP as suggested and also still shared with the world? Michael From donovan at abs.net Thu Apr 21 15:23:16 2005 From: donovan at abs.net (D Garcia) Date: Thu Apr 21 15:22:07 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <200504211823.17073.donovan@abs.net> On Thursday 21 April 2005 02:47 pm, Michael Hart wrote: > On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Carlo Traverso wrote: > > It is much better if the incomplete projects remain at DP: when pages > > are found, DP updates both the text and the images, so that, when > > these will be made available, these will be complete too. > > Is there any reason these projects cannot be kept at DP as suggested > and also still shared with the world? > > Michael Yes, we like to be thorough. :) From donovan at abs.net Thu Apr 21 15:24:49 2005 From: donovan at abs.net (D Garcia) Date: Thu Apr 21 15:23:37 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <4267C88E.8020403@uiuc.edu> Message-ID: <200504211824.49370.donovan@abs.net> On Thursday 21 April 2005 02:26 pm, Michael Hart eventually had this to say about missing page requests: > If you would send me such requests for inclusion in the Newsletter, > that might help. > > Michael Now that is an excellent suggestion! From tb at baechler.net Thu Apr 21 23:16:56 2005 From: tb at baechler.net (Tony Baechler) Date: Thu Apr 21 23:16:50 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <200504211823.17073.donovan@abs.net> References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <5.2.0.9.0.20050421230947.03e12280@baechler.net> At 06:23 PM 4/21/2005 -0400, you wrote: >On Thursday 21 April 2005 02:47 pm, Michael Hart wrote: > > On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Carlo Traverso wrote: > > > It is much better if the incomplete projects remain at DP: when pages > > > are found, DP updates both the text and the images, so that, when > > > these will be made available, these will be complete too. > > > > Is there any reason these projects cannot be kept at DP as suggested > > and also still shared with the world? Hi. This is only an idea, so if it's not practical, my apologies and please disregard. Why not start a subproject either within PG or DP that could still post the books as long as it is clearly understood that they are not official PG books and have x pages missing? Maybe the PGCC could have such a collection. This way people could still see the books in a transitional statt of completeness while they would not become a part of the PG archive. To take this a step further, they wouldn't be assigned PG ebook numbers and maybe the PGWW people won't even have to be involved, since the books are in a transitional state anyway. I guess it would be similar to the second round of proofreading in DP, the book still has errors, missing pages, etc but is available for all to see. The wanted requests could still be posted to the main PG site and newsletter in hopes that volunteers will find such missing pages more quickly. Since there would still need to be a way to keep track of these substandard books, give them the DP project numbers or no numbers at all. They would still stay within DP, they would just be released earlier with notes that x pages are missing, x more proofing needs to be done, etc. Again, maybe PGCC would be best for this so it's not directly associated with the PG archive. From traverso at dm.unipi.it Fri Apr 22 00:23:31 2005 From: traverso at dm.unipi.it (Carlo Traverso) Date: Fri Apr 22 00:20:48 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <5.2.0.9.0.20050421230947.03e12280@baechler.net> (message from Tony Baechler on Thu, 21 Apr 2005 23:16:56 -0700) References: <4261D8F9.4000805@frontiernet.net> <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> <5.2.0.9.0.20050421230947.03e12280@baechler.net> Message-ID: <200504220723.j3M7NVM18076@pico.dm.unipi.it> >>>>> "Michael" == Michael Hart writes: Michael> On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Carlo Traverso wrote: >> It is much better if the incomplete projects remain at DP: >> when pages are found, DP updates both the text and the images, >> so that, when these will be made available, these will be >> complete too. >> >> However a page at PG with a list of current requests might be >> very useful. A page with a line for book, with a link to a >> description of the problem. When fixed, the line will be moved >> to a different position for a while, with thanks. >> >> Of course the page could be useful for non-DP too; and may >> contain requests for books in PG that need maintenance. Michael> Is there any reason these projects cannot be kept at DP Michael> as suggested and also still shared with the world? In the forthcoming code release DP will have the so-called "Smooth reading pool", in which books that have passed (most of) the post-processing steps are made available for