From cannona at fireantproductions.com Sat May 1 20:56:59 2010 From: cannona at fireantproductions.com (Aaron Cannon) Date: Sat, 1 May 2010 22:56:59 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Announcement: New Project Gutenberg DVD released Message-ID: The Project Gutenberg April 2010 (Dual Layer) DVD has been released. This new DVD contains over 29,500 eBooks. For more information, visit the Project Gutenberg web site. http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_CD_and_DVD_Project Thanks to all those who participated in its production. Aaron From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 3 11:05:55 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 14:05:55 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> press release says: > CUPERTINO, California?May 3, 2010?Apple? today > announced that it sold its one millionth iPad? on Friday, > just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. iPad users have > already downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store > and over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.? > ?One million iPads in 28 days?that?s less than half of the > 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,? > said Steve Jobs, Apple?s CEO. ?Demand continues to > exceed supply and we?re working hard to get this > magical product into the hands of even more customers. they're selling like hotcakes. twice as fast as the iphone, which -- if i remember correctly -- was widely acknowledged as quite a phenomenon at the time... and this weekend, the g3 models came out, so apple stores had many people (who'd been waiting for it) standing in line. maybe apple _does_ need to do a little market research, so they woulda discovered the remarkable latent demand for this niche. it continues: > iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content > in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. > Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and > share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, > read ebooks and much more see where e-books come in, priority-wise? > http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/05/03ipad.html -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dakretz at gmail.com Mon May 3 11:52:15 2010 From: dakretz at gmail.com (don kretz) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 11:52:15 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: Try this with a kindle. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From prosfilaes at gmail.com Mon May 3 12:20:07 2010 From: prosfilaes at gmail.com (David Starner) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 15:20:07 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 2:52 PM, don kretz wrote: > Try this with a kindle. Cute; if I actually cared enough about gimmicks like that to own a single pop-up book, I might really care. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero. From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 3 12:43:40 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 15:43:40 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <2877a.5a696b52.3910816c@aol.com> dakretz said: > Try this with a kindle. well, there are lots of people who will _prefer_ the kindle for the precise reason that it _won't_ do things like that... they wanna read a book, be absorbed in that experience; if they wanted to play a videogame instead, they'd do that. i'm not saying they're right or wrong. but they _do_ exist. the other thing is, you need to know the budget for that app. i'd guess if you wanted to hire someone to make something like that for you as a one-off, you would end up paying a lot. and if you wanted someone to make you an _authoring-tool_ that allowed you to make all kinds of different books like that, you'd be paying ten times as much. keep that in perspective... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hart at pglaf.org Mon May 3 14:12:54 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 14:12:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <2877a.5a696b52.3910816c@aol.com> References: <2877a.5a696b52.3910816c@aol.com> Message-ID: I heard the same thing. . .makes me somewhat suspicious of when they announced the 300,000 mark. . . . One doesn't fit well in conjunction with the other. . .in which case I yield my guess. From hart at pglaf.org Mon May 3 14:36:15 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 14:36:15 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 3 May 2010, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > press release says: > >?? CUPERTINO, California?May 3, 2010?Apple? today > >?? announced that it sold its one millionth iPad? on Friday, > >?? just 28 days after its introduction on April 3. iPad users have > >?? already downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store > >?? and over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.? They are obviously not pushing eBook hard enough, as that means only 1.5 eBooks per iPad. However, I'll bet that changes. > >?? ?One million iPads in 28 days?that?s less than half of the ?? 74 days it > >took to achieve this milestone with iPhone,? ?? said Steve Jobs, Apple?s > >CEO. ?Demand continues to ?? exceed supply and we?re working hard to get > >this ?? magical product into the hands of even more customers. > > they're selling like hotcakes. > > twice as fast as the iphone, which -- if i remember correctly -- > was widely acknowledged as quite a phenomenon at the time... I agree that it was. . .however, I still have yet to see an iPad in the wild, and I've certainly seen iPhones, iPods, and clones. However, I've never seen ANY eReader in the wild, even airports, big cities, etc. > and this weekend, the g3 models came out, so apple stores > had many people (who'd been waiting for it) standing in line. > > maybe apple _does_ need to do a little market research, so they > woulda discovered the remarkable latent demand for this niche. Not to mention for eBooks. . .er, iBooks. . .hee hee! > it continues: > >?? iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content > >?? in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. > >?? Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and > >?? share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, > >?? read ebooks and much more > > see where e-books come in, priority-wise? It just makes you wonder, doesn't it? However, don't forget all the other eBook Apps!!! > >?? http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/05/03ipad.html > > -bowerbird > > From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 3 14:43:11 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 17:43:11 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <30e48.365dc87a.39109d6f@aol.com> 300,000 was after their first weekend, but that also included pre-orders; i'm sure they had lots of those. so in the 24 days since, they've sold some 700,000, which would work out to roughly 30,000 per day... i don't really know how to judge these things, but considering the number of apple stores, plus the fact that best buy is also selling it, it sounds right. the 3g models are going to cause a big bump too... so it wouldn't surprise me if they get to 2 million in another month or two. after that, it might level off. of course, they'll probably sell another 2 million in the 4th quarter, assuming people buy holiday gifts. (given our economy, it's not a sure thing anymore.) -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 3 14:47:25 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 17:47:25 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <312b3.7fec0f3e.39109e6d@aol.com> michael said: > They are obviously not pushing eBook hard enough, > as that means only 1.5 eBooks per iPad.? well, but steve jobs just might point out that that's how many p-books an average person in the united states buys in an average year... :+) -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 3 15:04:43 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 18:04:43 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <3251b.4b5bf613.3910a27b@aol.com> no word from the mad scientist, so let's proceed anyway... *** to remind you where we were, i had freed the text from the p.g. linebreaks, set the typesize at a nice 12-point, and run it out with a 4.5-inch measure, obtained from a pagesize of 5.5*8.5-inches, with 1-inch side-margins. the text-editor version weighed in at about 567 pages, and i provided both ragged-right and justified versions. *** the next thing was to run the text using my converter. i used most linebreaks obtained from the above specs... (i made a few changes, in a process i can discuss later.) these lines had an average length of about 66 characters. for my taste, that's still too long, but it's what bringhurst recommends, and that _is_ the length our specs created. another font woulda created lines with fewer characters, because times new roman is known for being quite tight -- it was designed with that aim -- but let's not quibble, other than to note that lines in the p-book were shorter. *** once linebreaks are set, you can output them to various _pagesizes_ simply by jacking up your text-size and/or making the margins bigger; as an example of that, i ran it out at 8.5*11, with 17-point type and 1-inch margins. > http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-8.5*11.pdf or here's the 5.5*8.5, at 12-point type, half-inch margins: > http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-5.5*8.5.pdf note that i could also do a version for the iphone screen, with perhaps 8-point type and very small margins, and _all_ of these versions would have the same linebreaks... there's this myth/misunderstanding about _reflow_ that you _must_ reflow to accommodate different screensizes. that's not entirely true; it's _never_ been entirely true. for instance, consider the popular "pocket dictionary" which brags that it has the exact same pagination as a regular-sized dictionary. then, in addition, take a look at an oversized dictionary, and you are likely to find that it too has the exact same pagination. how is this done? well, it's quite simple, actually. the font-size is reduced. and, actually, it's quite _natural_ to reduce the font-size with smaller pagesize. (and to increase it with bigger.) because we hold a pocket dictionary closer to our face, and the oversize dictionary farther than a regular one... so our eyes automatically adjust to the varying fontsize. nor does this harm readability. most studies show that it's character-count that matters in terms of readability, not the actual length of a line per se. which means that our notions about "reflow" are quite confused, because those notions create _shorter_ lines when the fontsize is increased, since we're holding the window-size constant. *** at any rate, you have a couple more .pdfs to peruse... i'll do some more fiddling with this book, just for my own edification, but at this point i could consider it "finished". so if anyone has any feedback, please feel free to spill it... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From answerwitch at gmail.com Mon May 3 16:13:51 2010 From: answerwitch at gmail.com (Mjit RaindancerStahl) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 19:13:51 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Michael S. Hart wrote: > > I agree that it was. . .however, I still have yet to see an iPad > in the wild, and I've certainly seen iPhones, iPods, and clones. > > However, I've never seen ANY eReader in the wild, even airports, > big cities, etc. > I've seen one kindle, owned by a woman who was attending an author talk at the local (Lansing MI) library. And I saw at least two iPads this weekend, at a science fiction convention (Penguicon). -- Mjit RaindancerStahl answerwitch at gmail.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Mon May 3 19:56:30 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 19:56:30 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <2877a.5a696b52.3910816c@aol.com> References: <2877a.5a696b52.3910816c@aol.com> Message-ID: >dakretz said: >> Try this with a kindle. >well, there are lots of people who will _prefer_ the kindle >for the precise reason that it _won't_ do things like that... My relatives love the iPad for playing Pictionary remotely with each other. The Kindle could be a much better Kindle, and the iPad could be a much better iPad. I'd have to say that we are still very much in the early innings of ebook reader development. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Mon May 3 20:54:27 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 20:54:27 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <312b3.7fec0f3e.39109e6d@aol.com> References: <312b3.7fec0f3e.39109e6d@aol.com> Message-ID: FWIW Wall Street Journal was projecting Kindle to be at 7 Million by year's end. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Mon May 3 21:01:56 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Mon, 3 May 2010 21:01:56 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <3251b.4b5bf613.3910a27b@aol.com> References: <3251b.4b5bf613.3910a27b@aol.com> Message-ID: Compare to: "The Case for Legibility" by John Ryder, which itself uses 40 char lines (surprise, surprise) and 3 / 4 inch margins on a page width of four inches. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hart at pglaf.org Tue May 4 04:08:51 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 04:08:51 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <312b3.7fec0f3e.39109e6d@aol.com> Message-ID: This all seems so strange given how many years it was before Amazon AND Sony released ANY numbers at all, and how long to a million!?! On Mon, 3 May 2010, James Adcock wrote: > > FWIW Wall Street Journal was projecting Kindle to be at 7 Million by year?s end. > > ? > > > From hart at pglaf.org Tue May 4 04:12:01 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 04:12:01 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <2877a.5a696b52.3910816c@aol.com> Message-ID: On Mon, 3 May 2010, James Adcock wrote: > > >dakretz said: > >>?? Try this with a kindle. > > >well, there are lots of people who will _prefer_ the kindle > >for the precise reason that it _won't_ do things like that... > > ? > > My relatives love the iPad for playing Pictionary remotely with each other. > > ? > > The Kindle could be a much better Kindle, and the iPad could be a much better > iPad.? I?d have to say that we are still very much in the early innings of ebook > reader development. However, let's not forget that on Apple's list of iPad interests, being an eBook reader was the last thing mentioned. . . . Not to mention how many games are pretty much over in early innings. Personally, I think there will be few more interesting "at bats." From hart at pglaf.org Tue May 4 04:20:02 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 04:20:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: Thanks. . . . I'm wondering why we don't see them more often. . . ? On Mon, 3 May 2010, Mjit RaindancerStahl wrote: > > > On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Michael S. Hart wrote: > > I agree that it was. . .however, I still have yet to see an iPad > in the wild, and I've certainly seen iPhones, iPods, and clones. > > However, I've never seen ANY eReader in the wild, even airports, > big cities, etc. > > > > I've seen one kindle, owned by a woman who was attending an author talk at the > local (Lansing MI) library. And I saw at least two iPads this weekend, at a > science fiction convention (Penguicon). > > -- > Mjit RaindancerStahl > answerwitch at gmail.com > > From vze3rknp at verizon.net Tue May 4 07:05:15 2010 From: vze3rknp at verizon.net (Juliet Sutherland) Date: Tue, 04 May 2010 10:05:15 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: <4BE0299B.5040104@verizon.net> I've seen both Kindles and Sony readers in airports and on planes. I haven't traveled since the iPad came out, so can't report on that. When I first got my Sony reader (August 2008) airline attendants didn't know what it was and so didn't make me turn it off for take-off and landing. Now they do know what the ereaders are, and insist that they must be turned off. That's been true for almost a year. JulietS On 5/4/2010 7:20 AM, Michael S. Hart wrote: > Thanks. . . . > > I'm wondering why we don't see them more often. . . ? > > > On Mon, 3 May 2010, Mjit RaindancerStahl wrote: > > >> >> On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 5:36 PM, Michael S. Hart wrote: >> >> I agree that it was. . .however, I still have yet to see an iPad >> in the wild, and I've certainly seen iPhones, iPods, and clones. >> >> However, I've never seen ANY eReader in the wild, even airports, >> big cities, etc. >> >> >> >> I've seen one kindle, owned by a woman who was attending an author talk at the >> local (Lansing MI) library. And I saw at least two iPads this weekend, at a >> science fiction convention (Penguicon). >> From jimad at msn.com Tue May 4 11:21:10 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 11:21:10 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: I commonly see Kindles, and on airplanes I commonly see at least one Kindle, BUT, SEATAC is on one end of my flights, so most of the people carrying Kindles in one hand are holding a Starbucks in the other hand... On an airplane I commonly see: About 50% of the passengers have laptops. About 5% of the passengers have netbooks. About 5% of the passengers rent a gaming console from the airplane company. About 0.5% own some kind of ebook reader. 0.0% reading anything on a cellphone-sized device. Kind of makes one wonder why people aren't working to improve the reading experience on laptops -- it would "just" require improved ebook reader software. Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, B&N Desktop aren't "bad" readers -- but they aren't very "good" either. From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 4 12:03:11 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 15:03:11 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> > projecting Kindle to be at 7 Million "projections" of future numbers are pure bunk. even estimates of the current number are suspect, since amazon resolutely refuses to announce it, but at least we have auxiliary measures that will provide some kind of realistic bounding restraints, one of the most important being e-book _sales_... in this regard, the best observer to pay attention to is david moynihan -- over at blackmask/munsey's -- who has been paying very close attention for years... david was the one who rang the bell when the kindle started moving substantial units. (and pooh-poohed everything else as mere hype and marketing bullcrap.) he has his finger on the pulse; he's the only one i trust. of course, i'm interested in the ipad _regardless_ of the numbers it rings up, because it presents opportunities in a number of new arenas, so i think it will springboard a lot of creativity that the kindle was too crude to free up. current estimates of the kindle weigh in at about 3 million. i don't see them selling more in the next 5 months than they have sold up to this point in time. but i can see them selling a lot of units nonetheless. and i can definitely say that i absolutely love the t.v. commercials they're running. one of 'em has a tune that knocks my socks off every time. i love it. it makes me feel _joy_. i replay it over and over. > in the early innings of ebook reader development. oh please. we've had worthwhile "e-book readers" for a decade, in the realm of both hardware and software. so these are hardly "early innings". that was long ago. and the development of a mobile computer has been a widespread vision ever since the early days of star trek. yes, things _will_ move a lot faster now, thanks to apple showing the world the direction in which it should move. and we'll be amazed by how far we go in the next 5 years. but let's not pretend we couldn't have taken these steps 5 years earlier, if the hardware businesses didn't have a policy of rolling out innovation as _slowly_ as they can, and soak up as much profit as possible from each step... previous tablets were crude, now that we've seen apple do them _correctly_. but if those crude tablets would've cost $500, instead of $1500, people woulda bought 'em, and the world could have started moving forward earlier. but those hardware guys are greedy greedy greedy boys... > I'm wondering why we don't see them more often. . . ? it's purely a coincidence thing. i noticed i didn't see many iphones until their number got to about 5 million or so. and it was only when it got up to 15 million that i started seeing them on a "regular" basis... but kindles _are_ out there... my girlfriend belongs to a women's philanthropic education organization, and there are three women in her chapter (of 45) who own a kindle. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 4 13:21:54 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 16:21:54 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <8fcc.6c7be7f2.3911dbe2@aol.com> more experimentation on "gods and fighting men". i ran out a .pdf version specifically for the iphone: > http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-320*440.pdf the iphone has a display that is 320*480, but i shortened up the height because when you read a .pdf in safari, there's a bar across the bottom. speaking of which, the .pdf reader in safari sucks. the first problem is that the .pdf is presented in one long scroll window. it would be much better if it was _paginated_, and a left/right swipe would navigate from page to page, a la iphone typicality. the second problem is that you cannot advance the scrollbar in long jumps to remote locations; you must move through the .pdf incrementally... when a .pdf has 530+ pages, like this one does, that becomes a significant pain in the derriere... i'd hope that other .pdf readers (a la goodreader) have overcome these constrictions in their apps... *** so now we have three different versions... > http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-320*440.pdf > http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-5.5*8.5.pdf > http://z-m-l.com/misc/14465-8.5*11.pdf aside from some differences in the _margins_ and the leading within the text-block, these .pdfs are extremely similar. they each have the same lines on the same pages, and that is easy to recognize... what you will find, moreover, is that the _pagesize_ doesn't make much difference at all -- almost none! if you pull these 3 .pdfs into the same view-port, the "zoom-to-fit" display option will make them appear to be quite similar. indeed, on the iphone, which has smarts that ignore whitespace margins, the different versions appear virtually identical... reflection shows that this is what i was talking about when i discussed how the "pocket dictionary" and the oversized version shared the exact same pagination as the "regular" version. the pages are just "zoomed" or "reduced" as necessary to fit the paper being used. so, if you create your .pdf _correctly_, it can be used on a wide variety of screensizes without any problem. the secret, however, to making the .pdf "correctly" is to make sure the fontsize being used is large enough. when i created the 8.5*11 .pdf, i had to use a fontsize of 17 points, which will seem "too big" to many people. it's not "too big". it creates a 66-character line-length, and the resultant .pdf is viable across many screensizes. and this is why the .pdf that most people create is bad, and not useable on smaller screens. they use a pagesize of 8.5*11 with text that is sized at 11-point or 12-point. that creates lines too long for best readability, and text that's too small to read when shrunk to a small screensize. *** however, even though i use phrases like "best readability" and "too small to read", the most important takeaway here is that digital text gives people the ability to make a .pdf that they can _customize_ to their own unique preferences. questions like "what pointsize gives best readability?" and "what's ideal line length?" and "what should the leading be?" all presume that there is _one_ answer that applies to all... that's a presumption that has some validity when we are creating _one_ version of the book that _everyone_ reads. but that's no longer the case, thanks to print-on-demand. now, everyone can make their own version of the book, and the only "ideal" variables are the ones for _you_personally_. some typographer might say that garamond is the "best font" for this book. but if you like palatino better, use palatino! and who cares if most people prefer 12-point type the best? if you like 11-point, use that to print your copy of the book. if you want 72-character lines, fine! 66-character lines? ok! 54-character lines, no problem! 40-character lines, great! 4-inch lines, fine! or 4.5-inch, 5-inch, 5.5-inch, whatever! the "standard" leading is 120%. but if you like 150% better, and you don't mind that it'll take more pages to print it out, then go for it! *** there is one caveat, however. it's fine for you to create your own one-off of a book set to your own preferences. but don't inflict that book on the world at large, please... keep it to yourself. the world doesn't need 14,926 versions of every book. because here's the problem. some of those versions will have errors in them. and other versions will have other errors. and other versions will have still others. sorting out these 14,926 versions will be a nightmare. that's why -- in my first experiments with this book, i retained the p.g. linebreaks. there's no reason to introduce new linebreaks to the world unnecessarily. it just complicates things, for very little good reason. as long as you retain the p.g. linebreaks, it'll be easy for users who wanna track the provenance of the text. once you introduce different linebreaks, even if the text is the same, ease of comparison is jeopardized. so go ahead and change the linebreaks for yourself. but don't inflict that changed version on the world... *** of course, there's little reason that project gutenberg should be introducing a new set of linebreaks itself... it would be far better if it kept the p-book linebreaks. those paper-books are already out there in the world. they are the canonical version we should adhere to... their linebreaks should be the linebreaks that we use. so let's take a look at the paper copies of this book... internet archive has scanned four copies of this book. here are scans for pages 122 and 123 in those books: > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm00gregrich122.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm00gregrich123.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm00greguoft122.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm00greguoft123.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm00yeatgoog122.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm00yeatgoog123.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm01yeatgoog122.jpg > http://z-m-l.com/misc/godfm01yeatgoog123.jpg as you can see, each of these scan-sets is consistent; linebreaks and page composition are the exact same. character-count on these lines is about 54 characters. page 122 and other full pages have a line-count of 36. my next experiments will be to reproduce this format. jim, if you want to make yourself useful, you could do a reformatting of the project gutenberg e-text so that it matches the linebreaks from one of these scan-sets. i will give you a couple days time to pull off that task... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hart at pglaf.org Tue May 4 15:06:02 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 15:06:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: I notice that no one has said they didn't see iPods back when there were only a million of those. ;-) From hart at pglaf.org Tue May 4 15:09:54 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 15:09:54 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <20fa9.cb8ce31.39106a83@aol.com> Message-ID: On Tue, 4 May 2010, Jim Adcock wrote: > I commonly see Kindles, and on airplanes I commonly see at least one Kindle, > BUT, SEATAC is on one end of my flights, so most of the people carrying > Kindles in one hand are holding a Starbucks in the other hand... I, too, come from SeaTac, and our CEO travels through it as well on a regular basis. > On an airplane I commonly see: > > About 50% of the passengers have laptops. Not once have I been on a flight with 50% laptops, even if you included all of the devices listed below. I'll start asking around. > About 5% of the passengers have netbooks. > > About 5% of the passengers rent a gaming console from the airplane company. > > About 0.5% own some kind of ebook reader. > > 0.0% reading anything on a cellphone-sized device. > > Kind of makes one wonder why people aren't working to improve the reading > experience on laptops -- it would "just" require improved ebook reader > software. Kindle for PC, Kindle for Mac, B&N Desktop aren't "bad" readers > -- but they aren't very "good" either. > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 4 15:24:48 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 4 May 2010 18:24:48 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <1542a.4bba832.3911f8b0@aol.com> michael said: > I notice that no one has said they didn't see iPods > back when there were only a million of those. those white earbuds were an excellent marketing device, eh? ;+) -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From schultzk at uni-trier.de Wed May 5 00:46:07 2010 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J. Schultz) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 09:46:07 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> C'mon People, 1 Million units! How many citizens in the US. So how many in 1 Million citizens will have a iPad. So what are the chances of seeing a iPad. Do not forget many of those units where out bound! The iPad has still to be launched in Europe, ... Yes, the numbers are impressive. Here in Germany I have not seen one Kindle. I friend of mine had bought one when he was told he could get all the new publications for it. Well, guess what? He returned because he could not get any new book he was interested in. So much for the eBook market. The eBook market is in the "early innings". Same goes for the iPad. I am sure Apple will open up their reader to import other formats as demands rises, just as they did with iTunes. As far as statistics are concerned: A hunter shot at a rabbit and missed it 10 feet to the right. Shot again. This time 10 feet to the left. Well, statistically he killed the rabbit! regards Keith. From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 5 01:52:01 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 04:52:01 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] quick review of my proofing system Message-ID: <26abe.16d6d2df.39128bb1@aol.com> here's a quick review of my proofing system... the best overview is to look at this screenshot: > http://z-m-l.com/go/triple2010.jpg you can see there is plenty of room for buttons, which can perform a wide multitude of actions... if you've got a cinema-screen, you can see it live: > http://z-m-l.com/go/triple2010.html proofers compare the scan against an .html-field. (the scan is on the left; the .html is in the middle.) if a change needs to be made, that change is done using the text-field, there on the right, which then generates as its output the .html-field in the center. the edit-field is not "what you see is what you get". but it's what creates the .html, so its representation _should_ be output that essentially matches the scan. of course, the users who don't have cinema screens can't have all three fields displayed simultaneously, so you'll have to swap the .html-field and edit-field as needed. the initial proof is with the .html-field, and the proofer clicks an "edit" button if necessary, which swaps out the .html-field for the edit-field, and the swap is reversed once the text gets edited... and yes, everything we need to represent _can_ be entered with a plain-text edit-field. lines of poetry can be indented with the correct number of spaces. even paragraph indents can be entered with spaces. likewise, i prepend "> " to the lines of a blockquote. a centered line of text is prefaced with _one_ space. headers have 4 (or more) lines above, and 2 below... (different header levels have 4, 5, 6, etc. lines above.) tables are discerned by their multiple internal spaces. once you commit to this methodology, you find that it's rather easy to create a simple way to make it work. likewise, the code that converts the text-field into the .html-field is rather straightforward and easy to create. if you need any help with any of these things, just call... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hart at pglaf.org Wed May 5 05:43:04 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 05:43:04 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> Message-ID: On Wed, 5 May 2010, Keith J. Schultz wrote: > C'mon People, > > 1 Million units! How many citizens in the US. > So how many in 1 Million citizens will have a > iPad. So what are the chances of seeing a iPad. 300 million people 1 million iPads 1/300 people have an iPad. > Do not forget many of those units where out bound! Not counting those already out of the country. > The iPad has still to be launched in Europe, ... > > Yes, the numbers are impressive. > > Here in Germany I have not seen one Kindle. > > I friend of mine had bought one when he was told > he could get all the new publications for it. > Well, guess what? He returned because he could not > get any new book he was interested in. So much for false representation, has happened with many items. > So much for the eBook market. The eBook market is in > the "early innings". Same goes for the iPad. If the predictions we have at the moment are correct, eBooks have entered the fourth inning, and, technically, have thus entered the middle innings. Remember, we are on a log curve here. . .not much has to happen in the early innings, but the next three could be the ones to tell how things will progress. > I am sure Apple will open up their reader to import > other formats as demands rises, just as they did with iTunes. You never really know about Apple, but I doubt they will even THINK about it as long as sales are so high, These thoughts will likely only come around when their numbers drop below some curve their MBA's have on their wall. > As far as statistics are concerned: > A hunter shot at a rabbit and missed it 10 feet to the right. > Shot again. This time 10 feet to the left. > Well, statistically he killed the rabbit! Yes, but your statistician left out the large Standard Deviation. Time to get a new statistician. > regards > Keith. > > From jimad at msn.com Wed May 5 12:54:32 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 12:54:32 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: >previous tablets were crude, now that we've seen apple do them _correctly_. Beg to differ that any tablet is done "correctly" if you pay for wifi/3g but aren't actually allowed to use the wifi/3g to do anything with books but buy from the company store. Kindle/Nook/iPad all suffer from restrictions on wireless transmission in an attempt by the hardware mfg to tie you to their company store. Netbooks, for example, do no suffer from this restriction. Toshiba Portege doesn't have the restriction, but at $1300 is a *bit* pricy for a reader, not to mention 5 lb vs. 1 lb for a DX. From hart at pglaf.org Wed May 5 13:10:02 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 13:10:02 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: Enough with you saying you can't "do anything with book but buy from the company store." I have already gone out of my way to demonstrate that people can get who knows how many tens of thousands of eBooks from other sources in the world than "buy from the company store." And these were FREE!!! Not just not from Apple's pile of eBooks, from also from others, not even for sale, so you were, and still are, wrong on both counts. "Buy" and "Company Store" You sound like nothing more than a shrill shill, given shillings for ranting and raving against Apple and the iPad. Please. . .be quiet until you have really done your homework. Stop, in heaven's name pretending that you did your homework when it is obvious to all concerned that you haven't. "My dog ate my homework, so I don't have it," would sound better. You make us all look bad when you talk like this. . . . Please stop. . . . On Wed, 5 May 2010, Jim Adcock wrote: > >previous tablets were crude, now that we've seen apple do them _correctly_. > > Beg to differ that any tablet is done "correctly" if you pay for wifi/3g but > aren't actually allowed to use the wifi/3g to do anything with books but buy > from the company store. Kindle/Nook/iPad all suffer from restrictions on > wireless transmission in an attempt by the hardware mfg to tie you to their > company store. Netbooks, for example, do no suffer from this restriction. > Toshiba Portege doesn't have the restriction, but at $1300 is a *bit* pricy > for a reader, not to mention 5 lb vs. 1 lb for a DX. > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > From jimad at msn.com Wed May 5 17:51:21 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 17:51:21 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <8fcc.6c7be7f2.3911dbe2@aol.com> References: <8fcc.6c7be7f2.3911dbe2@aol.com> Message-ID: >jim, if you want to make yourself useful, you could do a reformatting of the project gutenberg e-text so that it matches the linebreaks from one of these scan-sets. i will give you a couple days time to pull off that task... LOL, that would presume the usefulness of *your* current activities, BB! In any case, take a look at: http://www.freekindlebooks.org/Dev/godsln.txt You might also want to compare your approach to those of Ronald Burkey, circa 2001: http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Wed May 5 17:57:13 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 17:57:13 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <1542a.4bba832.3911f8b0@aol.com> References: <1542a.4bba832.3911f8b0@aol.com> Message-ID: > I notice that no one has said they didn't see iPods > back when there were only a million of those. It must have something to do with that dance that iPod owners do. http://www.apple.com/itunes/ads/ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Wed May 5 18:09:37 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 18:09:37 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> Message-ID: >Here in Germany I have not seen one Kindle. Looking at the Amazon.de site it appears that Amazon is NOT having good luck getting German publishers to publish on Kindle. On Amazon.de they advertise 380,000 *English Language* Kindle books available to the German Market, as compared to a handful of German Books to the German Market. On Amazon.com they have 1000+ Kindle German Language books selling into the US Market -- most of these books being "classics." From jimad at msn.com Wed May 5 18:42:47 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 18:42:47 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: >You sound like nothing more than a shrill shill, given shillings for ranting and raving against Apple and the iPad. Pardon, but I believe *I* expressed *My* opinions (repeated below) in a polite and measured way. I believe I have already acknowledged your "work-arounds" -- I just don't want to have to deal with "work-arounds." Also, I don't believe it is fair to represent my comments as coming from a "shill" given that I acknowledged the shortcomings of multiple machines. Also, I can assure you that I am NOT a "shill" and I would appreciate it if you publicly retracted that slander. If anything I appear to be the LEAST fanatic and most pragmatic about their choice of reading machine on this forum! If anyone else goes to the Apple Company Store, tries an iPad and it does what YOU want it to do: THEN BUY IT! I encourage EVERYBODY to go to an Apple Store, try it, and see what they think FOR THEMSELVES! It doesn't do what *I* want it to do, so *I* don't buy it -- I would THINK that wouldn't be very controversial position to take! Personally I am going to wait till 4.0 and see if its less restrictive then. HP Slate is rumored to be killed, in which case THAT certainly isn't a solution. (Presumably HP/Palm are now busy retooling to make a "Palm" version of the Slate/iPad, *sigh*) Que with its relationship with B&N also seems now to have picked up the wifi/3g "virus" of not allowing the owner of the machine to do what they like with their OWN wifi/3g connection. http://www.que.com/ What justification can you think of except trying to force sales through the company store to NOT allow the owner of a BrandX tablet to do the following: 1) Use wifi or 3g to transfer a book they own directly to/from their own computer? 2) Use wifi or 3g to transfer a book from any location they dang well like on the internet? 3) Use wifi or 3g to transfer a book not under DRM to a friend to share? Again, for comparison, laptops and netbooks have always had these capabilities. Maybe what we need is like cellphones the option of buying "unlocked" ebook readers at a higher price!? On Wed, 5 May 2010, Jim Adcock wrote: > >previous tablets were crude, now that we've seen apple do them _correctly_. > > Beg to differ that any tablet is done "correctly" if you pay for wifi/3g but > aren't actually allowed to use the wifi/3g to do anything with books but buy > from the company store. Kindle/Nook/iPad all suffer from restrictions on > wireless transmission in an attempt by the hardware mfg to tie you to their > company store. Netbooks, for example, do no suffer from this restriction. > Toshiba Portege doesn't have the restriction, but at $1300 is a *bit* pricy > for a reader, not to mention 5 lb vs. 1 lb for a DX. From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 5 19:05:15 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 22:05:15 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <5beef.27841216.39137ddb@aol.com> so, does anyone here have an ipad yet? i'll be getting one in the next week or so, when i know for sure that i can walk into the store and walk out with one in a bag. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 5 19:08:54 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 22:08:54 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <5c261.430fdb5e.39137eb6@aol.com> jim said: > In any case, take a look at: thanks jim. isn't it more fun to be useful? > You might also want to compare your approach > to those of Ronald Burkey, circa 2001: if you're really interested, you can check the archives. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hart at pglaf.org Wed May 5 19:11:43 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Wed, 5 May 2010 19:11:43 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: On Wed, 5 May 2010, James Adcock wrote: > >You sound like nothing more than a shrill shill, given shillings for > ranting and raving against Apple and the iPad. > > Pardon, but I believe *I* expressed *My* opinions (repeated below) in a > polite and measured way. You are not expressing "opinions" you are stating falsehoods. Stop it. I put them in quotes. . .please simply just state "in my opinion this is the equivalent of making people buy at a company store." However, it is NOT making people buy at a company store, and you know it, so please stop saying it is. > I believe I have already acknowledged your "work-arounds" -- I just don't > want to have to deal with "work-arounds." I'm not talking about workarounds, you are simply stating falsehoods. Stop it. > Also, I don't believe it is fair to represent my comments as coming from a > "shill" given that I acknowledged the shortcomings of multiple machines. Read more carefully. . .I did not say you WERE a shill. Don't misquote me to my face, or state falsehoods about iPad. Not here. . .not on our reputation. . .not on our dime. > Also, I can assure you that I am NOT a "shill" and I would appreciate it if > you publicly retracted that slander. Learn to read. > If anything I appear to be the LEAST fanatic and most pragmatic about their > choice of reading machine on this forum! Riiight! > If anyone else goes to the Apple Company Store, tries an iPad and it does > what YOU want it to do: THEN BUY IT! I encourage EVERYBODY to go to an Apple > Store, try it, and see what they think FOR THEMSELVES! It doesn't do what > *I* want it to do, so *I* don't buy it -- I would THINK that wouldn't be > very controversial position to take! Then stop telling them they can only buy at the company store. Simply not true. > Personally I am going to wait till 4.0 and see if its less restrictive then. Right. I'm not talking about whether they fulfill your desires or not, that is strictly up to you and them, as personal items. I'm talking you making and repeating statements that are false, easily proven false. Stop it, please. You are doing your best/worst to ruin our reputation. You could hardly do better if someone paid you to do that. Once again, I ask you to stop it. I would ask for retractions of your simple false statements, but I have no confidence you are serious about any of these, not from the first where you implied that the iPod Stanza is a good measure of what the iPad can do. You just never answer the direct replies. You are NOT having a conversation here. Please stop. Our CEO and I discussed this at length, both earlier when it first became obvious you were not to be taken seriously, and now when you insist on pretending none of it happened and it starts all over again. So, for the record, if you try to do this all over again you will find you are apt to lose your soapbox. In case that was not obvious, your messages will be moderate or they will be "moderated" for you. People here know just how much I hate doing that, it has had to be done only once before, if you want to be second please just keep it up a bit longer to insure there is no doubt you have utterly no concern for how you reflect on PG. So. . .once again I ask you to please stop with rhetoric and calm down to verified conclusions. Feel free to say you disagree with Apple, or anyone else, if you like, but make sure you state it as opinion at first and not just when you are challenged as to the facts. If/when I say you sound like a shill that is not the same as saying you ARE a shill, but YOU do not even give that leeway as state your opinions as if they were facts. Please stop doing that. No further comments below, to your list of personal desires. You should send your request to the manufacturers, magazines and others who might be able to give you some satisfaction. Enough. . .please. . . . I hope to be thanking you for this in the near future. Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg > HP Slate is rumored to be killed, in which case THAT certainly isn't a > solution. (Presumably HP/Palm are now busy retooling to make a "Palm" > version of the Slate/iPad, *sigh*) > > Que with its relationship with B&N also seems now to have picked up the > wifi/3g "virus" of not allowing the owner of the machine to do what they > like with their OWN wifi/3g connection. http://www.que.com/ > > What justification can you think of except trying to force sales through the > company store to NOT allow the owner of a BrandX tablet to do the following: > > 1) Use wifi or 3g to transfer a book they own directly to/from their own > computer? > > 2) Use wifi or 3g to transfer a book from any location they dang well like > on the internet? > > 3) Use wifi or 3g to transfer a book not under DRM to a friend to share? > > Again, for comparison, laptops and netbooks have always had these > capabilities. Maybe what we need is like cellphones the option of buying > "unlocked" ebook readers at a higher price!? > > On Wed, 5 May 2010, Jim Adcock wrote: > > > >previous tablets were crude, now that we've seen apple do them > _correctly_. > > > > Beg to differ that any tablet is done "correctly" if you pay for wifi/3g > but > > aren't actually allowed to use the wifi/3g to do anything with books but > buy > > from the company store. Kindle/Nook/iPad all suffer from restrictions on > > wireless transmission in an attempt by the hardware mfg to tie you to > their > > company store. Netbooks, for example, do no suffer from this restriction. > > Toshiba Portege doesn't have the restriction, but at $1300 is a *bit* > pricy > > for a reader, not to mention 5 lb vs. 1 lb for a DX. > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > From bruce at zuhause.org Wed May 5 22:26:17 2010 From: bruce at zuhause.org (Bruce Albrecht) Date: Thu, 06 May 2010 00:26:17 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> On 05/05/10 20:42, James Adcock wrote: > Que with its relationship with B&N also seems now to have picked up the > wifi/3g "virus" of not allowing the owner of the machine to do what they > like with their OWN wifi/3g connection. http://www.que.com/ As a nook owner, I'd like to dispel the misinformation repeated several times by James in this thread. While B&N limits the 3G access to their site, there are no limits on the wifi connection. For example, I've browsed Amazon on my nook using the wifi connection at a B&N store. I don't have a problem with B&N or Amazon limiting the use of the 3G connection when the reader is using the SIM provided with the reader, since they're the ones paying for the connection. With the nook, it is possible to replace the B&N SIM with your own. I know that web enabled apps available for a rooted nook are able to use 3G when you've replaced the B&N SIM with your own SIM with a data plan. I believe the B&N browser added to the 1.3 firmware is only able to use wifi though. From schultzk at uni-trier.de Thu May 6 01:15:27 2010 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J. Schultz) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 10:15:27 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> Message-ID: <6D4808E5-2F87-4F80-B9DB-0079979813A8@uni-trier.de> Hi James, I completely do not under stand you at all. You take a quote out of context and use it for a completely different matter/topic!!! The discussion was about the people actually seeing machines in use! NOT the availbility of books in a particular country. On another point. I find your posts very hard to follow as you do not mention who you are quoting. regards Keith. Am 06.05.2010 um 03:09 schrieb James Adcock: >> Here in Germany I have not seen one Kindle. > > Looking at the Amazon.de site it appears that Amazon is NOT having good luck > getting German publishers to publish on Kindle. On Amazon.de they advertise > 380,000 *English Language* Kindle books available to the German Market, as > compared to a handful of German Books to the German Market. > > On Amazon.com they have 1000+ Kindle German Language books selling into the > US Market -- most of these books being "classics." > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From gbnewby at pglaf.org Thu May 6 02:05:56 2010 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 02:05:56 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <5beef.27841216.39137ddb@aol.com> References: <5beef.27841216.39137ddb@aol.com> Message-ID: <20100506090556.GA18812@pglaf.org> On Wed, May 05, 2010 at 10:05:15PM -0400, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > so, does anyone here have an ipad yet? Yes. I'm not very impressed. Too big & heavy. I like the iPhone better. The interface is basically the same as the iPhone/iPod Touch, just a bigger screen. The interface is, overall, very impressive and responsive. The iBooks app is OK. Like all the related Apple devices, you are forced to "drink the kool-aid" and use iTunes to manage the devices, and go through the iTunes store for many things like new apps, even when those apps are free. (There are some workarounds, but iTunes is by far the path of least resistance.) As others have mentioned, there are some really great applications for eBooks, some of which have value-added features like community recommender/review systems. Stanza, GoodReader and Wattpad are all strong, and backed by large collections including much free content (lots of Gutenberg) and much non-free. Only the iPad has the iBooks app. IMHO, it doesn't have any significant stand-out benefits over the other eBook apps I've used. They did a nice job on (permitted, legal, freely distributed) repackaging of some Project Gutenberg titles. BTW, I was just interviewed today by these folks: http://www.youtube.com/FOXTappedin ...concerning the iPad and eBooks in general. The interview podcast is supposed to be online by early next week. But the site showcases some pretty neat apps that really DO (I suspect) benefit from the larger screen. For example, some educational apps that operate like a digital coloring book. > i'll be getting one in the next week or so, > when i know for sure that i can walk into > the store and walk out with one in a bag. BTW, http://m.gutenberg.org is looking VERY good on these portable devices. Marcello has been doing wonders. Still a work in progress, but a whole lot better than the generic site for small screens & touch devices. -- Greg From hart at pglaf.org Thu May 6 08:17:22 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 08:17:22 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> Message-ID: Bruce, once again taking both sides, sorry, I must ask of nook's wifi connection will connect to most wifi hotspots or just those provided by B&N??? i.e. can you use your nook's wifi to download books at airports? Thanks!!! Michael On Thu, 6 May 2010, Bruce Albrecht wrote: > On 05/05/10 20:42, James Adcock wrote: > > Que with its relationship with B&N also seems now to have picked up the > > wifi/3g "virus" of not allowing the owner of the machine to do what they > > like with their OWN wifi/3g connection. http://www.que.com/ > > As a nook owner, I'd like to dispel the misinformation repeated several times > by James in this thread. While B&N limits the 3G access to their site, there > are no limits on the wifi connection. For example, I've browsed Amazon on my > nook using the wifi connection at a B&N store. > > I don't have a problem with B&N or Amazon limiting the use of the 3G > connection when the reader is using the SIM provided with the reader, since > they're the ones paying for the connection. With the nook, it is possible to > replace the B&N SIM with your own. I know that web enabled apps available for > a rooted nook are able to use 3G when you've replaced the B&N SIM with your > own SIM with a data plan. I believe the B&N browser added to the 1.3 firmware > is only able to use wifi though. > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > From marcello at perathoner.de Thu May 6 09:05:45 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Thu, 06 May 2010 18:05:45 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> James Adcock wrote: > Personally I am going to wait till 4.0 and see if its less restrictive then. The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. When the first Mac came out, I and all my friends were impressed by what the machine could do. It had the revoloutionary Motorola 68000 CPU instead of the crappy Intel 8086 of the IBM PC. Everybody I knew was making expeditions to the Apple store to see the Mac, but in the end nobody bought it, because you needed a keyed screwdriver to even open the case. And then all chips were soldered on the main board. You could not upgrade memory. You could not put in a faster CPU. It had no expansion slots. Today I'm holding an iphone in my hands (courtesy of Apple). It is the most sexy device. It has a touchscreen that is a haptic joy to use, WiFI, 3G, GPS, BT, everything. History repeats itself: all my friends played with one. Nobody bought one. The iphone always makes me think of that pager-gimmick Commander Koenig (Martin Landau) carried on his belt in the Sci-Fi TV series "Space: 1999". He would unclip it from his belt and shout into it: "COMPUTER OPEN THAT DOOR!" and invariably the computer would *not* because it was owned by some alien entity. That's the iphone. A device capable of doing everything but *not* doing it, because some alien entity locked it down. Apple has and always had the most closed business model on earth. Apple is the most hypocritical company on earth. While they want you to think they are giving you freedom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 what they really do is: they take all freedom from you. Let's learn from history. Apple is not going to change. > Again, for comparison, laptops and netbooks have always had these > capabilities. Maybe what we need is like cellphones the option of buying > "unlocked" ebook readers at a higher price!? We don't *need* the option, we *have* the option. The Sony Reader has no WiFi but has opened every Epub I have thrown at it. It connects to any PC, even to Linux, and shows up as external disk drive. You can use any shell you want to move files onto it. I have a (Linux udev) script that syncs the ebooks to the Sony every time I plug it in. That's not quite as comfortable as WiFi but I gladly pay that price for the freedom to download what I want from everywhere I want. They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary comfort, deserve neither liberty nor comfort. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 6 09:57:30 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 12:57:30 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days Message-ID: <482b5.270aace1.39144efa@aol.com> greg said: > I'm not very impressed.? Too big & heavy.? > I like the iPhone better. "too big". that's a curious objection to make. then again, i was just telling someone yesterday apple might have done things in the wrong order. if they'd come out with the ipad first, and _then_ the iphone, we'da seen it as a natural progression. "computers always get smaller, and then cheaper." by skipping over the ipad form-factor to go directly to the iphone, now it seems they are "regressing"... at any rate, if the iphone and the ipad can do a job equally well, i'd see how the iphone would be better. but i think a whole class of functionality will develop where the iphone is _too_small_ to do the job well... (and a laptop or a netbook is "too big". to define this, seek out places where someone is using a _clipboard_; they will prove to be the realms where the ipad shines.) and of course apple gave itself plenty of room to grow. even if that functionality class takes a while to manifest, there's years of "upgrade" possibilities just in jacking up the memory, adding hardware (the future will laugh hard at the sans-camera debut), as well as dropping the price... > The interface is, overall, very impressive and responsive. let's hope apple doesn't choose to enforce its patents on it, or that the legal system is smart enough to toss such claims. there is nothing about the human hand that doesn't have a long and glorious history predating the founding of apple. > Like all the related Apple devices, you are forced to > "drink the kool-aid" and use iTunes to manage the devices, > and go through the iTunes store for many things > like new apps, even when those apps are free.? > (There are some workarounds, but iTunes is > by far the path of least resistance.) i understand why this grates on some people. i also understand that apple is doing it for a good reason, namely to ensure that the user-experience is high-quality. nobody complains that the xbox is a closed platform... or the wii... or all of the various nintendo machines... they just enjoy the fact that the experience comes first. so i take the same attitude with apple's ip* line of stuff... i don't particularly _like_ the fact that it's a closed system. but i _do_ like the stability. now, i'm hoping that the open-source world can compete. i'm hoping they can get high-quality hardware built out and i'm hoping they match that with high-quality software, and i'm hoping the resultant experience is a high-quality one... but i must say i am not _expecting_ them to come through. because they never have in the past. i'm not sure why steve is the only guy who can get it right. it shouldn't be that hard to simply copy what he has done. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kimo at webnetic.net Thu May 6 10:46:16 2010 From: kimo at webnetic.net (Kimo Crossman) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 10:46:16 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] {Disarmed} Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: San Francisco organization makes more than 1 million books available online to blind, dyslexic By: BROOKE DONALD Associated Press 05/06/10 8:21 AM PDT SAN FRANCISCO ? Even as audio versions of best-sellers fill store shelves and new technology fuels the popularity of digitized books, the number of titles accessible to people who are blind or dyslexic is minuscule. A new service being announced Thursday by the nonprofit Internet Archive in San Francisco is trying to change that. The group has hired hundreds of people to scan thousands of books into its digital database ? more than doubling the titles available to people who aren't able to read a hard copy. Brewster Kahle, the organization's founder, says the project will initially make 1 million books available to the visually impaired, using money from foundations, libraries, corporations and the government. He's hoping a subsequent book drive will add even more titles to the collection. "We'll offer current novels, educational books, anything. If somebody then donates a book to the archive, we can digitize it and add it to the collection," he said. The problems with many of the digitized books sold commercially is that they're expensive, they're often abridged, and they don't come in a format that is easily accessed by the visually impaired. The collections are also limited to the most popular titles published within the past several years. The Internet Archive is scanning a variety of books in many languages so they can be read by the software and devices blind people use to convert written pages into speech. The organization has 20 scanning centers in five countries, including one in the Library of Congress. "Publishers mostly concentrate on their newest, profitable books. We are working to get all books online," Kahle said. Marc Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind, says getting access to books has been a big challenge for blind people. "Now, for the first time, we're going to have access to an enormous quantity," he said. Maurer, who is blind, said that when he was in college, he hired people to read books to him because the Braille and audio libraries were so limited. "That has been the way most students have gotten through school," he said. "This kind of initiative by the Internet Archive will change that for many people." Only about 5 percent of published books are available in a digital form that's accessible to the visually impaired, Maurer said, and there are even fewer books produced in Braille. Ben Foss, a San Francisco man with dyslexia, says having so many more books available is liberating. He compares it to a million more ramps being added throughout a city for a person who uses a wheelchair. "For me, it's about access. They have provided flexibility and freedom to get books in a format that I use every day," said Foss, 36, who is the director of access technology in the digital health group at Intel Corp. The digitized books scanned by the Internet Archive will be available for free to visually impaired people through the organization's website. The organization does not run into copyright concerns because the law allows libraries to make books available to people with disabilities, Kahle said. Jessie Lorenz, an associate director at the Independent Living Resource Center San Francisco who has been blind since birth, said it has been hard to find controversial or edgy titles in a format she can use, and choices are often dictated by institutions or service groups who have selected certain books for scanning. "For individuals living with print-related disabilities, this is groundbreaking," she said. "This project will enable people like me to choose what we read." Lorenz, 31, has already decided what she wants: Howard Stern's autobiography "Private Parts," Andrew Weil's "The Natural Mind," and, perhaps most importantly, her grandmother's cookbook. ___ On the Net: The Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org The National Federation of the Blind: http://www.nfb.org Open Library: http://www.openlibrary.org Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/nation/san-francisco-organization-makes-more-than-1-million-books-available-online-to-blind-dyslexic-92936879.html#ixzz0nAH5tf2Z __._,_.___ Reply to sender| Reply to group| Reply via web post| Start a New Topic Messages in this topic( 1) Recent Activity: Visit Your Group MARKETPLACE Stay on top of your group activity without leaving the page you're on - Get the Yahoo! Toolbar now. ------------------------------ Get great advice about dogs and cats. Visit the Dog & Cat Answers Center. ------------------------------ Hobbies & Activities Zone: Find others who share your passions! Explore new interests. [image: Yahoo! Groups] Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest? Unsubscribe ? Terms of Use . __,_._,___ -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From hart at pglaf.org Thu May 6 15:43:37 2010 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael S. Hart) Date: Thu, 6 May 2010 15:43:37 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: {Disarmed} Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Thanks!!! me From joshua at hutchinson.net Thu May 6 18:15:10 2010 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 01:15:10 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> Message-ID: <1228176117.29987.1273194910590.JavaMail.mail@webmail08> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From bruce at zuhause.org Thu May 6 21:16:58 2010 From: bruce at zuhause.org (Bruce Albrecht) Date: Thu, 06 May 2010 23:16:58 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> Message-ID: <4BE3943A.1030505@zuhause.org> The nook should be able to connect to any hotspot, although I have not tried it at any hotspot that requires you to connect to some website and enter some sort of password before you can connect to the rest of the internet. It works fine with my wifi at home. The browser was added in the 1.3 firmware release, which has been available for about 2 weeks, and it's marked as "beta" in the icon to start it. This release of the browser does not support downloads but I expect that a future release will support downloads. The browser available to rooted nooks supports downloads, but this is probably mostly installed by computer-savvy users. While I like my nook, I think B&N still needs a couple of firmware releases before this is a great reader. The browser needs to be able to download files. It would be nice if it were possible to access the nook file system via wireless. It needs a password lock. The current library app has search features for books purchased at B&N, but not for sideloaded content. It really needs to support tagging (collections). I think B&N should have a nook marketplace so that developers could officially write apps for the nook. On 05/06/10 10:17, Michael S. Hart wrote: > > Bruce, once again taking both sides, sorry, I must ask of nook's > wifi connection will connect to most wifi hotspots or just those > provided by B&N??? > > i.e. can you use your nook's wifi to download books at airports? > > > Thanks!!! > > > Michael > > > > On Thu, 6 May 2010, Bruce Albrecht wrote: > >> On 05/05/10 20:42, James Adcock wrote: >>> Que with its relationship with B&N also seems now to have picked up the >>> wifi/3g "virus" of not allowing the owner of the machine to do what they >>> like with their OWN wifi/3g connection. http://www.que.com/ >> >> As a nook owner, I'd like to dispel the misinformation repeated several times >> by James in this thread. While B&N limits the 3G access to their site, there >> are no limits on the wifi connection. For example, I've browsed Amazon on my >> nook using the wifi connection at a B&N store. >> >> I don't have a problem with B&N or Amazon limiting the use of the 3G >> connection when the reader is using the SIM provided with the reader, since >> they're the ones paying for the connection. With the nook, it is possible to >> replace the B&N SIM with your own. I know that web enabled apps available for >> a rooted nook are able to use 3G when you've replaced the B&N SIM with your >> own SIM with a data plan. I believe the B&N browser added to the 1.3 firmware >> is only able to use wifi though. >> _______________________________________________ >> gutvol-d mailing list >> gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org >> http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d >> > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From schultzk at uni-trier.de Fri May 7 00:59:01 2010 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J. Schultz) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 09:59:01 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> Hi Marcello, I do not understand your arguments. I never had problems with my Macs MacPlus, and MacSE all had enough memory, that is the adress space maxed out. When I needed more their was virtual memory. When did Apple say their machines are universal. They always say it will do this and that, and they deliver on that fact! Nowhere did Apple say will be able to get eBooks from all possible sources. Sure it would be nice. Ever looked into the iPad SDK? On the otherside, I have had devices that would not pair with my Macs because the vendors did not provide support. Then again others did. I sure support for other formats will come. I sure do not want my friends iPhones accessing my Macs!! ;-)) regards Keith. Am 06.05.2010 um 18:05 schrieb Marcello Perathoner: > James Adcock wrote: > >> Personally I am going to wait till 4.0 and see if its less restrictive then. > > The only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history. > > > When the first Mac came out, I and all my friends were impressed by what the machine could do. It had the revoloutionary Motorola 68000 CPU instead of the crappy Intel 8086 of the IBM PC. > > Everybody I knew was making expeditions to the Apple store to see the Mac, but in the end nobody bought it, because you needed a keyed screwdriver to even open the case. And then all chips were soldered on the main board. You could not upgrade memory. You could not put in a faster CPU. It had no expansion slots. > > > Today I'm holding an iphone in my hands (courtesy of Apple). It is the most sexy device. It has a touchscreen that is a haptic joy to use, WiFI, 3G, GPS, BT, everything. > > History repeats itself: all my friends played with one. Nobody bought one. > > The iphone always makes me think of that pager-gimmick Commander Koenig (Martin Landau) carried on his belt in the Sci-Fi TV series "Space: 1999". He would unclip it from his belt and shout into it: "COMPUTER OPEN THAT DOOR!" and invariably the computer would *not* because it was owned by some alien entity. > > That's the iphone. > > A device capable of doing everything but *not* doing it, because some alien entity locked it down. > > > Apple has and always had the most closed business model on earth. > > Apple is the most hypocritical company on earth. While they want you to think they are giving you freedom > > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8 > > what they really do is: they take all freedom from you. > > Let's learn from history. Apple is not going to change. > > >> Again, for comparison, laptops and netbooks have always had these >> capabilities. Maybe what we need is like cellphones the option of buying >> "unlocked" ebook readers at a higher price!? > > We don't *need* the option, we *have* the option. > > The Sony Reader has no WiFi but has opened every Epub I have thrown at it. It connects to any PC, even to Linux, and shows up as external disk drive. You can use any shell you want to move files onto it. I have a (Linux udev) script that syncs the ebooks to the Sony every time I plug it in. That's not quite as comfortable as WiFi but I gladly pay that price for the freedom to download what I want from everywhere I want. > > > They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary comfort, deserve neither liberty nor comfort. > > > > -- > Marcello Perathoner > webmaster at gutenberg.org > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 7 02:06:20 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 05:06:20 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <318a.54b350c1.3915320c@aol.com> jim- your rewrapping of the p.g. e-text to the original linebreaks was pretty good, but i should have specified more carefully... it would've been best to retain the _end-line_hyphenates_ too (or else justification is unworkable), as well as _pagebreaks_ (because one objective is to compare the text with the scans.) i'll handle this one from here... but note that for next time... :+) -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marcello at perathoner.de Fri May 7 06:00:07 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Fri, 07 May 2010 15:00:07 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> Message-ID: <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> Keith J. Schultz wrote: > Hi Marcello, > > I do not understand your arguments. I never had problems with > my Macs MacPlus, and MacSE all had enough memory, that is the adress > space maxed out. Get your facts right before posting. The first 68000 had 23 address pins (== 8M) and the first Mac had 128k of RAM. The 68000 could address 64 times the RAM you had in the Mac. > When I needed more their was virtual memory. On a system with one floppy disk? Stop bullshitting. > When did Apple say their machines are universal. Nobody ever said their machines were universal (except Turing). -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From schultzk at uni-trier.de Fri May 7 06:46:27 2010 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J. Schultz) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 15:46:27 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> Message-ID: Hi Marcello, Was the MacPlus the first Mac? Was the MacSE a 68000? I did not say I had hard drives so no 128Kb limit! Who has the facts wrong? I have a Apple IIe with 1MB memory and a 640Kb drive! So do not tell be about BS and what can be done! It is a matter of money and know-how! regards Keith. Am 07.05.2010 um 15:00 schrieb Marcello Perathoner: > Keith J. Schultz wrote: >> Hi Marcello, >> I do not understand your arguments. I never had problems with my Macs MacPlus, and MacSE all had enough memory, that is the adress space maxed out. > > Get your facts right before posting. > > The first 68000 had 23 address pins (== 8M) and the first Mac had 128k of RAM. The 68000 could address 64 times the RAM you had in the Mac. > > > When I needed more their was virtual memory. > > On a system with one floppy disk? Stop bullshitting. > > >> When did Apple say their machines are universal. > > Nobody ever said their machines were universal (except Turing). > > > -- > Marcello Perathoner > webmaster at gutenberg.org > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 7 10:56:40 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 13:56:40 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: spill baby spill Message-ID: <20f40.3af796e7.3915ae58@aol.com> a week later, and the gulf oil spill is one week worse. ok, well, one person wrote me backchannel to say "this is off-topic", so let me tell you why it's not... you know when people complain about corporations extending copyright, thus robbing the public domain? that's certainly on-topic, and it's worth fighting them. but if you're gonna fight, you must know your enemy. so lesson number one: the big corporations who are paying politicians to extend copyright are the _same_ corporations who exploit the environment shamelessly, including the off-shore drilling that made this disaster. don't confuse the issue by saying "b.p. isn't disney". look, and you will find the same people behind both. 5% of the people in the world own 95% of the wealth, which means the rest of us just split up the crumbs... lesson number two: those people are _very_greedy_ they already own 95% of the wealth of the world, but they want _more_. it is an insidious disease, greed... lesson number three: greed makes them _dangerous._ they're the ones behind war, slavery, and exploitation. these people regard plain human lives as expendable. lesson number four: greed makes them very _reckless._ it's now become as obvious as the slick in the gulf coast that these people are willing to put the _planet_ at risk. 40% of the estuaries in the u.s. are located in the gulf. migrating birds are passing through there right now... many of them -- who thought they were just taking a short rest-stop -- will find their trip has gone wrong, badly wrong, in a tragedy that just might end their life. plus depending on the various currents that pick it up, that oil might touch land all up the eastern seaboard. so we're talking about some very far-reaching effects. and the gulf itself? quite dead for many years to come, and half-dead for perhaps decades, as mother nature tries to wash away the stain that human greed created. so what does this all mean? perhaps you consider debate on "intellectual property" to be philosophical exercise aimed at social progress. that's nice. very polite. like the way soldiers used to interrupt battle at tea-time, so they could do a ritual. four words for you: you will lose. badly. because your enemy has all the money, all the power, and your enemy also has deep-seated greed, which is causing them to be very dangerous, and to act rashly, taking _huge_ risks. the oil slick in the gulf gives you an idea of how badly some of their risks can backfire. they knew before; they didn't care; they wanted more. now you know. do you care? are you gonna stop 'em? this is your enemy. if you don't know your enemy, if you don't comprehend the intensity of the battle, you will never stand a chance. stop whining about "off-topic threads" and start fighting. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 7 16:20:25 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 19:20:25 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: <34442.599cd3e9.3915fa39@aol.com> when are people going to start calling "bullshit" on the press releases from the internet archive? that's what i want to know. look at their text. it's raw o.c.r., and it's _awful_. and unlike google, they're doing nothing to fix it. but they're putting it out for the "blind and dyslexic"? is this some kind of mean trick they're trying to play? do they think blind people won't notice the bad o.c.r.? i don't know who's calling the shots over there, since they all _seem_ like nice people... but my goodness, the cynicism of these press releases is overwhelming. and all this "good publicity" that they are getting will soon exercise its karmic force, and bite 'em in the butt. it's past the point of embarrassment; it's _dangerous_. even if the press will print your lies, it's wrong to lie... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kimo at webnetic.net Fri May 7 18:03:52 2010 From: kimo at webnetic.net (Kimo Crossman) Date: Fri, 7 May 2010 18:03:52 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: <34442.599cd3e9.3915fa39@aol.com> References: <34442.599cd3e9.3915fa39@aol.com> Message-ID: Thanks, I live in SF I will spread the word in the tech community On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:20 PM, wrote: > when are people going to start calling "bullshit" > on the press releases from the internet archive? > > that's what i want to know. > > look at their text. it's raw o.c.r., and it's _awful_. > and unlike google, they're doing nothing to fix it. > > but they're putting it out for the "blind and dyslexic"? > is this some kind of mean trick they're trying to play? > do they think blind people won't notice the bad o.c.r.? > > i don't know who's calling the shots over there, since > they all _seem_ like nice people... but my goodness, > the cynicism of these press releases is overwhelming. > > and all this "good publicity" that they are getting will > soon exercise its karmic force, and bite 'em in the butt. > > it's past the point of embarrassment; it's _dangerous_. > even if the press will print your lies, it's wrong to lie... > > -bowerbird > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From schultzk at uni-trier.de Sat May 8 04:05:59 2010 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J. Schultz) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 13:05:59 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> Message-ID: Heh Marcello, Just booted the SE up. Guess whast? 8 MB of installed RAM. regards Keith. Am 07.05.2010 um 15:00 schrieb Marcello Perathoner: > Keith J. Schultz wrote: >> Hi Marcello, >> I do not understand your arguments. I never had problems with my Macs MacPlus, and MacSE all had enough memory, that is the adress space maxed out. > > Get your facts right before posting. > > The first 68000 had 23 address pins (== 8M) and the first Mac had 128k of RAM. The 68000 could address 64 times the RAM you had in the Mac. > > > When I needed more their was virtual memory. > > On a system with one floppy disk? Stop bullshitting. > > >> When did Apple say their machines are universal. > > Nobody ever said their machines were universal (except Turing). From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 8 05:34:17 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 14:34:17 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4BE55A49.4000001@perathoner.de> Keith J. Schultz wrote: > Heh Marcello, > > Just booted the SE up. Guess whast? 8 MB of installed RAM. That's cool! Go and edit the Wikipedia article that says a Mac SE has 4 Megs max. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_SE#Specifications -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 8 05:42:52 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 14:42:52 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Keith J. Schultz wrote: > Hi Marcello, > > Was the MacPlus the first Mac? No. I never said that. I said that when we went to see the first Mac we were all disgusted by its non-expandability. > Was the MacSE a 68000? Yes. I still is. > I did not say I had hard drives so no 128Kb limit! What has the hard drive to do with the RAM? > Who has the facts wrong? You don't have wrong facts: You ho have no facts. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From greg at durendal.org Sat May 8 06:25:32 2010 From: greg at durendal.org (Greg Weeks) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 09:25:32 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 8 May 2010, Marcello Perathoner wrote: > Keith J. Schultz wrote: >> Was the MacSE a 68000? > > Yes. I still is. The SE was a 68020 actually. It integrated the 68000 and the L1 I cache, MMU, FPU and a full 32 bit address bus. It also was available in faster clock speeds than the original 68000 and 68008 parts. http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/68020/index.html -- Greg Weeks http://durendal.org:8080/greg/ From greg at durendal.org Sat May 8 06:31:26 2010 From: greg at durendal.org (Greg Weeks) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 09:31:26 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 8 May 2010, Greg Weeks wrote: > On Sat, 8 May 2010, Marcello Perathoner wrote: > >> Keith J. Schultz wrote: >>> Was the MacSE a 68000? >> >> Yes. I still is. > > The SE was a 68020 actually. It integrated the 68000 and the L1 I cache, MMU, > FPU and a full 32 bit address bus. It also was available in faster clock > speeds than the original 68000 and 68008 parts. Interesting, Wikipedia claims it was the 68000. I distinctly remember SE motherboards with 68020s on them. I wonder if they switched CPUs in the middle to get a cheaper and smaller SE. The SE/30 had software differences and needed a different System software. The 68020 looked like a 68000 with the support chips. The 68030 looked different to software. -- Greg Weeks http://durendal.org:8080/greg/ From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 8 06:49:17 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 15:49:17 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4BE56BDD.2080508@perathoner.de> Greg Weeks wrote: > On Sat, 8 May 2010, Marcello Perathoner wrote: > >> Keith J. Schultz wrote: >>> Was the MacSE a 68000? >> >> Yes. I still is. > > The SE was a 68020 actually. Then Apple got it wrong: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP191 -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From joaquin at cuencaabela.com Sat May 8 08:37:28 2010 From: joaquin at cuencaabela.com (Joaquin Cuenca Abela) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 17:37:28 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary Message-ID: Hi, the ebook http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14155 is missing all the apostrophes in the generated versions (at least HTML and ePub). The two hand-crafted files (plain text and rtf) contain the apostrophes, for instance one of the very first lines in the plain text file is: Permettez-moi d?inscrire This has been converted in the HTML version to:

Permettez-moi dinscrire Is this due to a bug in the epub-maker used to convert the file, or is there something buggy in the original text? Cheers, -- Joaquin Cuenca Abela From sly at victoria.tc.ca Sat May 8 09:48:46 2010 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 09:48:46 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Hmm.... at a quick look, it appears to be problem in the original file. At the top of the file, we have this: Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 And all transformations are done according to character-encoding standards. However, this file uses a representation of the apostrophe character which is not included in the ISO-8859-1 standard. If you want some history, basically you can blame microsoft. They developed their own character sets for use with Windows, which were _close_ to already-established standards, but not quite identical. Most often you see the effects of this cropping up when people use "curly quote" characters. For the Latin-1 texts in PG, we use just a plain ' character for an apostrophe. Automatic checking that is done when texts are submitted will flag this before a text is posted. However, there are some older text (such as this one) where this problem can still crop up. --Andrew On Sat, 8 May 2010, Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote: > Hi, the ebook http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/14155 is missing all the apostrophes in the generated versions (at least HTML and ePub). The two hand-crafted files (plain text and rtf) contain the apostrophes, for instance one of the very first lines in the plain text file is: Permettez-moi d?inscrire This has been converted in the HTML version to:

Permettez-moi dinscrire Is this due to a bug in the epub-maker used to convert the file, or is there something buggy in the original text? Cheers, -- Joaquin Cuenca Abela From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 8 10:26:11 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 19:26:11 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4BE59EB3.9080600@perathoner.de> Andrew Sly wrote: > If you want some history, basically you can blame microsoft. > They developed their own character sets for use with Windows, > which were _close_ to already-established standards, but not > quite identical. No, you cannot blame Microsoft. This is one of the few cases were they did right: They registered their character sets with IANA, and this makes them as standard as any other character set, ISO or UNICODE or whatever. The blame lies with the whitewasher who mislabeled the file as ISO-8859-1 when it really is WINDOWS-1252. Whatever. I fixed this by overriding the PG header in the database. Somebody should check all books by http://www.ebooksgratuits.com or all books with RTF files and see if they are correctly labelled. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From schultzk at uni-trier.de Sat May 8 10:43:04 2010 From: schultzk at uni-trier.de (Keith J. Schultz) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 19:43:04 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: Hi Marcello, read your own post! the fact was 128kb and VM! not RAM! regards Keith Am 08.05.2010 um 14:42 schrieb Marcello Perathoner: > Keith J. Schultz wrote: >> Hi Marcello, >> Was the MacPlus the first Mac? > > No. I never said that. I said that when we went to see the first Mac we were all disgusted by its non-expandability. > > > Was the MacSE a 68000? > > Yes. I still is. > >> I did not say I had hard drives so no 128Kb limit! > > What has the hard drive to do with the RAM? > >> Who has the facts wrong? > > You don't have wrong facts: You ho have no facts. > > > -- > Marcello Perathoner > webmaster at gutenberg.org > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From sly at victoria.tc.ca Sat May 8 11:15:53 2010 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 11:15:53 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary In-Reply-To: <4BE59EB3.9080600@perathoner.de> References: <4BE59EB3.9080600@perathoner.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 8 May 2010, Marcello Perathoner wrote: > Andrew Sly wrote: > > > If you want some history, basically you can blame microsoft. > > They developed their own character sets for use with Windows, > > which were _close_ to already-established standards, but not > > quite identical. > > No, you cannot blame Microsoft. > > This is one of the few cases were they did right: They registered their > character sets with IANA, and this makes them as standard as any other > character set, ISO or UNICODE or whatever. Yes. I am aware that it is a registed charset. I have read before that the general recomendation from microsoft was to simply label your text as Latin-1 because it was close enough that there were no important differences. However, I don't have a source for that, so it is possible that it is merely unfounded microsoft-bashing. > The blame lies with the whitewasher who mislabeled the file as > ISO-8859-1 when it really is WINDOWS-1252. Hmm... I could understand if this was some earlier PG text. (From the time when the only encoding distinction made was 7-bit ascii, or "8-bit") But it was more recent, and should have been caught at posting time. > Whatever. I fixed this by overriding the PG header in the database. > Somebody should check all books by http://www.ebooksgratuits.com or all > books with RTF files and see if they are correctly labelled. > Would it be possible to run some kind of automated check on all files labelled ISO-8859-1, searching for characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F range? --Andrew From bfoley at lemurskin.com Sat May 8 11:45:30 2010 From: bfoley at lemurskin.com (Brian Foley) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 19:45:30 +0100 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <20100508184530.GA15510@hume.vm.bytemark.co.uk> On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 07:43:04PM +0200, Keith J. Schultz wrote: > Hi Marcello, > > read your own post! > > the fact was 128kb and VM! not RAM! > > regards > Keith Dear lord, there's so much misinformation on this thread, it verges on being a parody! As a Mac user of many years, and having personally worked with all of the below but the 128 kB Mac, I can assure you that: a) The first Macintosh had 128 kB of RAM, an 8 MHz 68000 processor, most definitely did not have virtual memory, and wasn't upgradable without a soldering iron. b) The Mac Plus, which was introduced in 1986 had nice additions like a SCSI port, bigger ROMs and 1 MB of RAM which could be upgraded to 4 MB RAM using 30 pin SIMMs. The OS and memory map precluded the use of more than 4 MB RAM. It also used an 8 MHz 68000, and therefore was incapable of virtual memory. c) The SE from 1987 was very similar to the Plus in terms of specs. It also had an 8 MHz 68000, could take up to 4 MB of 30 pin SIMMs but had a proprietary expansion slot and ADB for keyboard and mouse. I think there were a couple of third party 68020 upgrade boards for the SE, but these definitely weren't common. Since they would have been Apple System 5 or 6 era, they would have predated Apple's introduction of virtual memory support in System 7 in 1991. d) The SE/30, which is possibly the machine Greg was thinking of, was released in 1989, had a 16 MHz 68030 with a built-in MMU, an FPU, and could (with upgraded ROMs and dense SIMMs) use up to 128 MB of RAM (8 MB with the original ROMs). There were a large number of expansion cards produced for it, including powerful (for the time) graphics cards; ethernet cards; and CPU & FPU upgrades. Apple's System 7 and 8, A/UX, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all supported virtual memory on the SE/30, and due to its relative power and compact size, it was often used as a low end server in universities and the like. They were also popular in graphics design and publishing circles, and many regard them as one of Apple's nicest 68k Macs. Cheers, Brian. From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 8 11:55:02 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 14:55:02 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary Message-ID: <18e10.64c70c3c.39170d86@aol.com> andrew said: > If you want some history, basically you can blame microsoft. what kind of "history" is that? c'mon, let's go _back_. let's blame the serpent in the garden of eden who tempted eve to take a bite of the forbidden fruit... get real. and stop making excuses. now that marcello knows that the encoding declaration can't be trusted, he can _improve_ his converter script by actually doing some reality-checks on the text itself, to make sure it actually is the encoding it claims to be. and apostrophes would be an _excellent_ way to start... or better yet, run such a checker-program against the entire library, and ferret out the incorrect declarations, so the converter script _can_ know the encoding for sure. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From greg at durendal.org Sat May 8 12:48:29 2010 From: greg at durendal.org (Greg Weeks) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 15:48:29 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <20100508184530.GA15510@hume.vm.bytemark.co.uk> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> <20100508184530.GA15510@hume.vm.bytemark.co.uk> Message-ID: On Sat, 8 May 2010, Brian Foley wrote: > c) The SE from 1987 was very similar to the Plus in terms of specs. > It also had an 8 MHz 68000, could take up to 4 MB of 30 pin SIMMs > but had a proprietary expansion slot and ADB for keyboard and mouse. > I think there were a couple of third party 68020 upgrade boards for > the SE, but these definitely weren't common. Since they would have > been Apple System 5 or 6 era, they would have predated Apple's > introduction of virtual memory support in System 7 in 1991. It's possible they were an after market add on. I saw them when they were coming in for non-warrenty repair or upgrades. Adding more memory was the most common upgrade I remember. > d) The SE/30, which is possibly the machine Greg was thinking of, was > released in 1989, had a 16 MHz 68030 with a built-in MMU, an FPU, > and could (with upgraded ROMs and dense SIMMs) use up to 128 MB of > RAM (8 MB with the original ROMs). There were a large number of > expansion cards produced for it, including powerful (for the time) > graphics cards; ethernet cards; and CPU & FPU upgrades. Nope I remember the SE/30 as a diffferent beast, the SE/30 needed the OS upgrade to work at all. I don't think it actually needed system 7 and the MMU on, but it came with an update just to work. It was a fair bit faster too. Dang, that was a long time ago. -- Greg Weeks http://durendal.org:8080/greg/ From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 8 13:32:24 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 22:32:24 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary In-Reply-To: References: <4BE59EB3.9080600@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4BE5CA58.4040204@perathoner.de> Andrew Sly wrote: > Would it be possible to run some kind of automated check on all files > labelled ISO-8859-1, searching for characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F range? In theory yes. In practice I've found that there are very many mislabelled files, not always so simple a case as ISO vs. WIN. I'll see if I can extract a list from somewhere. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From bfoley at lemurskin.com Sat May 8 13:49:28 2010 From: bfoley at lemurskin.com (Brian Foley) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 21:49:28 +0100 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> <20100508184530.GA15510@hume.vm.bytemark.co.uk> Message-ID: <20100508204928.GA20280@hume.vm.bytemark.co.uk> On Sat, May 08, 2010 at 03:48:29PM -0400, Greg Weeks wrote: > On Sat, 8 May 2010, Brian Foley wrote: > > >d) The SE/30, which is possibly the machine Greg was thinking of, was > > released in 1989, had a 16 MHz 68030 with a built-in MMU, an FPU, > > and could (with upgraded ROMs and dense SIMMs) use up to 128 MB of > > RAM (8 MB with the original ROMs). There were a large number of > > expansion cards produced for it, including powerful (for the time) > > graphics cards; ethernet cards; and CPU & FPU upgrades. > > Nope I remember the SE/30 as a diffferent beast, the SE/30 needed > the OS upgrade to work at all. I don't think it actually needed > system 7 and the MMU on, but it came with an update just to work. It > was a fair bit faster too. Dang, that was a long time ago. At the risk of veering even further off topic (sorry!)... You needed System 7 and either Connectix's MODE32 software, or 32-bit clean ROMs taken from a machine like the IIsi or IIfx to use >14 MB RAM. System 6 and earlier only supported 8 MB RAM (24-bit addressing was required because of the way the memory manager used to store state in the top 8 bits of address pointers, and half the address space was used to map NuBus cards). There were products like Maxima for System 6 that let you stretch this 8 MB to 14 MB, but they had drawbacks. And while System 7 had an appallingly slow (and optional) VM implementation, at least it had one: System 6 had no VM subsystem at all. IIRC System 6.0.3 was the earliest one that supported the SE/30's hardware. http://www.lowendmac.com/daystar/pages/dsd_products/support/ts_mode32.html Fun times! I really need to replace the dodgy capacitors in my poor little SE/30 one of these days. At a desperate attempt at relevance, at least you could get reasonably current commercial OCR software for the Mac back then. Cheers, Brian. From jimad at msn.com Sat May 8 14:16:38 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 14:16:38 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <5c261.430fdb5e.39137eb6@aol.com> References: <5c261.430fdb5e.39137eb6@aol.com> Message-ID: >thanks jim. isn't it more fun to be useful? I'll let you know if you guys ever start listening to me. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Sat May 8 14:24:26 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 14:24:26 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <6D4808E5-2F87-4F80-B9DB-0079979813A8@uni-trier.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <8C63FF8C-CB6A-4533-83A7-0208441DFE85@uni-trier.de> <6D4808E5-2F87-4F80-B9DB-0079979813A8@uni-trier.de> Message-ID: > You take a quote out of context and use it for a completely different matter/topic!!! Sorry, I thought it was obvious from context that one should not expect to see Kindles in Germany if Amazon is unable to source German books for German would-be purchasers to read on their Kindle. From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 8 14:27:02 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 08 May 2010 23:27:02 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> <5C598062-94EC-4866-AD17-682A12FF8E3C@uni-trier.de> <4BE40ED7.3050201@perathoner.de> <4BE55C4C.5080109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4BE5D726.607@perathoner.de> Keith J. Schultz wrote: > Hi Marcello, > > read your own post! > > the fact was 128kb and VM! not RAM! All Macs up to the Mac SE included have an 68000 and no MMU. So they can't do VM. Period. (Unless you fall for Apple's marketing blubber and call 'VM' that ridiculous double-indirection-thru-pointer-in-software thingie they had that was 10x worse than Intel's segmented architecture.) But you (or somebody acting as you) said: > Just booted the SE up. Guess whast? 8 MB of installed RAM. Boy! You should send them *yours* for the Apple Museum! *They* only managed to build SE's with a max. of 4 MB RAM. See the spec sheet: http://support.apple.com/kb/SP191 -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From jimad at msn.com Sat May 8 14:39:06 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 14:39:06 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> Message-ID: >As a nook owner, I'd like to dispel the misinformation repeated several times by James in this thread. While B&N limits the 3G access to their site, there are no limits on the wifi connection. For example, I've browsed Amazon on my nook using the wifi connection at a B&N store. Sorry, but I believe the thread of the conversation was talking about downloading BOOKS ie eBooks via wifi and/or 3G, not just "web browsing". Are you saying that the B&N web browser allows you to download books to your Nook from other than the B&N site? For example Kindle and Most desktop web browsers allow one to download a MOBI or ePub ebook via the web browser to one's computer or ebook reader and directly start reading that book. When I try this on the iPad I am told that I am not allowed to download that ebook. So, for example from a desktop computer or a Kindle I can directly download a book in MOBI or ePub format from the PG site to that computer and start reading, (just like most computers and web browswer allow one to download and read PDF files directly) but with an iPad I cannot. Here is a link to the B&N manuals for the Nook in case anyone wants to read for themselves what B&N says their product can do: http://images.barnesandnoble.com/pimages/nook/download/User_Guide_nook_v1_3. pdf From jimad at msn.com Sat May 8 16:00:38 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 16:00:38 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Apple's business model In-Reply-To: <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE2E8D9.8030808@perathoner.de> Message-ID: >The Sony Reader has no WiFi but has opened every Epub I have thrown at it. It connects to any PC, even to Linux, and shows up as external disk drive. You can use any shell you want to move files onto it. I have a (Linux udev) script that syncs the ebooks to the Sony every time I plug it in. That's not quite as comfortable as WiFi but I gladly pay that price for the freedom to download what I want from everywhere I want. Agreed this is about my current experience with Kindle. I also download some stuff via the Kindle's rudimentary web browser over 3G. But, I've connected and disconnected the Kindle literally a couple thousand times via USB now, and its getting really really old. That is why I'd like some kind of ebook reader that will allow me to transfer ebooks by wifi. I can do this using my netbook, in all of MOBI, ePUB, PDF "ebook" formats etc, its just that the keyboard really gets in the way of the ebook reading experience. With the current ebook reader apps one cannot even use the PgUp, PgDn buttons to change pages! You've got to use the mouse-pointer-pad thingee to click on the GUI up/down arrows. So what I want is an ebook reader with an "unlocked" interface to wifi so that we can do the kinds of things that we are permitted to do today by USB -- but actually using the wifi hardware capabilities built into the ebook reader already. From jimad at msn.com Sat May 8 16:19:51 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 16:19:51 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <318a.54b350c1.3915320c@aol.com> References: <318a.54b350c1.3915320c@aol.com> Message-ID: >it would've been best to retain the _end-line_hyphenates_ too (or else justification is unworkable), as well as _pagebreaks_ (because one objective is to compare the text with the scans.) I agree with you that you will have trouble with PDF unless you maintain the original source hyphens, but my understanding was that you were trying to work from the PG txt files - which do not retain the original hyphenations. Recovering original hyphenations should be in theory possible too, but not work that I have looked at yet. The linebreak recovery algorithm I worked on was intended to allow people at DP, for example, if they want to, to resubmit some of the early PG works and run them through DP again. Without automatic recovery of linebreaks one has several days of extremely tedious work reintroducing the original linebreaks. The other alternative for you is to leave healthy right margins and leave your PDF's "ragged right" [*very* ragged right!] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Sat May 8 16:22:22 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 16:22:22 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: one million units moved in 28 days In-Reply-To: <4BE3943A.1030505@zuhause.org> References: <3ecf.1fd9dcc.3911c96f@aol.com> <4BE252F9.2060608@zuhause.org> <4BE3943A.1030505@zuhause.org> Message-ID: >The browser available to rooted nooks supports downloads, but this is probably mostly installed by computer-savvy users. Not sure to what extent a "rooted nook" should still be considered a "nook" ? From sly at victoria.tc.ca Sat May 8 21:48:48 2010 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 21:48:48 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary In-Reply-To: <18e10.64c70c3c.39170d86@aol.com> References: <18e10.64c70c3c.39170d86@aol.com> Message-ID: On Sat, 8 May 2010 Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > andrew said: > > If you want some history, basically you can blame microsoft. > > what kind of "history" is that? > > c'mon, let's go _back_. > > let's blame the serpent in the garden of eden who > tempted eve to take a bite of the forbidden fruit... > > get real. and stop making excuses. Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. My own opinion is still that the way microsoft introduced and have used their character sets has created unnecessary difficulty for many people. I'm sorry if you perceive that as making an excuse. > now that marcello knows that the encoding declaration > can't be trusted, he can _improve_ his converter script > by actually doing some reality-checks on the text itself, > to make sure it actually is the encoding it claims to be. > and apostrophes would be an _excellent_ way to start... > > or better yet, run such a checker-program against the > entire library, and ferret out the incorrect declarations, > so the converter script _can_ know the encoding for sure. > I don't think this is any new revelation. I knew this was a problem years ago, and brought up the possibility of trying to run some kind of scan to identify texts that were possibly mislabelled. I got zero interest then. And you can't always tell with an automated check. For instance if you have a hungarian text encoded in ISO-8859-2, and it is incorrectly labelled as ISO-8859-1, an automated check won't be able to tell you that anything is wrong. But I agree it would certainly be useful to identify any texts that use byte values that should not be occuring in the stated character encoding. --Andrew From sly at victoria.tc.ca Sat May 8 21:58:03 2010 From: sly at victoria.tc.ca (Andrew Sly) Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 21:58:03 -0700 (PDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary In-Reply-To: <4BE5CA58.4040204@perathoner.de> References: <4BE59EB3.9080600@perathoner.de> <4BE5CA58.4040204@perathoner.de> Message-ID: On Sat, 8 May 2010, Marcello Perathoner wrote: > Andrew Sly wrote: > > > Would it be possible to run some kind of automated check on all files > > labelled ISO-8859-1, searching for characters in the 0x80 to 0x9F range? > > In theory yes. In practice I've found that there are very many > mislabelled files, not always so simple a case as ISO vs. WIN. I could believe that. The one that jumps to my mind is the Swedish Bible that I prepared for re-posting back in 2005. It looked like it had been prepared on a computer using one of the old DOS code pages, only it didn't quite seem to match any standard that I could find. Possibly it had been mangled in a file transfer somewhere. I was able to find what the correct characters should be, do some global search/replace and repost it as ISO-8859-1. --Andrew From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 9 09:52:22 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 12:52:22 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] happy mother's day! Message-ID: moms are special. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 9 10:04:07 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 13:04:07 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Missing apostrophes in the generated HTML / ePub versions of Madame Bovary Message-ID: andrew said: > Well, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. > My own opinion is still that > the way microsoft introduced > and have used their character sets > has created unnecessary difficulty > for many people. that's funny, because i have the same opinion about the way the unicode process has gone... but at some point, we need to just let it all go. > I'm sorry if you perceive that as making an excuse. well, yeah, if you're blaming microsoft (on something that they did a few decades back) for a mistake that was made much later, yeah, then i "perceive" that as making an excuse, yes. moreover, i "perceive" it as laughably abysmal... why not just say, "oh, hey, the encoding was wrong", fix it, and move on? why the need to point a finger? then -- as indicated in my previous message -- i would go on to _improve_the_workflow_ so that such problems wouldn't crop up again in the future. so you either make your converter impervious to the incorrect encoding declarations in the library, or you scrub the library to remove the incorrect declarations. i would probably do both, just to be on the safe side... what i would _not_ do is point 30 years into the past to try to deflect responsibility from where it belongs. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 9 10:23:14 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 9 May 2010 13:23:14 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <10d04.5ae9a178.39184982@aol.com> jim said: > if you guys ever start listening to me. listening? to you? oh jim, don't be naive. if you really wanted people to _listen_ to you, the first thing you'd have to do is start making sense. and stop saying things that are demonstrably false. but even then, nobody would probably listen... that's just not something that people _do_ here. but at least they might start _reading_ your posts a bit less infrequently, and stop shaking their heads when they _do_ read your posts, which is a good start. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Mon May 10 06:19:31 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 06:19:31 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <10d04.5ae9a178.39184982@aol.com> References: <10d04.5ae9a178.39184982@aol.com> Message-ID: > the first thing you'd have to do is start making sense. Well, clearly we live in parallel universes, because I actually *try* things that people suggest here, and when they don't work, I report it back here, and am called a liar for my efforts. All I can do is shrug my shoulders, and suggest that others on this forum go try it for themselves, and see what happens to them. "Try before you buy." From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 10 13:02:15 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 16:02:15 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> jim said: > All I can do is shrug my shoulders, and > suggest that others on this forum > go try it for themselves, > and see what happens to them. i will be buying an ipad as soon as the lines go down and i know i can walk in an apple store and walk out with one. i expect that i will be able to load .epubs onto the thing quite easily, simply by going through the itunes store... if i have any problems doing that, i will let people know. but i expect there will be no problems. and if people ask me why _you_ had problems doing it, i'll shrug _my_ shoulders, and mumble something about how you had some objection about doing things that way. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 10 13:41:47 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 16:41:47 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: <6377e.177c5e8d.3919c98b@aol.com> kimo said: > Thanks, I live in SF I will spread the word in the tech community right. you do that, kimo. tell them i'm here waiting at bowerbird at aol dot com to talk to them, any time they're ready. in fact, you can tell them that, for 32 days (32=2**5) -- from may 11 through june 11 -- i'll be posting a brief example every day showing a snippet of the terrible o.c.r. that archive.org foists off on the blind. and at the end of that time, i'll package all of those examples and send 'em off to places like boing boing, slashdot, reddit, and digg, and maybe to some techblogs like techdirt, techcrunch, and so on. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 10 13:54:20 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 10 May 2010 16:54:20 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: <648a1.3471358c.3919cc7c@aol.com> jim said: > my understanding was that you were trying to work from > the PG txt files ? which do not retain the original hyphenations.? right. so those end-of-line hyphenates need to be restored. > Recovering original hyphenations should be in theory possible > too, but not work that I have looked at yet. "in theory"? you just take them from the o.c.r. at archive.org, which is what you used to restore the linebreaks anyway, right? > The linebreak recovery algorithm I worked on was intended > to allow people at DP, for example, if they want to, to resubmit > some of the early PG works and run them through DP again. ok, fair enough. but in that case, your routines should have done what d.p. requires of its proofers, which is to move the second part of the end-of-line hyphenate to the previous line. i _believe_ that in some cases, you moved the first part down... (but i could be wrong on that, so do please let me know if i am.) > Without automatic recovery of linebreaks one has several days > of extremely tedious work reintroducing the original linebreaks.? as i said above, i use the o.c.r. text from archive.org to restore them. it's pretty straightforward, and automatic. it didn't take long to code, and it runs very fast. but you're right; doing it manually is painful... > The other alternative for you is to leave healthy right margins > and leave your PDF?s ?ragged right? [*very* ragged right!] well, one object is to clone the pages of the printed book itself, so ragged-right isn't really an option. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 11 12:26:45 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 15:26:45 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] cory's got a new book out today Message-ID: <9f1c6.7702efc0.391b0975@aol.com> cory's got a new book out today -- "for the win"... > http://craphound.com/ftw/download -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 11 12:28:41 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 15:28:41 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 01 of 32 Message-ID: <9f3b7.afc497b.391b09e9@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** let me begin by saying that this is guided by _love_... there is much that i admire about the internet archive. right at the top is the man at the top -- brewster kahle. he crafted, and is being guided by, the right philosophy: "universal access to knowledge". at a time when _many_ people adapt a "pragmatic" approach to our cyberlibrary, it's useful and vital to offset it with a philosophical tone. because the unique opportunity has presented itself now, creating a cyberlibrary is the _right_ thing for us to do... to _fail_ to do so would be a massive failure on our part. so i believe strongly in the mission of the internet archive. but in practice, there is much improvement to be desired... specifically, what good is a library when its text is garbled? *** and now some background... as is often the case, the problem's origin is deep in the past. archive.org took a fork in the road a long time back that has ramified to its present, in a way that is not particularly good. specifically, a decision was made to focus on _scans_ of books, a decision which made digitization of the text less important... moreover, it made digitization seem less costly than it truly is, because it ignored the costs associated with cleaning the o.c.r. but mostly, it was that the _attention_ got focused incorrectly; text was a second-class citizen, thus o.c.r. was largely ignored. in some ways, this decision was "understandable" at the time... early efforts proved that correcting o.c.r. was time-consuming; plus then creating a "book-like" version of that corrected o.c.r. was a layout task that seemed too hard for archive.org people. meanwhile, brewster was impressed by a page-flipping demo by the british library. and the scans didn't require the "layout" that seemed so difficult. so archive.org headed in that direction. as you might expect, a good many people (notably michael hart, with his firm insistence that "a picture of a book is _not_ a book") questioned this decision, and advocated on behalf of digital text. but the decision stuck to focus on scanning. as a consequence, correction of the digital text has never been a priority, a decision that has come back to haunt archive.org... end-users have found that archive.org's huge scan-sets are just too inconvenient. scan downloads are bulky, and take up space, and the absence of any searchable text is a distinct disadvantage, as is a total inability to reflow the book to differing form-factors. moreover, our shift to _mobile_ machines magnifies the need for e-books to be nimble, and archive.org scans will never be nimble. even the low-resolution scansets can run to dozens of megabytes. (and the high-res scansets are so darn big that they're ridiculous.) so, the demand is for digital text, now and into the future too. which means archive.org has been caught with its pants down, and is now paying the price for a bad decision made years ago. they find that their end-users are _demanding_ digital text, primarily in the form of .epub downloads and accessible text for blind and dyslexic users (which must be available by law), but the only digital text archive.org can provide is riddled with embarrassing o.c.r. errors making the text unusable practically. *** archive.org hasn't made _any_ efforts to clean up their o.c.r. consequently, it's quite easy to find examples of terrible o.c.r. in the archive.org library. indeed, it's so easy that i wouldn't ordinarily even bother to point out such _common_ examples. i'd say that 95% of the archive.org e-books exhibit problems in their digital text. finding e-books _without_ any problems is the difficult task here, not finding ones that have problems. indeed, the problem is so pervasive that if _i_ were making the decision to release this text -- as it is -- to the general public, i would refuse to do so... that's how bad some of this text is... but not only is archive.org _releasing_ the text, it's _promoting_ the release of its flawed text, as if it were _proud_ of the release. i don't really understand why they'd _do_ this. (it's almost as if they expect that nobody will actually even _look_ at their books, even though they're promoted with high-profile press releases.) but -- after having tried for years and years and years to bring this problem to their attention and have them do something to correct it -- i can no longer sit by without making a public fuss. and let there be no mistake about this. i am _willing_ to help archive.org correct their o.c.r. i've done lots of work on this, and i _have_ offered my assistance. i was largely ignored, so i persisted, and -- to my amazement -- i was _banned_ from their mailing listserves. talk about shooting the messenger! *** so here's today's example. for this one, i will pick a book that archive.org itself once trumpeted as an example of its work -- the adventures of tom sawyer. in keeping with its focus on its page-flipping scan-set viewer, archive.org showed one of the chapter-header pages, complete with an illustration that overlapped with the opening text there. here's where they promoted the page: > http://openlibrary.org/dev/docs/ui#anchor5 and here's the actual page: > http://www.archive.org/stream/adventuresoftoms00twaiiala#page/26 the reason (the scan of) this page was so impressive was because our current e-book formats are largely incapable of integrating text with pictures in such a sophisticated and pleasing mesh... but that intertwining of text and graphic has a deleterious effect on the o.c.r. so if you pull up the o.c.r. text from this very page, you'll see that it shows this: > morning was > > come, and all the summer world was > bright and fresh, and brimming with > life. There was a song in every heart ;. > and- if the heart was young the music > issued at the lips. There was cheer > in every face and a spring in every > step. The locust trees were in bloom > and the fragrance of the blossoms > filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond > the Village and above it, was green > with vegetation, and it lay just far > enough away to seem a Delectable > Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. > Tom appeared on the sidewalk with > a bucket of whitewash and a long- > handled brush. He surveyed the > fence, and all gladness left him and > a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence > nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing. > > 26 as you can see, the chapter-header has been lost, and the word "saturday" at the beginning of the chapter too. so a person who is "reading" this o.c.r. text won't know that this is a new chapter, or that the day is a saturday. other than that, aside from a few other o.c.r. glitches, the text is ok. but that's a serious problem for a reader, not knowing that this is the start of a new chapter. and this is on a page that was actively promoted by archive.org! -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 11 13:07:23 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 16:07:23 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] in other news Message-ID: now in other news, rfrank's "fadedpage" proofing site has taken a big step forward, transitioning to a "match-the-page" mode. what's funny is that he thinks he's in "uncharted territory" now. um, no, roger, i've already mapped that land quite extensively. but hey man, if you wanna learn it all by yourself, be my guest. roger is also doing a good job of listening to his users, who keep asking him to provide the types of functionality that i demonstrated with my proofing site. if he only just keeps responding to their requests, sooner or later his site will be working very similar to mine. convergence can be beautiful. one down-side is that roger went to a database operation... that's sad, because when you box your text into a database, it's not nearly as open and convenient as when it's on the web. which means that other people cannot build utility around it... what makes this doubly sad is that it seems that he went to the database to solve the problems he was having with sync, like replacing the text of one page with that of another page. the thing is, synch problems are typical of new e-book code, particularly when it is being written by a new e-book coder, and it really has _nothing_ to do with the underlying storage, whether that be in a database or in your ordinary file-system. so he didn't really _need_ to switch to a database operation... oh well; as long as it's only one step back for two steps forward, he'll keep making progress. oh, and by the way, even at the very start of "match-the-page", the proofers seem to like it a lot. and that will grow over time. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 12 10:33:57 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 13:33:57 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 02 of 32 Message-ID: <62efb.23049b81.391c4085@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** once again, i love internet archive and its mission. and when someone you love has a booger hanging from their nose, you _tell_ them that's the situation, so they won't go embarrassing themselves publicly. that's what i'm doing here... *** today's example comes from "pride and prejudice", which i'm sure you know is one of the most popular downloads of all time for public-domain e-books... here's the pagescan: > http://www.archive.org/stream/prideprejudicewi00austuoft#page/34 and here's the o.c.r. from that page: > > 34 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE > > *Ur.>' Iv,' replied Darcj", (o whom tliis remark was chiefly > > addrcucu. [;.cic is meanness it " ???' - arts whicii ladies sometimes > condescend to rturl,-'. (.-r I.- Wlutrvrt Ivars atfimiy > > (O cunning is i > > Mitj Binglc)- wii no( lo entirely utist;ed with this reply as to > continue the suhjca. > > ' ' ??? ??? ?? ?? - i th.cm again only to uy that her sivter was > > ,, . : could niH lca\c l-.cr. Binglc)' urged Mr. Jones's > > being sent for immediately; uh.ilc hit utters, convinced that ik> > country adncc could be of any service, recommended an express > to f ' one of the most eminent physiciaru. Thii the would > > :??? ?? ' " ??? -'x was not so unwilling to comply with their > > , and It was settled that Mr. lones should l-'c > tent for eaily in the morning, if Miss Bennet u ere not decidedly > bcncr. Bingley was quite uixomfortable; his sisten declared > that the)- were misaable. The)- solaced their uteti " > howc\a, by duets after suppa, while he could find i.. . ^.vt > rcUefto his feelings than by giving his houickccjxrr direaioni that > c\cry possible attention might be paid to the tick lady and > her sisiCT. no comment necessary, as that o.c.r. speaks for itself. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kimo at webnetic.net Wed May 12 11:29:00 2010 From: kimo at webnetic.net (Kimo Crossman) Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 11:29:00 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 02 of 32 In-Reply-To: <62efb.23049b81.391c4085@aol.com> References: <62efb.23049b81.391c4085@aol.com> Message-ID: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Mayors-jobs-program-to-digitize-library-books-82522997.html Mayor's jobs program to digitize library books Staff report January 24, 2010 Mayor Gavin Newsom (Courtesy photo) SAN FRANCISCO ? Stacks of books at the San Francisco Public Library will be digitized by a company that is receiving federal stimulus funds through Mayor Gavin Newsom's jobs program. San Francisco Jobs Now, which provides companies with stimulus money to pay employees, has allowed Internet Archive to hire more than 100 people to painstakingly copy materials at the Main Library to the Internet. The company has just 12 employees. Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/Mayors-jobs-program-to-digitize-library-books-82522997.html#ixzz0nk0JvV4m m/local/Mayors-jobs-program-to-digitize-library-books-82522997.html On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 10:33 AM, wrote: > for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems > with the text in e-books from the internet archive... > > *** > > once again, i love internet archive and its mission. > > and when someone you love has a booger hanging > from their nose, you _tell_ them that's the situation, > so they won't go embarrassing themselves publicly. > > that's what i'm doing here... > > *** > > today's example comes from "pride and prejudice", > which i'm sure you know is one of the most popular > downloads of all time for public-domain e-books... > > here's the pagescan: > > http://www.archive.org/stream/prideprejudicewi00austuoft#page/34 > > and here's the o.c.r. from that page: > > > > 34 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE > > > > *Ur.>' Iv,' replied Darcj", (o whom tliis remark was chiefly > > > > addrcucu. [;.cic is meanness it " ???' - arts whicii ladies sometimes > > condescend to rturl,-'. (.-r I.- Wlutrvrt Ivars atfimiy > > > > (O cunning is i > > > > Mitj Binglc)- wii no( lo entirely utist;ed with this reply as to > > continue the suhjca. > > > > ' ' ??? ??? ?? ?? - i th.cm again only to uy that her sivter was > > > > ,, . : could niH lca\c l-.cr. Binglc)' urged Mr. Jones's > > > > being sent for immediately; uh.ilc hit utters, convinced that ik> > > country adncc could be of any service, recommended an express > > to f ' one of the most eminent physiciaru. Thii the would > > > > :??? ?? ' " ??? -'x was not so unwilling to comply with their > > > > , and It was settled that Mr. lones should l-'c > > tent for eaily in the morning, if Miss Bennet u ere not decidedly > > bcncr. Bingley was quite uixomfortable; his sisten declared > > that the)- were misaable. The)- solaced their uteti " > > howc\a, by duets after suppa, while he could find i.. . ^.vt > > rcUefto his feelings than by giving his houickccjxrr direaioni that > > c\cry possible attention might be paid to the tick lady and > > her sisiCT. > > no comment necessary, as that o.c.r. speaks for itself. > > -bowerbird > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 12 12:34:40 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 15:34:40 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 02 of 32 Message-ID: <6be70.5c62826a.391c5cd0@aol.com> if some of those stimulus funds are used to _clean_ the o.c.r., that would be an extremely excellent use of them, to be sure... if they're used to scan more books and create more crap o.c.r., however, that would be sad. to put this in perspective, it takes about _one_hour_ per book to clean up the o.c.r. and turn that digital text into an e-book. just one hour. (people from distributed proofreaders will try and tell you it takes longer than that; that's because they're doing it wrong.) but "just one hour" for a million books takes a million hours. so you need to _budget_ for that. brewster worked himself into a hole when he promised that he could digitize a book for $30 (roughly 10 cents per page): > http://www.opencontentalliance.org/2009/03/22/economics-of-book-digitization/ you can _scan_ it and handle the other associated overhead, but you need an hour of crafty human labor _after_ scanning in order to make the digital text worthy of human exposure... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 13 01:28:31 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Thu, 13 May 2010 04:28:31 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 03 of 32 Message-ID: <2c8dd.795befa5.391d122f@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is from "books and culture", the book google offered as its very first public-domain scan-set. here's the pagescan for page 14: > http://www.archive.org/stream/booksandculture00mabirich#page/14 here's the o.c.r. for the book: > http://ia341039.us.archive.org/2/items/booksandculture00mabirich/booksandculture00mabirich_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 14: > > Material and Method. > > the wisest of modern readers has said > that the most important character- > istio of the real critic the man who > penetrates the secret of a work of > art is the ability to admire greatly; > and there is but a short step between > admiration and love. And as if to > emphasise the value of a quality so > rare among critics, the same wise > reader, who was also the greatest > writer of modern times, says also > that fc where keen perception unites > with good will and love, it gets at > the heart of man and the world ; > nay, it may hope to reach the high > est goal of all." To get at the heart > of that knowledge, life, and beauty > which are stored in books is surely > one way of reaching the highest > goal. > > That goal, in Goethe s thought, > was the complete development of > 14 if you look at that text, you'll see a few o.c.r. errors... specifically, "charateristio" instead of "characteristic", and a double-quotemark that's misrecognized as "fc". the bigger problems, however, are what you do not see. comparing the text against its scan, you'll discover that one end-line-hyphenate -- "highest' -- lost its hyphen. also notice that the apostrophe in "goethe's" was lost... both of these problems happened frequently in this book. they're serious flaws, to be sure, but they lend themselves to fixes that can be applied more-or-less automatically... although that fact gives little solace once we consider the offsetting fact that the auto-fixes have not been applied. but there's yet another problem here, even more serious. as you see, em-dashes were lost in the o.c.r. of this page, review of other pages shows this problem is _book-wide_, and a look at other books reveals it's a common problem. although it might not seem like that big of a deal, the loss of em-dashes can make some passages weird and illogical. as a solution, i programmed a tool that will let you easily insert em-dashes into a text. it works fine, but the job is still time-consuming. indeed, i found it much quicker to simply re-do the o.c.r., a route that's clearly unacceptable. the problem got more interesting, however, when i learned -- after considerable sleuthing -- that this is a problem in the _workflow_ of the internet archive, not the o.c.r. per se. the o.c.r. records em-dashes, but somewhere along the line, due to some bad coding, they are being lost from the file... in other words, the employees at archive.org screwed it up. this is human error, from people being paid to know better. this problem is especially galling to me, because i thought -- after i'd gone through some severe agitation to get it -- i had extracted a promise from the archive.org people that they would go back and _fix_ this glitch on all the old files. but as can be seen clearly, they reneged on their promise... i guess they thought that once they banned me from their listserve, they could forget the promises they made to me. but i can't figure out why they don't care about their books. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 14 11:58:25 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 14:58:25 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 04 of 32 Message-ID: <3a299.20f7eb9c.391ef751@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's sample is "alice's adventures in wonderland", the book that -- more than any other -- captured the imagination of people, from martin gardner on down. in the e-book arena, "alice" has been "the prototype", in that it's the overwhelming choice to use in demos. it's the text which every new system cuts its teeth on. one warning: don't use any archive.org o.c.r. version! here's the page-scan: > http://www.archive.org/stream/alicesadventur00carr#page/20 here's the o.c.r. for the full book: > http://ia311325.us.archive.org/3/items/alicesadventur00carr/alicesadventur00carr_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for that page (which is page 20, not "n35"): > > 20 THE POOL > > and four times six is thirteen, and four times > seven is ??? oh dear! I shall never get to twenty > at that rate ! However, the Multiplication Table > doesn't signify : let's try Geography. London is > the capital of Paris, and Pciris is the capital of > Eome, and Eome ??? no, that 's all wrong, I'm > certain ! I must have been changed for Mabel ! > I'll try and say ' Hoiv doth the little ??? '" and she > crossed her hands on her lap as if she were > saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but her > voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words > did not come the same as they used to do : ??? > > " Hoi'j doth the little crocodile > Improve Iris shining tail, > And 2^our the v:aters of the Site > On every golden sccde ! > > " Hoir cheerfully he seems to grin, > Hoio neatly spreads his elavjs, > And welcomes little fishes in > With gently smiling jaws/" gosh, what a litany of errors and glitches on just this one page. first, that funny character after "second is" in the second line is an em-dash. it's a utf8 em-dash. that's right. to "solve" the problem of the em-dashes that their workflow had misplaced, they stick a _utf8_ em-dash into what is otherwise 7-bit ascii... i think that's _stupid_, but i guess it's what they call "progress". but let's go on. numerous examples of "floating" punctuation dot the page, which is not all that unusual for o.c.r., and i note that it _can_ be corrected automatically, except it _hasn't_ been. we also have misrecognitions on "paris" and "rome" (twice)... moreover, the _italics_ were lost, both in the text for emphasis, and on the poem. the _centering_ of the poem was lost as well. and there were more misrecognitions on the italicized text, on "how" (4), "his", "pour", "waters", "nile", "scale", and "claws", plus an exclamation-point that was misrecognized as a slash. all in all, a pretty dismal performance, all on this single page... a classic book like this deserves much better... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 14 12:03:06 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 15:03:06 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: spill baby spill Message-ID: <3a756.604f450f.391ef86a@aol.com> none of the "containment" methods are working. and gobs of goo are starting to come up on-shore. and now we learn that the gusher is releasing some _ten_times_ as much oil as we were told previously. with no end in sight, heaven help us... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Fri May 14 19:10:41 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 19:10:41 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> References: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> Message-ID: >i expect that i will be able to load .epubs onto the thing quite easily, simply by going through the itunes store... Do me a favor and see what you can do with it using wifi and without feeding Apple your credit card number, nor signing up for one of the "Company Store" accounts: aka iTunes, iBooks, nor the App Store. In my experience it is a "boat anchor" as far as reading books are concerned until one feeds Apple one's credit card number - one can however "read online web connected" in txt or pdf format using the included "Safari" stateless web browser - "stateless" meaning that the browser only remembers the latest txt or pdf one has read, one cannot use the web browser to save more than one "favorite" book and then come back and read it successfully later - unless one has an active wifi or 3G connection, or unless that's the last book read. But maybe you can figure out some tricks that I haven't been able to figure out re avoiding "The Company Store!" Also, see if you can figure out any way to load epub books from the PG site directly, via wifi, and without using a USB cable, nor by going through The Company Store. I haven't been able to figure out any way to use wifi to directly load a free epub book from an internet location of my choosing (such as directly from PG) >and if people ask me why _you_ had problems doing it, i'll shrug _my_ shoulders, and mumble something about Again, *I* want to read what I want to read and where I want to read it from. And if *I* pay for wifi then I'd like to be able to use that wifi to do this--god forbid! What I consistently see is a pattern of the makers of ebook readers crippling the use of wifi to keep the user from acquiring and reading books from wherever they want to get those books. What I see is the makers only really allowing the wifi to be used to acquire books and documents when purchasing from the official company store (or licensee) of that maker. Also, *I* want to be able to take a non-DRM aka "Free" book off my machine and give it to a friend and have that friend be able to read that "Free" book. I also want to be able to create books, and applications, and freely share those books and applications with my friends, and not have to ask The Corporation's permission to share my creations, nor have The Corporation limit my distribution to only my 100 closest friends. In short I would like to retain my first amendment rights, and not flush them down the toilet with my choice of reader machine. I would also like to retain my freedom of political expression in these matters, and not have The Corporation decide what political speech they will allow on my machine, nor what political speech I can choose to distribute, etc. And I would like to be able to use wifi to do these things, not just a USB umbilical cord. Again, netbooks already allow me to do all these things, so it is not like I am asking for anything that is technically impossible, nor anything that keeps one or another ebook maker from earning an honest buck, its just that the packaging of the keyboard with the netbook is an awkward packaging choice for an "ebook reader" IMHO. And the Toshiba Portege already allows all these things without a keyboard and with a touchscreen display, its just that it's a bit heavy and a *bit* expensive at $1500 bucks! But I will happily put up with a netbook's limitation rather than have The Corporation tell me what I am allowed to read and from where! And it doesn't matter WHO "The Corporation" is! -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Fri May 14 19:26:30 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (James Adcock) Date: Fri, 14 May 2010 19:26:30 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <648a1.3471358c.3919cc7c@aol.com> References: <648a1.3471358c.3919cc7c@aol.com> Message-ID: > but in that case, your routines should have done what d.p. requires of its proofers, which is to move the second part of the end-of-line hyphenate to the previous line. i _believe_ that in some cases, you moved the first part down... (but i could be wrong on that, so do please let me know if i am.) Yes, my routines would have been smart enough to move the second part up if I had been smart enough to remember to run my smart dehyphenation routines prior to running the linebreak recovery routine, but since you were only doing a visual ?proof of concept? I didn?t think it would matter to you whether the half-word was moved one line up or one line down since the line length imbalance would on average remain the same in any case. "in theory"? you just take them from the o.c.r. at archive.org, which is what you used to restore the linebreaks anyway, right? I don?t ?just? do anything. The linebreak recovery algorithm is more-or-less a whole document best match using Levenshtein distance tokenized on words+whitespace, and then cloning the whitespace information from the OCR text to the PG text. Since it is the PG text that contributes the ?word? part of the information there are no hyphens to recover ? because PG requires that we remove those hyphens. If I not only took the ?whitespace? part of the information from the OCR but also the ?word? part from the OCR, then you would be back to the raw OCR ? but hey, if that?s what you want? ?I will see what it would take to also recover the hyphens, which also sounds like a reasonable thing to be able to do. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 15 11:42:44 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 14:42:44 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 05 of 32 Message-ID: for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** one of the most creative cats of the last 500 years is jules verne. i want some of what _he_ was smoking! so let's look at "around the world in 80 days" for our example today of what's wrong with archive.org text. here's the scan of page 55 > http://www.archive.org/stream/tourofworldineig00vernrich#page/55 here's the o.c.r. of the entire book: > http://ia361301.us.archive.org/1/items/tourofworldineig00vernrich/tourofworldineig00vernrich_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. of page 55: > > TOUR OF THE WORLD IN EIGHTY DA 78. 55 > > out ofj>rder his mechanism, so wonderfully organ- > ized. I Then he played at whistT/ For he found > companions as devoted to it as himself ; a collector > of taxes, who was going to his post at Goa ; a min- > ister, the Eev. Decimus Smith, returning to Bom- > bay ; and a brigadier-general of the English army, > who was rejoining his corps at Benares. These > three passengers had the same passion for whist as > Mr. Fogg, and they played for entire hours, not > less quietly than he. > > [As for Passepartout, seasickness had taken no > holci on him. He occupied a forward cabin, and > eafc conscientiously. It must be said that the voy- > age made under these circumstances was decidedly > not unpleasant to himTj He rather liked his share > of it. [Well fed and well lodged, he was seeing the > country, and besides he asserted to himself that all > this whim would end at Bombay. j [The next day > after leaving Suez it was not without a certain > pleasure that he met on deck the obliging jgerson > whom he had addressed on landing in Egypt./ > > I" I am not mistaken," he said, on approaching > him with his most amiable smile, " you are the very > gentleman that so kindly served as my guide in > Suez?" > > "Indeed," replied the detective, "I recognize > you ! You are the servant of that odd English- > man " > > " Just so, monsieur " > > "Fix." > > u Monsieur Fix," replied Passepartout. " De- there you go. i'll let y'all do the commentary on this one... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gbnewby at pglaf.org Sat May 15 12:11:00 2010 From: gbnewby at pglaf.org (Greg Newby) Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 12:11:00 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: References: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> Message-ID: <20100515191100.GB23261@pglaf.org> On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 07:10:41PM -0700, James Adcock wrote: > > >i expect that i will be able to load .epubs onto the thing > quite easily, simply by going through the itunes store... > > > > Do me a favor and see what you can do with it using wifi and without feeding > Apple your credit card number, nor signing up for one of the "Company Store" > accounts: aka iTunes, iBooks, nor the App Store. In my experience it is a > "boat anchor" as far as reading books are concerned until one feeds Apple > one's credit card number - one can however "read online web connected" in > txt or pdf format using the included "Safari" stateless web browser - > "stateless" meaning that the browser only remembers the latest txt or pdf > one has read, one cannot use the web browser to save more than one > "favorite" book and then come back and read it successfully later - unless > one has an active wifi or 3G connection, or unless that's the last book > read. But maybe you can figure out some tricks that I haven't been able to > figure out re avoiding "The Company Store!" I have tried to do the things Jim suggests, on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. As far as I know, these cannot be done without going through iTunes on a host computer: - get a .epub file from gutenberg.org or elsewhere to display (Safari cannot do it. Any other ePub apps, such as Wattpad or Stanza, don't come with the device and need to come from the store via iTunes) - getting an .epub file that you have somehow managed to get on your iPad/etc. device off of that device, to share with others, without going through iTunes. In the Apple universe, I think that getting content from the iPad/etc. is not the model. The model is to have a fully-featured computer with iTunes be the "host" for the device, and any exchange/sharing/ syncing of content goes through that device. So, for example, I have some books in these three apps: Stanza, GoodReader and Wattpad. They're free PG eBooks, via those application's interfaces. To get the APPS, I needed iTunes. But once the app was installed, I could go to their own store (or whatever you want to call it) via free WiFi or cellular network or however I'm connected. Books or other files downloaded to those apps would come in via the device. So, I could use my iPhone to run Stanza, and get a copy of a book on the iPhone. THEN, when I connected the iPhone to my host computer with iTunes, and allowed syncing to other devices, the app & book would then appear on those other devices: the computer, the iPhone, and, say, the iPad. (The iBooks app, of course, is only on iPad. Similarly, there are some apps that won't run on all device types.) On the host computer, the PG *file* could be copied out of iTunes, and manipulated/sent like any other file. Similarly, I could put ePub files or others into iTunes. How to play/view them from the iPhone, I do not yet know since apps like Stanza and Wattpad only seem to see what came in from their own storefronts, not other sources. Basically, FILES seem to need to be tied to APPS for display. Fundamentally, a. You need iTunes to get any new apps on your computer; b. You need an Apple iTunes store account, before iTunes will let you load any apps -- even free ones! Can you provide some sort of fake info to the Apple iTunes store to get activated? Maybe. That would open the store, but you'd still need iTunes at least to get started. Are there apps that make it possible to add a file to what an app sees (so, say, Stanza will see a .epub)? Maybe, but I think this is something the app would need to permit. Finally, I have been reading about the Apple SDK for all of this. They are intentionally prohibiting most forms of inter-app communication that we are used to seeing on fully-featured computers. This is why Firefox, which relies on plugins for full functionality, might not appear on these devices. It's also why (I think) Safari cannot launch an external ePub reader program. Instead, somewhat incredibly, when you use your iPhone's Safari to click on an .epub file at www.gutenberg.org, it tells you it cannot open that file. -- Greg > > > > Also, see if you can figure out any way to load epub books from the PG site > directly, via wifi, and without using a USB cable, nor by going through The > Company Store. I haven't been able to figure out any way to use wifi to > directly load a free epub book from an internet location of my choosing > (such as directly from PG) > > > > >and if people ask me why _you_ had problems doing it, > i'll shrug _my_ shoulders, and mumble something about > > > > Again, *I* want to read what I want to read and where I want to read it > from. And if *I* pay for wifi then I'd like to be able to use that wifi to > do this--god forbid! What I consistently see is a pattern of the makers of > ebook readers crippling the use of wifi to keep the user from acquiring and > reading books from wherever they want to get those books. What I see is the > makers only really allowing the wifi to be used to acquire books and > documents when purchasing from the official company store (or licensee) of > that maker. > > > > Also, *I* want to be able to take a non-DRM aka "Free" book off my machine > and give it to a friend and have that friend be able to read that "Free" > book. I also want to be able to create books, and applications, and freely > share those books and applications with my friends, and not have to ask The > Corporation's permission to share my creations, nor have The Corporation > limit my distribution to only my 100 closest friends. In short I would like > to retain my first amendment rights, and not flush them down the toilet with > my choice of reader machine. I would also like to retain my freedom of > political expression in these matters, and not have The Corporation decide > what political speech they will allow on my machine, nor what political > speech I can choose to distribute, etc. And I would like to be able to use > wifi to do these things, not just a USB umbilical cord. > > > > Again, netbooks already allow me to do all these things, so it is not like I > am asking for anything that is technically impossible, nor anything that > keeps one or another ebook maker from earning an honest buck, its just that > the packaging of the keyboard with the netbook is an awkward packaging > choice for an "ebook reader" IMHO. And the Toshiba Portege already allows > all these things without a keyboard and with a touchscreen display, its just > that it's a bit heavy and a *bit* expensive at $1500 bucks! But I will > happily put up with a netbook's limitation rather than have The Corporation > tell me what I am allowed to read and from where! And it doesn't matter WHO > "The Corporation" is! > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From danweber at mindspring.com Sat May 15 12:50:59 2010 From: danweber at mindspring.com (Dan Weber) Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 15:50:59 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: <20100515191100.GB23261@pglaf.org> References: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> <20100515191100.GB23261@pglaf.org> Message-ID: <003c01caf467$f18c19e0$d4a44da0$@com> Using only the included mail program on my Ipod touch, I can read attachment files (only txt and pdf are viewable with included viewers). But they are sent wifi from my router. No cables. And there is a way to set up your desktop box as a server for "ereader" A free program from itunes. Dan Weber -----Original Message----- From: gutvol-d-bounces at lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces at lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of Greg Newby Sent: Saturday, May 15, 2010 3:11 PM To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 07:10:41PM -0700, James Adcock wrote: > > >i expect that i will be able to load .epubs onto the thing > quite easily, simply by going through the itunes store... > > > > Do me a favor and see what you can do with it using wifi and without feeding > Apple your credit card number, nor signing up for one of the "Company Store" > accounts: aka iTunes, iBooks, nor the App Store. In my experience it is a > "boat anchor" as far as reading books are concerned until one feeds Apple > one's credit card number - one can however "read online web connected" in > txt or pdf format using the included "Safari" stateless web browser - > "stateless" meaning that the browser only remembers the latest txt or pdf > one has read, one cannot use the web browser to save more than one > "favorite" book and then come back and read it successfully later - unless > one has an active wifi or 3G connection, or unless that's the last book > read. But maybe you can figure out some tricks that I haven't been able to > figure out re avoiding "The Company Store!" I have tried to do the things Jim suggests, on iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. As far as I know, these cannot be done without going through iTunes on a host computer: - get a .epub file from gutenberg.org or elsewhere to display (Safari cannot do it. Any other ePub apps, such as Wattpad or Stanza, don't come with the device and need to come from the store via iTunes) - getting an .epub file that you have somehow managed to get on your iPad/etc. device off of that device, to share with others, without going through iTunes. In the Apple universe, I think that getting content from the iPad/etc. is not the model. The model is to have a fully-featured computer with iTunes be the "host" for the device, and any exchange/sharing/ syncing of content goes through that device. So, for example, I have some books in these three apps: Stanza, GoodReader and Wattpad. They're free PG eBooks, via those application's interfaces. To get the APPS, I needed iTunes. But once the app was installed, I could go to their own store (or whatever you want to call it) via free WiFi or cellular network or however I'm connected. Books or other files downloaded to those apps would come in via the device. So, I could use my iPhone to run Stanza, and get a copy of a book on the iPhone. THEN, when I connected the iPhone to my host computer with iTunes, and allowed syncing to other devices, the app & book would then appear on those other devices: the computer, the iPhone, and, say, the iPad. (The iBooks app, of course, is only on iPad. Similarly, there are some apps that won't run on all device types.) On the host computer, the PG *file* could be copied out of iTunes, and manipulated/sent like any other file. Similarly, I could put ePub files or others into iTunes. How to play/view them from the iPhone, I do not yet know since apps like Stanza and Wattpad only seem to see what came in from their own storefronts, not other sources. Basically, FILES seem to need to be tied to APPS for display. Fundamentally, a. You need iTunes to get any new apps on your computer; b. You need an Apple iTunes store account, before iTunes will let you load any apps -- even free ones! Can you provide some sort of fake info to the Apple iTunes store to get activated? Maybe. That would open the store, but you'd still need iTunes at least to get started. Are there apps that make it possible to add a file to what an app sees (so, say, Stanza will see a .epub)? Maybe, but I think this is something the app would need to permit. Finally, I have been reading about the Apple SDK for all of this. They are intentionally prohibiting most forms of inter-app communication that we are used to seeing on fully-featured computers. This is why Firefox, which relies on plugins for full functionality, might not appear on these devices. It's also why (I think) Safari cannot launch an external ePub reader program. Instead, somewhat incredibly, when you use your iPhone's Safari to click on an .epub file at www.gutenberg.org, it tells you it cannot open that file. -- Greg > > > > Also, see if you can figure out any way to load epub books from the PG site > directly, via wifi, and without using a USB cable, nor by going through The > Company Store. I haven't been able to figure out any way to use wifi to > directly load a free epub book from an internet location of my choosing > (such as directly from PG) > > > > >and if people ask me why _you_ had problems doing it, > i'll shrug _my_ shoulders, and mumble something about > > > > Again, *I* want to read what I want to read and where I want to read it > from. And if *I* pay for wifi then I'd like to be able to use that wifi to > do this--god forbid! What I consistently see is a pattern of the makers of > ebook readers crippling the use of wifi to keep the user from acquiring and > reading books from wherever they want to get those books. What I see is the > makers only really allowing the wifi to be used to acquire books and > documents when purchasing from the official company store (or licensee) of > that maker. > > > > Also, *I* want to be able to take a non-DRM aka "Free" book off my machine > and give it to a friend and have that friend be able to read that "Free" > book. I also want to be able to create books, and applications, and freely > share those books and applications with my friends, and not have to ask The > Corporation's permission to share my creations, nor have The Corporation > limit my distribution to only my 100 closest friends. In short I would like > to retain my first amendment rights, and not flush them down the toilet with > my choice of reader machine. I would also like to retain my freedom of > political expression in these matters, and not have The Corporation decide > what political speech they will allow on my machine, nor what political > speech I can choose to distribute, etc. And I would like to be able to use > wifi to do these things, not just a USB umbilical cord. > > > > Again, netbooks already allow me to do all these things, so it is not like I > am asking for anything that is technically impossible, nor anything that > keeps one or another ebook maker from earning an honest buck, its just that > the packaging of the keyboard with the netbook is an awkward packaging > choice for an "ebook reader" IMHO. And the Toshiba Portege already allows > all these things without a keyboard and with a touchscreen display, its just > that it's a bit heavy and a *bit* expensive at $1500 bucks! But I will > happily put up with a netbook's limitation rather than have The Corporation > tell me what I am allowed to read and from where! And it doesn't matter WHO > "The Corporation" is! > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 15 12:54:37 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 15:54:37 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") Message-ID: jim said: > Do me a favor and see what you can do with it using wifi > and without feeding Apple your credit card number, > nor signing up for one of the "Company Store" accounts: > aka iTunes, iBooks, nor the App Store. if you're gonna refuse to give apple your credit-card number, there's no reason to buy apple machinery... no reason at all... perhaps you'd like apple to use a different business model. fine. i can understand that. but that's apple's call to make. and if you want to bellow about it, i can understand that too. but when you continue to bellow, and continue to bellow more, and won't stop bellowing here, even though _nobody_here_ can do anything about apple's choice of business model, it gets old. it gets really old. to the point people really want you to shut up. even the people who agree with you. _especially_ those people, because you make them look bad because they hold your opinion. i suppose you know the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says "doc, it hurts when i do _this_", and the doctor replies by saying "then don't do that." take a hint, jim. please. *** greg said: > Instead, somewhat incredibly, when you use your iPhone's > Safari to click on an .epub file at www.gutenberg.org, > it tells you it cannot open that file. is there any browser that can _open_ an .epub file? -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 15 13:17:18 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 22:17:18 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Typesetting ("gods and fighting men") In-Reply-To: References: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> Message-ID: <4BEF014E.4050305@perathoner.de> James Adcock wrote: >>i expect that i will be able to load .epubs onto the thing > quite easily, simply by going through the itunes store... > > Do me a favor and see what you can do with it using wifi and without feeding > Apple your credit card number, nor signing up for one of the ?Company Store? > accounts: aka iTunes, iBooks, nor the App Store. In my experience it is a ?boat > anchor? as far as reading books are concerned until one feeds Apple one?s credit > card number You need iTunes at least once. So you need a Windows PC or Mac at least once. You can get an AppStore account without disclosing your credit card. (I did it.) I guess you can also use a fake identity to do that. There are how-to's on the net. Google for them. The gist is to try and download a free application before registering for the AppStore. Then you can download Stanza (for free) and inside Stanza you can download epubs (even from arbitrary urls if you want to). > Also, see if you can figure out any way to load epub books from the PG site > directly, via wifi, Get Stanza, then add m.gutenberg.org as book source. -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From marcello at perathoner.de Sat May 15 14:02:29 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Sat, 15 May 2010 23:02:29 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] More Apple Humor In-Reply-To: <4BEF014E.4050305@perathoner.de> References: <6011a.65ee5756.3919c047@aol.com> <4BEF014E.4050305@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <4BEF0BE5.9090007@perathoner.de> Anybody remember Apple rejecting the Eucalyptus eBook App because they figured out you could read the Kama Sutra with it? I downloaded the Opera Web Browser for iphone and it's rated 17+ because it "contains erotic scenes". -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From cannona at fireantproductions.com Sun May 16 08:19:30 2010 From: cannona at fireantproductions.com (Aaron Cannon) Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 10:19:30 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: <34442.599cd3e9.3915fa39@aol.com> References: <34442.599cd3e9.3915fa39@aol.com> Message-ID: I just love it when people criticize something without fully understanding it first. As a blind person myself, I think this new project is great! Folks can complain about the quality of the books, but the fact is that most of the books are still usable, in spite of the foibles of OCR. Given the choice between a nicely proofread book from PG or another source, or the raw version from archive.org, I'll of course choose the proofread version. Unfortunately, that's usually not an option. Most of the books made available from archive.org in this program are not available from other sources in an electronic format. So, given the choice between getting the book from archive.org or scanning it myself, I'll choose archive.org. I'd much rather let them do the scanning for me. If it is unusable, fine, I'll rescan it or get someone else to proofread it. However, in my experience, that is almost never necessary. One barely usable book is worth more to me than a thousand nicely proofread titles, if the one book is the one I happen to need. Aaron On 5/7/10, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > when are people going to start calling "bullshit" > on the press releases from the internet archive? > > that's what i want to know. > > look at their text. it's raw o.c.r., and it's _awful_. > and unlike google, they're doing nothing to fix it. > > but they're putting it out for the "blind and dyslexic"? > is this some kind of mean trick they're trying to play? > do they think blind people won't notice the bad o.c.r.? > > i don't know who's calling the shots over there, since > they all _seem_ like nice people... but my goodness, > the cynicism of these press releases is overwhelming. > > and all this "good publicity" that they are getting will > soon exercise its karmic force, and bite 'em in the butt. > > it's past the point of embarrassment; it's _dangerous_. > even if the press will print your lies, it's wrong to lie... > > -bowerbird > From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 16 11:30:58 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 14:30:58 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: <9ad74.7ef515ea.392193e2@aol.com> aaron said: > I just love it when people criticize something > without fully understanding it first.? um, aaron, just exactly what is it that you think i fail to "fully understand"? because i do fully understand that a book with poor o.c.r. is better than no book with no o.c.r. there's no question about that. but that's not what archive.org's press release was all about. they were trumpeting the release of e-books in the daisy format, for the blind and dyslexic. _all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format. the reason this press release is cynical is that the o.c.r. can be awful, as i've been showing, meaning the text is bad and the daisy is bad. a sighted reader can refer to the page-scan if a passage is unclear, and resolve the issue. but a blind reader has no such recourse... so, if anyone here doesn't "fully understand" the issue, i'm afraid it is you, aaron, not me. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 16 11:44:26 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 14:44:26 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 06 of 32 Message-ID: <9b6c4.2e85b02a.3921970a@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** nobody bothered to comment on yesterday's example, which likely means that nobody's even looking at these. which is fine. i'm a self-starter. yesterday's scan was a page that had been "annotated"... that is, a library patron had underlined one sentence and bracketed a few more, and "corrected" a few printer errors. such marks are not that unusual if we remember that these are books that are in a library, and have been checked out by who-knows-how-many patrons along their long journey. it might be "unfair" to judge uncorrected o.c.r. on such a page, because we cannot expect o.c.r. to overcome marks on a page. but that's the _point_, you see. these _are_ library books, and we can _expect_ that they might be marked on, and we cannot expect o.c.r. to compensate, which is just one more reason why we _need_ to make a good effort to actually _correct_ the o.c.r. *** nonetheless, it's not difficult to find examples of terrible o.c.r. even if we rule out any pages with markings made by patrons... so, for today's example, i'll again use verne's "around the world", and focus on a page that has no such patron-markings on it... *** here's the scan of page 69: > http://www.archive.org/stream/tourofworldineig00vern#page/69 and here's the o.c.r. of the entire book: > http://ia310838.us.archive.org/0/items/tourofworldineig00vern/tourofworldineig00vern_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. of page 69: > > Thii Tour of the World in Eiyldy Days. 69 > > " Be so good, landlord, as not to swear, but > remember this : cats were formerly considered, in > India, as sacred animals. That was a good time." > *' For the cats, mv lord 1 " > *' Perhaps for the travellers as well ! " > After which Mr. Fogg quietly continued his > dinner. Fix had gone on shore fchortly after ^Ir. > Fogg, and his first destination was the head- > quarters of the Bombay police. He made himself > known as a London detective, told his business > at Bombay, and the position of affairs relative to > the supposed robber, and nervously asked if a > warrant had arrived from London. It had not > reached the office; indeed, there had not yet been > time for it to arrive. Fix w^as sorely disajDpointed, > and tried to obtain an order of arrest from the > director of the Bombay police. This the director > refused, as the matter concerned the London of- > fice, which alone could legally deliver the warrant. > Fix did not insist, and was fain to resign himself > to aw^ait the an-ival of the important document ; > but he was determined not to lose sight of the > mysterious rogue as long as he stayed in Bombay. > He did not doubt for a moment, any more than > Passepartout, that Phileas Fogg would remain > there, at least until it was time for the warrant > to arrive. > > Passeparto\it, however, had no sooner heard his > master's orders on leaving the Mongolia, than he > saw at once that they were to leave Bombay as > they had done Suez and Paris, and that the journey > would be extended at least as far as Calcutta, and > perhaps beyond that place. He began to ask him- i count at least a half-dozen misrecognized words there, and another half-dozen other o.c.r. errors of various kinds. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cannona at fireantproductions.com Sun May 16 13:39:58 2010 From: cannona at fireantproductions.com (Aaron Cannon) Date: Sun, 16 May 2010 16:39:58 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: <9ad74.7ef515ea.392193e2@aol.com> References: <9ad74.7ef515ea.392193e2@aol.com> Message-ID: Bowerbird said: "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format." I stand by my initial assessment. You did not fully understand the announcement, nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing. From the release: "We'll offer current novels, educational books, anything. If somebody then donates a book to the archive, we can digitize it and add it to the collection," he [brewster kahle] said. So, if all those e-books are available as text, tell me where I might find (to pick a random book) At the carnival by Leslie Valdes, published in 2005? As far as I can tell, it's only available in the DAISY format from archive.org. Aaron On 5/16/10, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > aaron said: >> I just love it when people criticize something >> without fully understanding it first. > > um, aaron, just exactly what is it that you think > i fail to "fully understand"? > > because i do fully understand that a book with > poor o.c.r. is better than no book with no o.c.r. > there's no question about that. > > but that's not what archive.org's press release > was all about. > > they were trumpeting the release of e-books > in the daisy format, for the blind and dyslexic. > > _all_ these e-books are also available as text, > and have always been available in that format. > > the reason this press release is cynical is that > the o.c.r. can be awful, as i've been showing, > meaning the text is bad and the daisy is bad. > > a sighted reader can refer to the page-scan > if a passage is unclear, and resolve the issue. > > but a blind reader has no such recourse... > > so, if anyone here doesn't "fully understand" > the issue, i'm afraid it is you, aaron, not me. > > -bowerbird > From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 16 23:53:05 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 02:53:05 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: <25ef.7eb2b01f.392241d1@aol.com> aaron said: > You did not fully understand the announcement, > nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing. yes, i do fully understand it. i didn't care to talk too much about the in-copyright stuff, because i believed that the less said about that, the better. i can talk about that if you want to delve into it deeper, but remember i do support the overall mission of archive.org... so, do you want me to talk about that? first, though, answer me this: do you believe archive.org's o.c.r. of in-copyright material will be significantly better? i'm using the public-domain material to show the problem, simply because it's all i can see, and conveniently point to. but do you believe in-copyright o.c.r. will be problem-free? there's a chance that newer books will o.c.r. more cleanly, but if not, do you think archive.org will make corrections? will they bring their e-books up to a standard of _quality?_ i don't think so. so i, too, stand behind the point which i have been making. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cannona at fireantproductions.com Mon May 17 11:53:17 2010 From: cannona at fireantproductions.com (Aaron Cannon) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 14:53:17 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: <25ef.7eb2b01f.392241d1@aol.com> References: <25ef.7eb2b01f.392241d1@aol.com> Message-ID: LOL. So much for "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, and have always been available in that format." I suspect that the quality of the public domain books will be roughly the same as the copyrighted texts. As to whether or not they will spend the time and money to improve the quality of their books, I doubt it. If they do, I suspect it would only be for a very few "important" works. The cost would otherwise be prohibitive, unless the improvement could be made via software. The print-disabled already have services which work on converting books into accessible formats in high quality. One such organization is the National Library Service for the Blind, a division of the Library of Congress. They do so at a cost of about $5,000 per title (if I remember correctly). Archive.org seems to be focusing more on quantity and much less on quality. I think there is a need for both types of efforts. As I said before, one barely usable book is worth more to me than a thousand nicely proofread titles, if the one book is the one I happen to need. If archive.org tried to cleanup their books more, I suspect that far fewer titles would get added to the collection, and in my view, that trade off would not be worth it. Aaron On 5/17/10, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > aaron said: >> You did not fully understand the announcement, >> nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing. > > yes, i do fully understand it. > > i didn't care to talk too much about the in-copyright stuff, > because i believed that the less said about that, the better. > i can talk about that if you want to delve into it deeper, but > remember i do support the overall mission of archive.org... > > so, do you want me to talk about that? > > first, though, answer me this: do you believe archive.org's > o.c.r. of in-copyright material will be significantly better? > > i'm using the public-domain material to show the problem, > simply because it's all i can see, and conveniently point to. > but do you believe in-copyright o.c.r. will be problem-free? > > there's a chance that newer books will o.c.r. more cleanly, > but if not, do you think archive.org will make corrections? > will they bring their e-books up to a standard of _quality?_ > > i don't think so. > > so i, too, stand behind the point which i have been making. > > -bowerbird > From kimo at webnetic.net Mon May 17 13:03:37 2010 From: kimo at webnetic.net (Kimo Crossman) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 13:03:37 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: References: <25ef.7eb2b01f.392241d1@aol.com> Message-ID: Hi I want to say I am learning a tremendous amount from this interesting discussion - thanks for you two for having it! On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Aaron Cannon < cannona at fireantproductions.com> wrote: > LOL. So much for > "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, > and have always been available in that format." > > I suspect that the quality of the public domain books will be roughly > the same as the copyrighted texts. As to whether or not they will > spend the time and money to improve the quality of their books, I > doubt it. If they do, I suspect it would only be for a very few > "important" works. The cost would otherwise be prohibitive, unless > the improvement could be made via software. > > The print-disabled already have services which work on converting > books into accessible formats in high quality. One such organization > is the National Library Service for the Blind, a division of the > Library of Congress. They do so at a cost of about $5,000 per title > (if I remember correctly). Archive.org seems to be focusing more on > quantity and much less on quality. I think there is a need for both > types of efforts. As I said before, one barely usable book is worth > more to me than a thousand nicely > proofread titles, if the one book is the one I happen to need. > > If archive.org tried to cleanup their books more, I suspect that far > fewer titles would get added to the collection, and in my view, that > trade off would not be worth it. > > Aaron > > On 5/17/10, Bowerbird at aol.com wrote: > > aaron said: > >> You did not fully understand the announcement, > >> nor do you understand what Archive.org is doing. > > > > yes, i do fully understand it. > > > > i didn't care to talk too much about the in-copyright stuff, > > because i believed that the less said about that, the better. > > i can talk about that if you want to delve into it deeper, but > > remember i do support the overall mission of archive.org... > > > > so, do you want me to talk about that? > > > > first, though, answer me this: do you believe archive.org's > > o.c.r. of in-copyright material will be significantly better? > > > > i'm using the public-domain material to show the problem, > > simply because it's all i can see, and conveniently point to. > > but do you believe in-copyright o.c.r. will be problem-free? > > > > there's a chance that newer books will o.c.r. more cleanly, > > but if not, do you think archive.org will make corrections? > > will they bring their e-books up to a standard of _quality?_ > > > > i don't think so. > > > > so i, too, stand behind the point which i have been making. > > > > -bowerbird > > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 17 13:14:27 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 16:14:27 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] adding e-books to itunes Message-ID: <2da5a.4a2007c8.3922fda3@aol.com> here's more on this subject: > http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1505-how-to-quickly-add-your-oreilly-ebooks-to-itunesibooks/ -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From kimo at webnetic.net Mon May 17 13:32:04 2010 From: kimo at webnetic.net (Kimo Crossman) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 13:32:04 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] improve scanning on color docs? Message-ID: love comments from anyone who knows about this: Improve OCR Accuracy on Color Documents This white paper confirms that industry-standard practices to clean color document images can be improved to produce higher OCR accuracy. Image Detergent? from Accusoft Pegasus improves OCR accuracy by 5-10% more than a standard Smoothing filter. This white paper leads the reader through the testing that proves it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 17 15:01:33 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 18:01:33 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: <35e19.3e409b72.392316bd@aol.com> aaron said: > LOL.? So much for > "_all_ these e-books are also available as text, > and have always been available in that format." aaron, i don't have experience with the daisy format. are you telling us that one can't get text out of that? and are you claiming archive.org doesn't _start_ with the o.c.r. output when it creates the daisy-format file? if they give you daisy, and not text, then that must be part of the d.r.m. they wrap around the file to prevent the books from being "pirated" out to the seeing world. what i said _is_ true about the public-domain material. perhaps none of the public-domain material is counted in their announcement of "more than 1 million books"... > I suspect that the quality of the public domain books > will be roughly the same as the copyrighted texts.? so we agree on that. > As to whether or not they will spend the time and > money to improve the quality of their books, I doubt it. so we agree on that. > The cost would otherwise be prohibitive, unless > the improvement could be made via software. well, we cannot know that unless we categorize the errors. which is precisely why i am undergoing such categorization. but yes, i've done more than enough research along the way to say unequivocally that _many_ improvements can be made, via software, with -- at most -- minimal human input needed. which pinpoints some of the ridiculousness around this issue. on the one hand, there are apologists who try to tell us that "even bad o.c.r. is better than no o.c.r. at all." well, that's true. but if we're really willing to settle for that, then why do those people over at distributed proofreaders even bother working? obviously, some of us put a value on correcting bad o.c.r. on the other side of the tightrope, we have those same people at distributed proofreaders who try to tell us that their job of correcting o.c.r. is horrendously difficult and time-consuming. and this is equally ludicrous. it takes them a long time to do it because they're doing it in a way that takes a long time to do it. i'm trying to walk the middle-ground, which seems to me like it should be a very broad path that's obviously the best to take, where we spend a sensible amount of time on a book (an hour), and take it to a place where it meets almost all of our needs... we can decide to ignore quality and focus on quantity alone, and we can have millions of books; and all of 'em are flawed. we can decide to ignore quantity and focus on quality alone, and we can have 23,456 books, like project gutenberg does... we can even do _both_, and have 23,456 high-quality books and millions of flawed ones. so, is that what we want to do? or we can spend one hour per book, and have half-a-million pretty-darn-good books, with all their obvious flaws corrected. i don't know why it's so hard to see this middle path is the best. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Mon May 17 16:18:27 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 16:18:27 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic In-Reply-To: <25ef.7eb2b01f.392241d1@aol.com> References: <25ef.7eb2b01f.392241d1@aol.com> Message-ID: How about if you make your point by "fixing" some of the bad OCR's at TIA, resubmit them to TIA -- and then use those examples to make your point? From jimad at msn.com Mon May 17 16:29:54 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 16:29:54 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: adding e-books to itunes In-Reply-To: <2da5a.4a2007c8.3922fda3@aol.com> References: <2da5a.4a2007c8.3922fda3@aol.com> Message-ID: >here's more on this subject: >> http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1505-how-to-quickly-add-your-oreilly-ebooks -to-itunesibooks/ Which just to be clear uses the USB "tether" to transfer the books not the wifi "untethered" mode. From jimad at msn.com Mon May 17 16:44:03 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 16:44:03 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: improve scanning on color docs? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Looking at the details of their paper they seem to be dealing with simple "modern" digitizations of simple "modern" documents which ought to be duck-soup for any modern OCR -- except they deliberately corrupt the image by doing a very lossy jpeg compression of the digitization and then set the binary threshold "wrong" so that the resulting characters lose important parts. Suggest instead of buying their software just don't do that! Do not store your digitizations in jpeg mode but rather in some lossless form such as png. Spend some time with playing with thresholding software like Photoshop if your OCR requires binary images else send the OCR a grayscale digitization to begin with and let the OCR pick its own levels. A little Unsharp Masking can go a long way too -- as does setting your dpi appropriate in the first place. 300 dpi for 12pt "equals" 600 dpi for a text in 6pt ! Playing around a bit to figure out what works best can easily affect your error rates +- 20% -- which is a lot more than this software claims! http://www.accusoft.com/Improve_OCR_Accuracy_on_Color_Documents.pdf From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 17 17:13:45 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 20:13:45 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: Internet Archive makes more than 1 milllion books available online to blind, dyslexic Message-ID: <3dbb0.4cb6fd5.392335b9@aol.com> jim said: > How about if you make your point by "fixing" some of the bad OCR's at TIA, > resubmit them to TIA -- and then use those examples to make your point? how about if i decide how i will make my point? -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 17 17:28:22 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 17 May 2010 20:28:22 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 07 of 32 Message-ID: <3f0e6.4c835dbc.39233926@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's sample comes from "gods and fighting men". here's the page-scan: > http://www.archive.org/stream/godsfightingmens00greguoft#page/17 and here's the o.c.r. for the entire book: > http://ia341017.us.archive.org/0/items/godsfightingmens00greguoft/godsfightingmens00greguoft_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r.: > > '^f// THE COMING OF LUGH 17 > > ,^ Vf X W r^J^^*" ""* brass." " We have a worker in brass > oui's I\ s, that is Credne Card." > > Then Lugh said : " Go and ask the king if he has any > one man that can do all these things, and if he has, I > will not ask to come into Teamhair." The door-keeper > went into the king's house then and told him all that. > "There is a young, man at the door," he said, "and > his name should ue the Ildanach, the Master of all > Arts, for all the things the people of your house can > do, he himself is able to do every one of them." " Try > him with the chess-boards," said Nuada. So the chess- > boards were brought out, and every game that was > played, Lugh won it. And when Nuada was told > that, he said : " Let him in, for the like of him never > came into Teamhair before." > > Then the door-keeper let him pass, and he came into > the king's house and sat down in the seat of knowledge. > And there was a great flag-stone there that could hardly > be moved by four times twenty yoke of oxen, and > Ogma took it up and hurled it out through the house, > so that it lay on the outside of Teamhair, as a challenge > to Lugh. But Lugh hurled it back again that it lay > in the middle of the king's house. He played the harp > for them then, and he had them laughing and crying, > till he put them asleep at the end with a sleepy tune. > And when Nuada saw all the things Lugh could do, he > began to think that by his help the country might get > free of the taxes and the tyranny put on it by the > Fomor. And it is what he did, he came down from > his throne, and he put Lugh on it in his place, for the > length of thirteen days, the way they might all listen to > the advice he would give. > > This now is the story of the birth of Lugh. The > time the Fomor used to be coming to Ireland, Balor > > B we have several problems in the first few lines, which are bad on the scan as well, so we cannot fault the o.c.r. here, but whatever the cause, the text is botched nonetheless... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 18 13:01:01 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 16:01:01 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 08 of 32 Message-ID: <88726.8e20b0c.39244bfd@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's sample is from the ever-popular "the art of war". here is the page-scan for page 54: > http://www.archive.org/stream/artofwaroldestmi00suntuoft#page/54 here's the o.c.r. for the entire book: > http://ia331333.us.archive.org/3/items/artofwaroldestmi00suntuoft/artofwaroldestmi00suntuoft_djvu.txt here is the o.c.r. for page 54: > > 54 > > the four seasons make ^ay for each other in turn. > Literally, "have no invariabl, seat>>> > > There are short days a^ long; the moon has its periods > of waning and waxing. > > Cf. V. 6. The purport of the passage j s s i mp iy to illustrate the want > of fixity in war by the chang s constant i y taking place in Nature. The > comparison is not very happ.^ however, because the regularity of the > phenomena which Sun Tzu m n ti ons i s by no means paralleled in war. this particular edition mixed ideographs in with the text, so i could've picked virtually any page and presented some hairy-looking o.c.r., but i decided to focus instead on a page with no ideographs whatsoever... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From gbuchana at teksavvy.com Tue May 18 19:43:59 2010 From: gbuchana at teksavvy.com (Gardner Buchanan) Date: Tue, 18 May 2010 22:43:59 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: improve scanning on color docs? In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <4BF3506F.903@teksavvy.com> I believe this is mostly gobbledygook. As Jim pointed out, the example is contrived. JPG artefacts are not, at least in my experience, the worst type of problems OCR systems have to contend with. I plunked the image -- both before and after -- into Photoshop to see what's what. Simply extracting the blue channel from the sample yielded results that were much improved. After that, a high-pass filter yielded pretty well perfect results. I do not believe that automated optimization of colour images for OCR is particularly interesting. There is likely the odd colour image out there, but I think they would be things that you would handle as a one-off as Jim suggested. I have had occasion to tinker with colour image manipulation in an effort to improve OCR. The thing with the use-case I had is that I was able to construct a customised series of filter steps to get what I needed, and then apply those to all the pages at once. I tinkered a lot with this one: http://www.archive.org/stream/waunangeeormassa00rich#page/49/mode/1up before attempting to clean up the rest of the pages. (BB, you should look at the IA OCR results on *that* page ;-)) What I found was that the foxing shows up most strongly in the blue channel, and if you select the red channel, you can get rid of it almost entirely. Next make a histogram of the pixel values. You expect a somewhat bi-modal distribution. A percentile cut is what I wound up with, to pick the cutoff between black and white. I think that a filter that performed principle component analysis on colourspace, used a statistical analysis of the results to find the colourspace axis that gives a pixel distribution resembling text, then a little high-pass filtering would do the job on what accusoft is going for. I also think the machine vision folks are way out in front. On 17-May-2010 19:44, Jim Adcock wrote: > > http://www.accusoft.com/Improve_OCR_Accuracy_on_Color_Documents.pdf > ============================================================ Gardner Buchanan Ottawa, ON FreeBSD: Where you want to go. Today. From Bowerbird at aol.com Wed May 19 13:08:38 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 16:08:38 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 09 of 32 Message-ID: <1d59a.22e41a51.39259f46@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is from jack london's classic "white fang". here's the scan for page 7: > http://www.archive.org/stream/whitefanglondon00jackrich#page/7 and here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia331319.us.archive.org/1/items/whitefanglondon00jackrich/whitefanglondon00jackrich_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 7: > > THE TRAIL OF THE MEAT 7 > > At the fall of darkness they swung the dogs into > a cluster of spruce trees on the edge of the water > way and made a camp. The coffin, at the side of > the fire, served for seat and table. The wolf-dogs, > clustered on the far side of the fire, snarled and bick > ered among themselves, but evinced no inclination > to stray off into the darkness. > > * Seems to me, Henry, they re stayin remarkable > close to camp," Bill commented. > > Henry, squatting over the fire and settling the pot > of coffee with a piece of ice, nodded. Nor did he > speak till he had taken his seat on the coffin and be > gun to eat. > > i They know where their hides is safe," he said. > "They d sooner eat grub than be grub. They re > pretty wise, them dogs." > > Bill shook his head. "Oh, I don t know." > > His comrade looked at him curiously. "First > time I ever heard you say anythin about their not > bein wise." > > "Henry," said the other, munching with delibera > tion the beans he was eating, "did you happen to > notice the way them dogs kicked up when I was > a-feedin em?" > > "They did cut up more n usual," Henry acknowl > edged. > > "How many dogs ve we got, Henry?" > > "Six." as we can see here, this book has missing apostrophes, some missing hyphens on end-of-line-hyphenates, and exhibits some problems with opening-doublequotes... you will remember the missing apostrophes and hyphens are caused by a workflow glitch, not by the o.c.r. itself, so we might also expect that the em-dashes are missing too, since that is another aspect of that glitch, and sure enough, a look at other pages (like 10 and 12) show that flaw as well. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 20 23:19:45 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 02:19:45 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 10 of 32 Message-ID: <63228.ef065d4.39278001@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is from "the massacre at chicago", thanks to gardner buchanan, who pointed it out... here's the scan for page 49: > http://www.archive.org/stream/waunangeeormassa00rich#page/49 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia331420.us.archive.org/2/items/waunangeeormassa00rich/waunangeeormassa00rich_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 49: > > THE MASSACI^S; AT-CHJCAGO. IftV > > 'engaged in hostilities ? ? lias Winnebeg not reyealedthi^,?". iM ?  ,-, ? ??tu I. y ?  !.; > . ! :". Npt; a ? ??v(fpj;d," jreplipd ; J^i^itenautliliflj^ley, i^stonislied, in liii*! tu^iij at -the > information. ' .?  ![.. -^r.^::! ? ??? ??.?  ?  --;; ?  -'.'. .>' . ? ??i : ?  :?  ?  ],?  .'.:; > > *.' At aqotbi^r .inoraent, .and on an indifferent occasion, this mutual misun- > der^^tauJiiig ^^liglit, afford room for pleasaiitry," continued Mr. McKenzje > Avith a grave smile ; " but if Is not so., ^'inncbeg, I ?ee, iias been trucitp > his tru|5t; |anf],.x'yltI)Oiagh cognizant of tli9/;n;atvfre of tb^;despatphes, reve-uled > the info^'ipation, to no one hut myself, whom, hp regarded, as having not only > ii, right to.^pp.'^sess it at the , Cfirliegt moment, but as, being the most pioper > person to advise withtlie commanding officer, at the earliest moment, on the > measures to- be -adopted. 1 am here for that purpose ; think you 1 slijdl find, > liini alone? ?~ for I wouldn't enter upon the subject before Mrs. IJeiidley,": ? ??,-,. > > "I have just said that ]\Irs,. IJeadlej and Margaret are in attendancei on > the unfortunate Ronayne,,"' replied Elmsley.,;; ?  'i ;Y,pu,,^i)l,, t^herelore, be .sui-^ > ,to find him alone, aud.no doubt busied,,iu t^i^ for^g^ionjof-iplanS) of opera- > .tipn consequent on this inteJligence.'' . , . j ,..; ,[;;., ; ; ,, ., .;. , ; , : , , > > '?!"?Recollect, not a word of this untiljt is p|ficially revealed. , I shall npt > even let Captain Headley know that I am aware of the facts, but, siimply > state that, having heard he was iii the .r^jqeiptcsf-despatches, I had come to > know if there was any ne\ys of irnportance?? ;But, pf one ;thing I would wai'n > jou, Elmsley ; there will be a council of war to-morrow?? and I could wish > that your view of the subject may, lead you to prefer defending, the fort to > the last extremity ill preference tq.c), long, and uncertain -retreat tq Por[t > Wayne, which I know is suggested in the' despatch." '?  .,,;) > > . '* I shall have no, difficul^ty in ^rrivi^g, at that; depiijion/V^^tufni^ the > ..officer of the guar^/f',jtor qpmhppn sjensq only, is necessary ,tp. show the > advantages of one course over tlic other. In the meantime,, I shall evince > .no knowledge pf what you have conveyed to me, until the hour of councih > Did no other consideration weigh with me, I would oppose a movement > 'which cuts us off from all hope. of restoring the de.-^r lost wife of,lvQnayae > to Iier distracted husband." , , , : ..? ?? ,?  ]?  ,: .1 '?  : > > \ "Good bye, God bless you," answered the trader, as he mpyedto-yrai'd^ > the quarters of Captain Headley. ' .,,..;,.,,. ...,.', ?  ?  ?  ,,'? ???  , I'tui > > "Then," mused Elmsley, when alone, "arelhe faret)oding^.pf ithat ^sty- > old number of the I)^ational Intelligencer whicH I have thumbed for hours > over and over again for the last three months, at length finally realized^ ? ? > and Avar is come at last ; well, be it so ! .My chief anxiety is for Margaret, > Would that she and all the rest of the weak women in this forti-ess were safe. > H within the fortifications of Detroit ; but all evil seems to be coming upon us > at once." , '' ' ' " ?  ? ?? ,, ,;; > > " Ah ! Mr, McKenzie^ I laipa.^Y.ery gl^d tp seei ypu," said Captain ileadlej, > rising as the trader entei-eii tbe room set apart for .his library; and the tr^iflSr-. > action of military official business. ^ " 'take a se,at. ; 1 Ypu .0pul,d not have Jf^l^ > me a more opportune visit." , . ,, , ,, ,,.:, . . ' ,.. . , ??,-'[| > > "Ihad understood that \Vinnebeg had just returned with despfatchig^ > from Detroit," remarked the trader, "and am come to learn the news.." ,,,( ,^ > > " Bad enough," answered Capt^ Headley, gravely, as he handej.tc) (hjypa > the despatchyfrom General Hull. "Read tliat !" ^ ? ??.' : ',' , - ..',.'1;^ '?  /?  ? ??' i') the reason for this dreadful o.c.r. is that the page has very bad bleedthrough, where the text from the other side of each page also shows up on each scan. it also has foxing -- brownish spots of various shapes and sizes on the page. and indeed, most of the pages within this book showed these same problems. gardner reports he was able to do some manipulations on this scan such that he was able to get better o.c.r. out of it. but i wonder if that's really worth it. in my opinion, we need to just throw out this scan-set and re-scan that book. (and make sure that we scan another copy of the book to avoid a recurrence.) i'll note, however, that if gardner _can_ get good o.c.r. out of a scan like this, and if the manipulations of the scan can be formulated to the point where they can be applied in a batch process to the full scan-set, resulting in decent o.c.r., that would be fabulous. of course, that will also mean we have yet _another_ version of the scan-set for this book. archive.org already has two versions -- the high-res version and the low-res "flippy" version for their online reading. (can you imagine they have a "high-res" version of these bad-looking pages? what in the world is _that_ good for?, except wasting a whole lotta diskspace.) i originally suggested as a "best practices workflow" that a scanning operation should do o.c.r. immediately on each page, and then spellcheck the results, and -- when there was a high percentage of misrecognized words -- re-do the scan. needless to say, such a workflow would prevent us having scans like this one... for the most part, i will avoid presenting scans like this one in this series, since the takeaway should be that we _can_ correct the o.c.r., in a cost-effective way, and therefore we should pursue that path. obviously, that's untrue of this book. thankfully, books like this are very rare in the archive.org library. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From cannona at fireantproductions.com Fri May 21 10:11:56 2010 From: cannona at fireantproductions.com (Aaron Cannon) Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 12:11:56 -0500 Subject: [gutvol-d] !@! Take a look at the new DVD label Message-ID: Hi all. You can view and/or download the new DVD label for the April 2010 DVD at http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/pgdvd042010-label.jpg Let me know what you think. If it needs different text, let me know, as that's easy to change. Aaron From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 21 14:05:58 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 17:05:58 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 11 of 32 Message-ID: <9a17c.30f848da.39284fb6@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, in volume 9 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 115: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle09poee#page/115 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341307.us.archive.org/2/items/worksofedgaralle09poee/worksofedgaralle09poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 115: > > EUREKA 115 > > wme the eight Asteroids (Ceres, Juno, Vesta > PaUas, Astrma, Flora, Iris, and Hebe) at an > average distance of about 250 millioiS Then we > > 90Tinfn^' f^^^^ ^^'^ '??""??????' '^^^ Sat??r^! > flnal^ N??^. ' then Uranus, 19 hundred millions > finally Neptune, lately discovered, and revolving > at a distance, say of 28 hundred millions. Leav > ing Neptune out of the aecount-^f which a^ vlt > we know little accurately and whichl poSy > one of a system of Asteroids-it will be seenthat > with,n certain limits, there exists el older of > interval among the planets. Speaking loosely > > w ll *^' ^u? ? ^' '" ^^^ ^??^t i??'^er one. May > ofBol"'t''}T '^'=??????ned-mot, not the law > or Bode? ? be deduced from consideration of the > analogy suggested by me as having place between > the solar discharge of rings and the mode of the > atomxc irradiation? ' > > r? ?~I^^ ""Mt^rs hurriedly mentioned in this sum- > maij of distance, it is folly to attempt compre- > > ^o^}?.^l "" '^i,"* *^' "='? ??* "* abstract arithmet- > oni tL ^^^ ^'?  ^ "??* practically tangible > ^^A 17,.?''??''^^ "" P^'^^'^e ideas. I have > stated that Neptune, the planet farthest from > the Sun, revolves about him at a distance of 28 > hundred millions of miles. So far good:-I > ? ?~Zt f ^1^ mathematical fact; aad, without > comprehending ,t in the least, we may put it to > > ^V^ ??T'"^*'''^"y- ^'it ? ? mentioning, even, > that the Moon revolves about the Earth at the > comparatively trifling distance of 237,000 miles > I entertained no expectation of giving any one as you can see, this is another one of those hopeless pages... the scan is badly skewed, but you'd think that abbyy would be able to correct for that. but i guess you'd be wrong about that. anyway, hardly worth discussing this page. just go do it again... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From dakretz at gmail.com Fri May 21 14:37:53 2010 From: dakretz at gmail.com (don kretz) Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 14:37:53 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 11 of 32 In-Reply-To: <9a17c.30f848da.39284fb6@aol.com> References: <9a17c.30f848da.39284fb6@aol.com> Message-ID: For comparison, here's my undeskewed cut-and-paste abbyy read of the self-same page. Perhaps their lens was dirty ... EUREKA 115 come the eight Asteroids (Ceres, Juno, Vesta, Pallas, Astr?a, Flora, Iris, and Hebe) at an average distance of about 250 millions. Then we have Jupiter, distant 490 millions; then Saturn, 900 millions; then Uranus, 19 hundred millions; finally Neptune, lately discovered, and revolving at a distance, say of 28 hundred millions. Leav- ing Neptune out of the account?of which as yet we know little accurately and which is, possibly, one of a system of Asteroids?it will be seen that, within certain limits, there exists an order of interval among the planets. Speaking loosely, we may say that each outer planet is twice as far from the Sun as is the next inner one. May not the order here mentioned?may not the law of Bode?he deduced from consideration of the analogy suggested by me as having place between the solar discharge of rings and the mode of the atomic irradiation? The numbers hurriedly mentioned in this sum- mary of distance, it is folly to attempt compre- hending, unless in the light of abstract arithmet- ical facts. They are not practically tangible ones. They convey no precise ideas. I have stated that Neptune, the planet farthest from the Sun, revolves about him at a distance of 2S hundred millions of miles. So far good:?I have stated a mathematical fact; and, without comprehending it in the least, we may put it to use?mathematically. But in mentioning, even, that the Moon revolves about the Earth at the comparatively trifling distance of 237,000 miles, I entertained no expectation of giving any one -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 21 15:08:55 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 18:08:55 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 11 of 32 Message-ID: <72fc4.387c43b3.39285e77@aol.com> don said: > For comparison, here's my undeskewed cut-and-paste abbyy > read of the self-same page. Perhaps their lens was dirty ... they use abbyy 8.0. what did you use? -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Badger at nyc.rr.com Fri May 21 16:21:58 2010 From: Badger at nyc.rr.com (Badger) Date: Fri, 21 May 2010 19:21:58 -0400 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internetarchive -- 11 of 32 References: <9a17c.30f848da.39284fb6@aol.com> Message-ID: <9C0541F6ABEB4C3B9B3A55541665FFC7@D3CSQL91> It's not the lens, it is inside Abbyy. I OCR'd the same page twice using FR 8.0. It will produce either this: > interval among the planets. Speaking loosely, > we may say that each outer planet is twice as > far from the Sun as is the next inner one. May > not the order here mentioned?may not the law > of Bode?be deduced from consideration of the > analogy suggested by me as having place between or this: > interval among the planets. Speaking loosely > > 7?r7rJ \f ^ ^ 0Uter Planet i? twice as > far from the Sun as is the next inner one. May > > T*nl?rier}T ^fi^ed-maj, not the law > or node?be deduced from consideration of the > > thfy SU/gefted bVme as having place between The difference depends on whether FR rotates the image by 2 degrees before the recognition starts. ----- Original Message ----- From: don kretz To: Project Gutenberg Volunteer Discussion Sent: Friday, May 21, 2010 5:37 PM Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internetarchive -- 11 of 32 For comparison, here's my undeskewed cut-and-paste abbyy read of the self-same page. Perhaps their lens was dirty ... EUREKA 115 come the eight Asteroids (Ceres, Juno, Vesta, Pallas, Astr?a, Flora, Iris, and Hebe) at an average distance of about 250 millions. Then we have Jupiter, distant 490 millions; then Saturn, 900 millions; then Uranus, 19 hundred millions; finally Neptune, lately discovered, and revolving at a distance, say of 28 hundred millions. Leav- ing Neptune out of the account?of which as yet we know little accurately and which is, possibly, one of a system of Asteroids?it will be seen that, within certain limits, there exists an order of interval among the planets. Speaking loosely, we may say that each outer planet is twice as far from the Sun as is the next inner one. May not the order here mentioned?may not the law of Bode?he deduced from consideration of the analogy suggested by me as having place between the solar discharge of rings and the mode of the atomic irradiation? The numbers hurriedly mentioned in this sum- mary of distance, it is folly to attempt compre- hending, unless in the light of abstract arithmet- ical facts. They are not practically tangible ones. They convey no precise ideas. I have stated that Neptune, the planet farthest from the Sun, revolves about him at a distance of 2S hundred millions of miles. So far good:?I have stated a mathematical fact; and, without comprehending it in the least, we may put it to use?mathematically. But in mentioning, even, that the Moon revolves about the Earth at the comparatively trifling distance of 237,000 miles, I entertained no expectation of giving any one ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ gutvol-d mailing list gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 22 00:43:54 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 03:43:54 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: spill baby spill Message-ID: <815c7.5569e349.3928e53a@aol.com> it's been over a month now... i am reminded of a recent episode of lost, where jacob holds a beaker with what looks like oil inside it, turning it upside down and comparing that to something about the island, saying that he's the stopper preventing it from escaping and causing damage. the man in black later smashes the beaker which releases the fluid. it makes me wonder if _lost_ caused this big spill, messing around with the space/time continuum... you might've also heard that foucault's pendulum -- the original, in france -- just snapped its cable, causing irreparable damage to its spherical bob... a lost episode from a past season had a pendulum. so again, i wonder if the end of lost is responsible. if there's something in the series finale which will explain the theft this week of those five paintings, well, i think that just might tie everything together. otherwise, i'm not expecting any answers. are you? oh yeah, we also found out this week that b.p. has been lying all along about how much oil is leaking. i was not surprised by that admission... were you? -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From mrcdh58 at gmail.com Sat May 22 01:19:48 2010 From: mrcdh58 at gmail.com (Marc D'Hooghe) Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 10:19:48 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: spill baby spill In-Reply-To: <815c7.5569e349.3928e53a@aol.com> References: <815c7.5569e349.3928e53a@aol.com> Message-ID: a global fuck up, this is - cant tell anything constructive 2010/5/22 > it's been over a month now... > > i am reminded of a recent episode of lost, > where jacob holds a beaker with what looks > like oil inside it, turning it upside down and > comparing that to something about the island, > saying that he's the stopper preventing it from > escaping and causing damage. the man in black > later smashes the beaker which releases the fluid. > it makes me wonder if _lost_ caused this big spill, > messing around with the space/time continuum... > > you might've also heard that foucault's pendulum > -- the original, in france -- just snapped its cable, > causing irreparable damage to its spherical bob... > a lost episode from a past season had a pendulum. > so again, i wonder if the end of lost is responsible. > > if there's something in the series finale which will > explain the theft this week of those five paintings, > well, i think that just might tie everything together. > otherwise, i'm not expecting any answers. are you? > > oh yeah, we also found out this week that b.p. has > been lying all along about how much oil is leaking. > i was not surprised by that admission... were you? > > -bowerbird > > _______________________________________________ > gutvol-d mailing list > gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org > http://lists.pglaf.org/mailman/listinfo/gutvol-d > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 22 14:33:33 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sat, 22 May 2010 17:33:33 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: spill baby spill Message-ID: <89c7.f5d0453.3929a7ad@aol.com> marc said: > a global fuck up, this is - cant tell anything constructive * carbon-overload * earthquakes * floods * hurricanes * icecap-melting * ozone-hole * tornadoes * tsunamies * volcanoes yes, the gods are angry with us... they are certainly very angry with us... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sat May 22 23:44:48 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 02:44:48 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 12 of 32 Message-ID: <17939.ab69ebe.392a28e0@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 2 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 23: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle02poee#page/23 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341311.us.archive.org/2/items/worksofedgaralle02poee/worksofedgaralle02poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 23: > > NARPtATlVE OF A. GORDON PYM 23 > > thick fog in our favoi', it was agreed to lose no > time in secreting me. Augustus led the way to > the wharf, and I followed at a little distance, > enveloped in a thick seaman's cloak, which he > had brought with him, so that my person might > not be easily recognized. Just as we turned the > second corner, after passing Mr. Edmund's well, > who should appear, standing right in front of > me, and looking me full in the face, but old Mr. > Peterson, my grandfather. ''Why, bless my > soul, Gordon," said he, after a long pause, "why, > why,??? whose dirty cloak is that you have onV > ' ' Sir ! " I replied, assuming, as well as I could, in > the exigency of the moment, an air of offended > surprise, and talking in the grufL'est of all imag- > inable tones??? ''sir! you are a sum 'mat mistaken > ???my name, in the first place, bee'nt nothing at > all like Goddin, and I'd want you for to knov/ > better, you blackguard, than to call my new ober- > coat a darty one." For my life I could hardly > refrain from screaming with laughter at the odd > manner in which the old gentleman received this > handsome rebuke. He started back two or threa > steps, turned first pale and then excessively red, > threw up his spectacles, then, putting them > down, ran full tilt at me, with his umbrella up- > lifted. He stopped short, however, in his career, > as if struck with a sudden recollection; and > presently, turning round, hobbled off down tiie > street, shaking all the while with rage, and mut- > tering between his teeth: "Won't do??? new > glaf^eis??? thought it was Gordon??? d???d good-for- > nothinf' salt water Lonj? Tom. ' ' there are a number of o.c.r. mistakes here that you might or might not see at first, including "favor", "on?", "gruffest", "know", "three", "the", "glasses", "nothing", and "long", plus some problems with floating punctuation and doublequotes, and of course the missed italics... shows how the errors in even a single page can mount up to something significant... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 23 10:28:58 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 13:28:58 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] gotta love amazon's pluck Message-ID: <26fa0.3600d482.392abfda@aol.com> gotta love amazon's pluck... are they sitting back and feeling sorry for themselves, facing challenges from the ipad and the agency model? not one bit! no sir, they're doubling down. that cute kindle commercial -- once a rarity on t.v. -- has now become a staple, playing all hours of the day. it's as if amazon considers that the debut of the ipad _justifies_ and _bolsters_ their belief in their machine. and the agency model? well, gee, it's fairly easy to see how amazon can live with a 30% markup on big-5 books, seeing how they used to use many of 'em as loss-leaders. when the product that you used to _literally_ pay people to purchase is suddenly dumping money in your pocket, you have funds to buy more things like t.v. commercials... so i love all of that. but this last thing is most excellent. even though the big-5 publishers have upped the cost of the e-books they sell through amazon, amazon has been concentrating on giving its customers an attractive option. specifically, they have been concentrating on loading the store with e-books that are priced in the $5-$9.98 range. > http://kindlehomepage.blogspot.com/2010/05/power-of-catalog-kindle-undercuts.html they're spitting in the face of the publishers who want to elevate the price of e-books, by making 'em work harder and harder against competitors that offer a lower price... as a direct consequence of severely curtailed demand at the higher prices, combined with renewed competition at these lower pricepoints, the big-5 publishers are learning they have to lower their prices back to the dreaded $9.99. except instead of getting the kindle subsidy that they used to get when they were receiving $12.50 (50% of a $25 list), those publishers are now getting $7 (70% of the $9.99 sale). just as most of us observers predicted back when it occurred, the agency model has backfired -- very badly -- on the big-5. they thought steve jobs was their savior, when really, he was pulling a fast one on them (albeit doing it for their own good, since these corporate fat-cats are delusional about pricing)... you just watch -- at the end of their one-year "trial period", the big-5 will find a way to quietly shelve the agency model and return to their former way of doing business. but alas, nothing they do can save them now. their goose is cooked... kudos to amazon! -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Sun May 23 12:50:03 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Sun, 23 May 2010 15:50:03 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 13 of 32 Message-ID: <2c604.3e811ca4.392ae0eb@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 1 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 29: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle01poee#page/29 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341314.us.archive.org/0/items/worksofedgaralle01poee/worksofedgaralle01poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 29: > > THE POETIC PRINCIPLE 29 > > work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely > noble, than this verj^ poem, this poem per se, this > poem which is a poem and nothing more, this > poem wi'itten solely for the poem's sake. > > With as deep a reverence for the True as ever > inspired the bosom of man, I would nevertheless > limit, in some measure, its modes of inculcation. > I would limit to enforce them. I would not en- > feeble them by dissipation. The demands of > Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with > the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable > in Song is precisely all that with which she has > nothing whatever to do. It is but making her a > flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and > flowers. \ln^ enforci ng a truth we need severity > rather than etilo rescence "o? lans;uage . We^ miist > be'simple, prec ise,"l:erse. We^QUst pe cooL c^ItQ: > ummp assioned." In a word, "we must be in that > mood wJiicli, as nearly as possible, isjtlia exaoj^ > converse of the poe tical . He must be blind in- > deed who does not perceive the radical and chas- > mal difference between the truthful and the > poetical modes of inculcation. He must be > theory-mad beyond redemption who, in spite of > these differences, shall still persist in attempting > to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of > Poetry and Truth. > > Dividing the world of mind into its three most > immediately obvious distinctions, we have the > Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense. I > place Taste in the middle because it is just this > position which in the mind it occupies. It holds > intimate relations with either extreme ; but from once again, we have patron-inflicted annotations on this page, a few sentences which've been underlined. but if you examine the o.c.r. throughout the page, you'll also find errors elsewhere. mostly i choose this page because i was struck by the irony that the passages which people underline are likely quite meaningful; yet their underlining can cause o.c.r. to _miss_ that very passage. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 24 15:58:04 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 24 May 2010 18:58:04 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 14 of 32 Message-ID: <745fd.1621c9ac.392c5e7c@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 7 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 185: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle07poee#page/185 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341325.us.archive.org/3/items/worksofedgaralle07poee/worksofedgaralle07poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 185: > > BON-BON 185 > > called my souL (Signed) A . . . /'* > (Here his Majesty repeated a name which I do > not feel myself justified in indicating more un- > equivocally.) > > * * A clever fellow that, ' ' resumed he ; * * but like > you, Monsieur Bon-Bon, he was mistaken about > the soul. The soul a shadow, truly! The soul > a shadow ; Ha ! ha ! ha ! ??? he ! he ! he ! ??? hu ! hu ! > uu ! Only think of a fricasseed shadow ! ' ' > > **Only think ??? hiccup! ??? of a fricasseed shad- > ow!" exclaimed our hero, whose faculties were > becoming much illuminated by the profundity > of his Majesty's discourse. > > **Only think of a ??? hiccup !???fricasseeaf shad- > ow ! ! Now, damme ! ??? hiccup ! ??? humph ! If / > would have been such a ??? hiccup ! ??? ^nincom- > poop ! My soul, Mr. ??? humph ! ' ' > > * * Your soul, Monsieur Bon-Bon ? ' ' > > *'Yes, sir ??? hiccup! ??? my soul is ** > > **What, sir?" > > *'iVo shadow, damme!" > > **Did you mean to say " > > **Yes, sir, my soul is ??? hiccup! ??? humph! ??? yes, > > > > << > > > > Did you not intend to assert- > > > > My soul is ??? hiccup! ??? peculiarly qualified > > for ??? hiccup ! ??? a " > > **What, sir?" > > *'Stew." > > **Ha!" > > **Soufflee." > > **Eh!" > > ??? (iu??ry. ??? Arouet? well... sorry... but no heavy analysis today... i dunno... this page just made me shake my head and laugh... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 25 13:36:31 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 16:36:31 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: the problem with the e-books from the internetarchive -- 11 of 32 Message-ID: <26074.5e912e6b.392d8ecf@aol.com> badger said: > It's not the lens, it is inside Abbyy.? i'm pretty sure dkretz was pulling our legs when he made his reference to "the lens"... ;+) > The difference depends on whether FR?rotates > the image by 2 degrees before the recognition starts. excellent detective work, badger. thanks for that. and, oh my word, who would have ever thought that archive.org would instruct finereader _not_ to rotate a page which is crooked... what an asinine decision... in my original suggested workflow for these projects, i recommended that they do an initial shot of the page, and then analyze the results and rotate the _camera_ ever-slightly as required to get a perfectly straight scan. once again, the ludicrous irony of having a high-res scan that is marred in some way -- e.g., by being crooked -- asserts itself... what a bunch of idiots we have in charge. anyway, thanks again badger... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Tue May 25 13:59:12 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 16:59:12 EDT Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 15 of 32 Message-ID: <2789d.6802da12.392d9420@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 4 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 22: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle04poee#page/22 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341320.us.archive.org/2/items/worksofedgaralle04poee/worksofedgaralle04poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 22: > > 22 WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE > > ''IJcnri Duval, a neighbor, and by trade a > silvej -imith, deposes that he was one of the > party v\ iio first entered the house. Corroborates > the testimony of Muset in general. As soon as > they forced an entrance, they re-closed the door, > to keep out the crowd, which collected very fast, > notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. The > shrill voice, this witness thinks, was that of an > Italian. Was certain it was not French. > Could not be sure that it was a man's voice. It > might have been a woman's. Was not ac- > quainted with the Italian language. Could not > distinguish the words, but was convinced by the > intonation that the speaker was an Italian. > Knew Madame L. and her daugh4;er. Had con- > versed with both frequently. Was sure that the > shrill voice was not that of either of the > deceased. f > > " Odenheimer, restaurateur. ??? This wit- > ness volunteered his testimony. Not speaking > French, was examined through an interpreter. > Is a native of Amsterdam. Was passing the > house at the time of the shrieks. They lasted > for several minutes ??? probably ten. They were > long and loud ??? very awful and distressing. > Was one of those who entered the building. > Corroborated the previous evidence in every re- > spect but one. Was sure that the shrill voice > was that of a man ??? of a Frenchman. Could > not distinguish the words uttered. They were > loud and quick ??? unequal??? spoken apparently in > fear as well as in anger. The voice was harsh > ??? not so much shrill as harsh. Could not call it errors in the upper-left corner, including "henri" and "silversmith" and "who". with "daughter" further down, a stray "f", and some missing em-dashes too. plus the missing italics, of course, at the start of each paragraph. this is pretty representative of many pages, in that it is _very_ good in the sense that it's almost all correct, but the half-dozen problems which do manifest will still take a bit of time to fix, and that accumulates over a full book. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From jimad at msn.com Wed May 26 21:43:48 2010 From: jimad at msn.com (Jim Adcock) Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 21:43:48 -0700 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: gotta love amazon's pluck In-Reply-To: <26fa0.3600d482.392abfda@aol.com> References: <26fa0.3600d482.392abfda@aol.com> Message-ID: Strange, what I notice when I go to Amazon's "new and improved" Kindle books site is that they now list a "Free Book Collections" section which includes instructions on how to get *free* books for Kindle *directly* from the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Manybooks web sites! Which means that Kindle users are now getting books that *really are* Project Gutenberg books, including the PG legalese, books which are definitely *not DRM'ed* and which they can copy back off their Kindle machines and share with friends - even friends who don't own a Kindle. And that IMHO, is how it *should* be! http://www.amazon.com/b?ie=UTF8&node=2245146011 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From marcello at perathoner.de Thu May 27 00:31:32 2010 From: marcello at perathoner.de (Marcello Perathoner) Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 09:31:32 +0200 Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: gotta love amazon's pluck In-Reply-To: References: <26fa0.3600d482.392abfda@aol.com> Message-ID: <4BFE1FD4.7030109@perathoner.de> Jim Adcock wrote: > Strange, what I notice when I go to Amazon?s ?new and improved? Kindle books > site is that they now list a ?Free Book Collections? section which includes > instructions on how to get **free** books for Kindle **directly** from the > Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg, and Manybooks web sites! What's this "e-mail the file to your Kindle" thingie? Does every Kindle have an email address? Would it make sense to offer an email-to-kindle option on the Gutenberg site? -- Marcello Perathoner webmaster at gutenberg.org From joshua at hutchinson.net Thu May 27 04:58:05 2010 From: joshua at hutchinson.net (Joshua Hutchinson) Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 11:58:05 +0000 (GMT) Subject: [gutvol-d] Re: gotta love