download for a final reading, identifying the further corrections needed. IIRC, download will be available to non-registered users too, (re-upload for registered users only). While availability is meant for a short period only, it can be used for projects with missing pages for as long as it is needed (until upload at PG). Carlo From collin at xs4all.nl Fri Apr 22 05:25:23 2005 From: collin at xs4all.nl (Branko Collin) Date: Fri Apr 22 05:13:24 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: References: <200504210704.j3L74ch11399@pico.dm.unipi.it> Message-ID: <42690953.26409.256859@localhost> On 21 Apr 2005, at 11:47, Michael Hart wrote: > On Thu, 21 Apr 2005, Carlo Traverso wrote: > > > It is much better if the incomplete projects remain at DP: when > > pages are found, DP updates both the text and the images, so that, > > when these will be made available, these will be complete too. > > Is there any reason these projects cannot be kept at DP as suggested > and also still shared with the world? No such reason, but I will come to that later. There are philosophical differences between PG and DP that hardly ever come to light except in instances such as now. One is that DP doesn't care how long it takes before a public domain book is presented to the public. This is part of its very make-up; we distribute the work in bits that are as small as possible, and there are very few stakeholders who have a large interest in what finally will happen to the book. If neither the scanner or the post-processor care very much _when_ the book will be released, there is a chance that a text will be sat upon until it's ready, not until it's time. The other difference is that nitpickers are drawn to DP the way moths are drawn to a flame. A lot of volunteers at DP care more about the quality of the works we put out than the quantity. We don't want to produce as many books as possible for as long a time as possible (part of PG's main philosophy), we want to produce good books. Obviously I am exagerating the differences a great deal; I make it sound like PG does not care about quality, and obviously that is not true. I also make it sound that books sit forever at DP, while proofreading monks chip away at the tiniest of imperfections, which is also not true. But the differences that there are may account for why books are apparently sitting longer at DP than PG would like. I can see several solutions for this: - Spring cleaning; the powers that be at DP regularly organize proofreading / post-processing / mentoring / whatever marathons, whenever they feel something needs extra attention. If there are truly books that have been sitting at DP for too long, we can try and organize something like that to flush out the forgotten projects. - Assign quality levels; currently, a PG text is a PG text is a PG text no matter how much effort and attention has gone into it. This means there is a variety in quality that is currently not accounted for. (As a consequence, our bad texts are dragging down our reputation, causing PG's goal to reach out to as many people to miss the mark. Some people won't read our books because of their reputation--see my recent discussion with David Rothman at the Teleread blog.) I can see several disadvantages and several advantages to this proposal. The disadvantages: 1. PG has never liked putting out "editions". I am not sure why. Quality levels are like "editions". 2. Someone has to build it before we can use it. Things can go wrong while we use it. Readers might not understand what each level means. 3. On the PG side, someone has to check (whitewash) a book at every level, not just once. Corrections may have to performed to multiple versions, if we choose to retain versions at older levels. The advantages: 1. We can publish books during several stages of its restoration phase. Currently the following stages would make sense to me: a. After scanning (and perhaps OCR-ing) b. After proofreading/post-processing c. After extended mark-up/proofreading phases (what would be smoothreading at DP) 2. We can keep the process more transparent. 3. Users can choose between quality levels: have an unchecked, incomplete book now, or wait for the improved version. -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl From collin at xs4all.nl Fri Apr 22 05:42:10 2005 From: collin at xs4all.nl (Branko Collin) Date: Fri Apr 22 05:30:15 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <20050421051744.GF6638@pglaf.org> References: <15cfa2a5050419141222f2a8ad@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <42690D42.13117.34C4A1@localhost> I think the person responsible for server management at DP is the much overworked Pauline/Pourlean, so I am forwarding the following to her per this reply. On 20 Apr 2005, at 22:17, Greg Newby wrote: > I'm posting here, in case discussion has stalled or this message > didn't get to the right person previously: We're perpetually ready to > acquire additional hardware for DP. > > I can also offer lots of off-site networked storage for backups, > "holding" items, etc., etc. There have been numerous short > discussions about this, but it sounds like most DP folks are busy > doing other things, and haven't had cycles to work on expanding > infrastructure. So, in case this helps, I want to reiterate that > funding for DP's hardware/network/backups/storage infrastructure is > available. -- branko collin collin@xs4all.nl From jon_niehof at yahoo.com Fri Apr 22 09:04:25 2005 From: jon_niehof at yahoo.com (Jon Niehof) Date: Fri Apr 22 09:04:32 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: 6667 Message-ID: <20050422160425.45164.qmail@web41611.mail.yahoo.com> --- Tony Baechler wrote: > Why not start a subproject either within PG or DP that could > still post the books as long as it is clearly understood that > they are not official PG books and have x pages missing? The concern I'd have with this sort of approach is that, once it's on the web, it tends to get copied all over. Even once a completed version is out, "broken" versions may very well continue to outnumber the other, and the value gets lost in the noise. This isn't an image issue, but rather a "service to posterity" issue. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From servalan at ar.com.au Sat Apr 23 02:12:57 2005 From: servalan at ar.com.au (Pauline) Date: Sat Apr 23 02:13:40 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <42690D42.13117.34C4A1@localhost> References: <15cfa2a5050419141222f2a8ad@mail.gmail.com> <42690D42.13117.34C4A1@localhost> Message-ID: <426A1199.7080903@ar.com.au> Branko Collin wrote: > I think the person responsible for server management at DP is the > much overworked Pauline/Pourlean, so I am forwarding the following to > her per this reply. Thanks. I haven't been keeping up with mailing lists at all recently. > > On 20 Apr 2005, at 22:17, Greg Newby wrote: > >>I'm posting here, in case discussion has stalled or this message >>didn't get to the right person previously: We're perpetually ready to >>acquire additional hardware for DP. >> >>I can also offer lots of off-site networked storage for backups, >>"holding" items, etc., etc. There have been numerous short >>discussions about this, but it sounds like most DP folks are busy >>doing other things, and haven't had cycles to work on expanding >>infrastructure. So, in case this helps, I want to reiterate that >>funding for DP's hardware/network/backups/storage infrastructure is >>available. I suspect my last email to Greg went west, so I'll resend privately. As to the issue of extra disk space... I've said a few times on the DP Forums that after developers the thing which DP lacks most is PPers, i.e. the people who take the proofed text & turn it into ebooks. Adding extra disk space will solve the problem in the medium term, but in the end the PP mountain will just grow higher, until we can match the number of posted projects to the number proofed. I am really hoping that the upcoming site upgrade will help with this problem as the extra formatting rounds & open smooth reading pool will hopefully make life much easier for PPers. If you're not a developer, at the moment the best thing you can do for DP is to PP or PPV, so we can get projects posted to PG & into the archive (i.e. off the production server). Here's a more detailed post on how people can help - the numbers have changed since November & we did some recoding of how images are handled to recover some disk space - but essentially the same issue remains: http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=96304#96304 Thanks, P -- Help digitise public domain books: Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net "Preserving history one page at a time." Set free dead-tree books: http://bookcrossing.com/referral/servalan From jonathan_ingram at yahoo.com Sat Apr 23 06:25:22 2005 From: jonathan_ingram at yahoo.com (Jonathan Ingram) Date: Sat Apr 23 06:25:27 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Update on Harvesting of the Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection Message-ID: <20050423132522.83607.qmail@web41705.mail.yahoo.com> A week ago, DP started systematically working through the Internet Archive's Canadian Libraries collection. In that week, we have looked at 208 of the 798 books in the archive. Of these, 22 books are identical to books which have previously been through DP, so will not need to be looked at further, and 18 books have errors (missing or blurred pages) -- the remaining 168 are being processed and should eventually all move through DP. The aim is to eventually process *every* book in this collection, and then move on to others. You can monitor the current progress of our harvesting effort here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jenjonliz/jon/tia/canadianlibraries.html And (if you are a DP project manager) claim texts using the following thread in the DP forum: http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14768 -- Jon Ingram __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From scott_bulkmail at productarchitect.com Sat Apr 23 11:41:33 2005 From: scott_bulkmail at productarchitect.com (Scott Lawton) Date: Sat Apr 23 11:42:43 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] suggestions for volunteer page Message-ID: i.e. for http://www.gutenberg.org/info/volunteer This seems like a good place to put requests for missing pages and such. Incidentally, I just came across a different sort of "missing page" issue: a possible error in a posted text that requires verification against the original scan -- which is (apparently) long gone. Also, I really hope that PG soon links to scans for all books where scans exist. -- Cheers, Scott S. Lawton http://Classicosm.com/ - classic books http://ProductArchitect.com/ - consulting From marcello at perathoner.de Sat Apr 23 14:14:20 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat Apr 23 14:14:33 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Questions on PG and other ebooks In-Reply-To: <426A1199.7080903@ar.com.au> References: <15cfa2a5050419141222f2a8ad@mail.gmail.com> <42690D42.13117.34C4A1@localhost> <426A1199.7080903@ar.com.au> Message-ID: <426ABAAC.2070706@perathoner.de> Pauline wrote: > Here's a more detailed post on how people can help - the numbers have > changed since November & we did some recoding of how images are handled > to recover some disk space - but essentially the same issue remains: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=96304#96304 Is there a list of missing pages that you don't have to log in to see? We could put up a link fron the pg web site. Ideally the list should be printable and contain exact edition data plus the last paragraph of the preceding and the first para of the next page. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From gbuchana at rogers.com Sun Apr 24 10:42:34 2005 From: gbuchana at rogers.com (Gardner Buchanan) Date: Sun Apr 24 10:42:51 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Update on Harvesting of the Internet Archive's Ca In-Reply-To: <20050423132522.83607.qmail@web41705.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: Hi Jonathan, I have done some work developing scripts to re-process the page image sets from the Toronto archive. If you're interested, maybe we should compare notes. I've found the images to be quite high quality. You didn't mention reconciling your list with the cleared/books in progress list, and looking at your web page, I see that you intend to process at least one of those books in progress - by me - namely: Macdonald, (Captain) John A Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 Clearance OK key=20041231142201macdonald I've always found it a let down when a book I've laboured over pops up in PG 3 days before my year-long effort is finally finished. I have dibs on this: hands off. Also, your list also has a duplicate entry for this title. On 13:25:22 Jonathan Ingram wrote: > A week ago, DP started systematically working through the Internet Archive's > Canadian Libraries collection. In that week, we have looked at 208 of the 798 > books in the archive. Of these, 22 books are identical to books which have > previously been through DP, so will not need to be looked at further, and 18 > books have errors (missing or blurred pages) -- the remaining 168 are being > processed and should eventually all move through DP. The aim is to eventually > process *every* book in this collection, and then move on to others. > > You can monitor the current progress of our harvesting effort here: > http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jenjonliz/jon/tia/canadianlibraries.html > And (if you are a DP project manager) claim texts using the following thread > in > the DP forum: > http://www.pgdp.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14768 > From grythumn at gmail.com Sun Apr 24 11:39:45 2005 From: grythumn at gmail.com (Robert Cicconetti) Date: Sun Apr 24 11:39:53 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Update on Harvesting of the Internet Archive's Ca In-Reply-To: References: <20050423132522.83607.qmail@web41705.mail.yahoo.com> Message-ID: <15cfa2a50504241139324897c4@mail.gmail.com> *Interspersed* On 4/24/05, Gardner Buchanan wrote: > Hi Jonathan, > > You didn't mention reconciling your list with the cleared/books in > progress list, and looking at your web page, I see that you intend to > process at least one of those books in progress - by me - namely: > > Macdonald, (Captain) John A > Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 Apparently you didn't read the header at all; these are a list of _all_ of the books in the Canadian Library section of IA that are in their catalog. The PM making a claim is responsible for checking against the In-Progress list; Jon is simply providing a faster method of reducting duplicate claims than Mr. Price's invaluable monthly updates. Similar setups have happened around holidays, where a number of Christmas or Halloween books may be cleared within days of each other. > I've always found it a let down when a book I've laboured over > pops up in PG 3 days before my year-long effort is finally finished. > I have dibs on this: hands off. Your tone is a bit harsh. If you bothered to read the header, you would have seen (by the lack of a color code) that those books are currently unclaimed by anyone. A simple note to the thread (I see that you have a DP account) or privately to Jon, would get them claimed in your name. Actually, while I am typing this you have done so, although it would have been better to claim both. > Also, your list also has a duplicate entry for this title. That is because the IA has two copies of this title. One taken on their original setup, and another one taken later, with a different camera. >From a post by Molly at IA: We tagged all of the books with what kind of scanner scanned them. Here's the key: Kirtas APT 1200 #1- prototype robot with 8 megapixel camera, originals shot at around 250DPI, processed images interpolated to 300DPI (processed will be bigger, around 3MB each). Kirtas APT 1200 #2- production robot, same kind of camera as #1 Kirtas APT 1200 #2.5- production robot, new 16megapixel camera. originals are 500ish DPI (9-10MB each), most of the time processed images are 300DPI (~2MB each). R C From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun Apr 24 13:20:15 2005 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird@aol.com) Date: Sun Apr 24 13:20:32 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] the .html version of e-text #15701 Message-ID: <1d4.3aaa3df9.2f9d597f@aol.com> i'm trying to look at the .html version of #15701, which i downloaded as a zip file to my own machine, and it seems to require an open internet connection. it wants to call the w3 or something. why? even with such a connection, it won't display in ie5.1. works in opera 5, but not internet explorer. why not? and the .html version of #15698 won't work in either one... help, anyone? -bowerbird From jonathan_ingram at yahoo.com Sun Apr 24 15:35:07 2005 From: jonathan_ingram at yahoo.com (Jonathan Ingram) Date: Sun Apr 24 15:35:18 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] Update on Harvesting of the Internet Archive's Ca In-Reply-To: 6667 Message-ID: <20050424223507.3615.qmail@web41712.mail.yahoo.com> --- Gardner Buchanan wrote: > I have done some work developing scripts to re-process the page > image sets from the Toronto archive. If you're interested, maybe > we should compare notes. I've found the images to be quite high > quality. Almost all of the people working on the Toronto archive, and the other archive.org page image archives, are using the generated DjVu files, as we don't have the bandwidth to download half a gig or more of images per book. These are usually of good enough quality to OCR. > You didn't mention reconciling your list with the cleared/books in > progress list The reconciliation is done by people informing me when material on this list is already in progress. It might be possible to do some of this by automatically comparing David's In Progress List with this list, but nothing along those lines has yet been done. It's up to the individuals who claim books from this list to check their status. , and looking at your web page, I see that you intend to > process at least one of those books in progress - by me - namely: > > Also, your list also has a duplicate entry for this title. Thanks for reporting these in the thread on the DP forum. Both entries have been marked as already in progress. -- Jon Ingram __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com From jtinsley at pobox.com Sun Apr 24 16:27:15 2005 From: jtinsley at pobox.com (Jim Tinsley) Date: Sun Apr 24 16:27:28 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] the .html version of e-text #15701 In-Reply-To: <1d4.3aaa3df9.2f9d597f@aol.com> References: <1d4.3aaa3df9.2f9d597f@aol.com> Message-ID: <20050424232715.GA24277@panix.com> On Sun, Apr 24, 2005 at 04:20:15PM -0400, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote: > >i'm trying to look at the .html version of #15701, >which i downloaded as a zip file to my own machine, >and it seems to require an open internet connection. >it wants to call the w3 or something. why? > I don't know. It doesn't for me. It's conceivable--just-- that your browser is trying to pre-fetch the W3 DTD as defined in the DOCTYPE declaration, but it's the first time I ever heard of something like that happening. And the same declaration is in lots of texts; nothing new or strange about this one. I'm glad you mentioned it, though, because when I posted it last night, I made a final one-character change and instead of copying it to /gut, I copied it to gut, which resulted in my uploading both the real file and a copy of it with the change named "gut". I've fixed and reuploaded. >even with such a connection, it won't display in ie5.1. >works in opera 5, but not internet explorer. why not? I have really given up trying to figure out why IE, any version, doesn't work right, so you're on your own there! I can tell you that it displays fine in my IE 6, Mozilla, K-Meleon . . . even Lynx. :-) > >and the .html version of #15698 won't work in either one... > That one is more interesting; it doesn't have a terminating HTML comment mark after the , but should pass that text on to the stylesheet parser. It has become common to embed an internal style declaration inside HTML comments () for compatibility with older browsers which did not support style sheets. If a browser did not support style sheets it would encounter the tag. No validation of the actual style sheets is performed. I suspect that the W3C validator operates the same way. Validators are good tools, but satisfying a validator does not mean that the HTML is, in fact, valid -- only that there are no errors of the type that the validators are designed to catch. On a related note, let me say that I view internal style declarations as just plain rude. Style sheets are indeed A Good Thing, but someone imposing their quirky notions of style on me is not. By placing style definitions in an external style sheet and simply linking that style sheet into the main document with a element, it makes it easy for me to strip away the suggested styles, and return to browser defaults, by simply deleting or renaming the style sheet. And if the suggested styles are mostly good, and need only a slight tweaking, it is safer and easier to edit an external style sheet than the main document. I would strongly encourage all PG volunteers who are creating HTML documents to consider putting suggested style definitions in an external style sheet rather than embedding those styles in the main document. From joshua at hutchinson.net Tue Apr 26 14:04:06 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Tue Apr 26 14:04:16 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More than you ever wanted to know about XHTML and CSS Message-ID: <20050426210406.16234EE13D@ws6-1.us4.outblaze.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Passey" > > On a related note, let me say that I view internal style declarations as > just plain rude. Style sheets are indeed A Good Thing, but someone > imposing their quirky notions of style on me is not. By placing style > definitions in an external style sheet and simply linking that style > sheet into the main document with a element, it makes it easy for > me to strip away the suggested styles, and return to browser defaults, > by simply deleting or renaming the style sheet. And if the suggested > styles are mostly good, and need only a slight tweaking, it is safer and > easier to edit an external style sheet than the main document. I would > strongly encourage all PG volunteers who are creating HTML documents to > consider putting suggested style definitions in an external style sheet > rather than embedding those styles in the main document. > Let me say that I agree. But right now, the ww'ers have indicated that they want all styles inline. I think this practice should be changed, but it isn't my call. Josh From marcello at perathoner.de Tue Apr 26 14:43:06 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Tue Apr 26 14:43:18 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More than you ever wanted to know about XHTML and CSS In-Reply-To: <426EA495.5010905@novomail.net> References: <20050425190003.8CBDA8C8EF@pglaf.org> <426EA495.5010905@novomail.net> Message-ID: <426EB5EA.5020904@perathoner.de> Lee Passey wrote: > The problem is, indeed, the unterminated comment. The XHTML DTD defines > the , but > should pass that text on to the stylesheet parser. A user agent that *knows* about style sheets will not. A user agent developed before CSS will just ignore the style tags but will process the data in between. > While the lack of a closing comment tag in the

Don't show this to any DP Project Manager. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster@gutenberg.org From jon at noring.name Thu Apr 28 11:35:07 2005 From: jon at noring.name (Jon Noring) Date: Thu Apr 28 11:35:16 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More than you ever wanted to know about XHTML and CSS (gutvol-d Digest, Vol 9, Issue 23) In-Reply-To: <42712884.7080305@perathoner.de> References: <20050427001709.324168C8F9@pglaf.org> <427102BE.5040001@novomail.net> <42712884.7080305@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <802820895.20050428123507@noring.name> Marcello wrote: > Lee Passey wrote: >> This objection, and Marcello's response, are both based on a faulty >> assumption: that the primary use of HTML files will be online, served up >> by some sort of HTTP server. I would bet that the vast majority of all >> HTML files offered by Project Gutenberg are downloaded to a local >> computer, and then read while offline. > But how does the file get to the local harddrive in the first place? > Maybe you don't realize that the PG website is serving an average of > 300.000 file requests for a total of 130 GB a day. That is 12 Mbit/s, or > 8 T1 lines under full steam all day long. > > In our case it is very important not to constipate the pipes with all > those packets needed to open and close a connection which carry no > useful data. Lee did mention that the HTML version of a PG book be put into a downloadable zip file. This should lead to some reduction in "pipe flow". Otherwise, whenever someone accesses the online version, they may do so multiple times. Also, zip may help some with improved compression, and of course encapsulate multiple files into one. At least that's how I see it. How much savings this gives, if any, I can't estimate. On another matter, how Firefox handles multiple > > > > >

Don't show this to any DP Project Manager. > > Too late. We know all about that trick! :) The problem is that some browsers, whom shall remain nameless (*cough* IE *cough), go into "quirks" mode when there is multiple style sheets defined. Things that worked fine with just one style sheet defined now quit working correctly with multiple style sheets defined. Nevermind the fact that IE refuses to let you switch styles on the fly. Now, IE *shouldn't* switch to quirks mode base on multiple styles, but it seems to anyways (at least in the limited testing I did on the subject). It is also extremely annoying that IE triggers quirks mode if you include an XML prolog at the beginning. (BTW, Marcello, the TEI conversion currently puts that prolog in ... which triggers IE to quirks mode DESPITE the Strict statement in the next line. We should see if we can safely remove it.) See http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html for a quick and dirty primer on quirks mode and why it exists. Josh From joshua at hutchinson.net Thu Apr 28 11:47:33 2005 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Thu Apr 28 11:47:41 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More than you ever wanted to know about XHTML andCSS (gutv Message-ID: <20050428184733.933272F9CD@ws6-3.us4.outblaze.com> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jon Noring" > > On another matter, how Firefox handles multiple >> >> >> >> >>

Don't show this to any DP Project Manager. >> > It is also extremely annoying that IE triggers quirks mode if you > include an XML prolog at the beginning. encoding="utf-8"?> Thanks for the link to quirksmode.org. I was aware of the quirks/ strict mode switches of browsers (based mostly on DOCTYPE), but didn't realize that IE6 messed things up vis-a-vis the XML prolog: "In Explorer 6 Windows, Microsoft implemented one extra rule: if a doctype that triggers strict mode is preceded by an xml prolog, the page shows in quirks mode. This was done to allow web developers to achieve valid pages (which require a doctype) but nonetheless stay in quirks mode." This is very lame. Microsoft simply assumed that no one will ever include the XML prolog in a finished online HTML page, so they invoked this rule for testing purposes! (There are certainly other ways they could have used to force quirks mode, like a "always quirks mode" menu selection.) Hopefully the announced IE upgrade (supposedly to me more CSS standards conformant -- a result of the pressure from Firefox and Opera) will fix this. But I'm not holding my breath. Jon Noring From marcello at perathoner.de Thu Apr 28 12:16:55 2005 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Thu Apr 28 12:17:05 2005 Subject: [gutvol-d] More than you ever wanted to know about XHTML and CSS (gutvol-d Digest, Vol 9, Issue 23) In-Reply-To: <802820895.20050428123507@noring.name> References: <20050427001709.324168C8F9@pglaf.org> <427102BE.5040001@novomail.net> <42712884.7080305@perathoner.de> <802820895.20050428123507@noring.name> Message-ID: <427136A7.5090108@perathoner.de> Jon Noring wrote: > Lee did mention that the HTML version of a PG book be put into a > downloadable zip file. I see. He invented warm water. We were doing that since day 1. > On another matter, how Firefox handles multiple > > > > >

Don't show this to any DP Project Manager. > > For *internal* style sheets, defined within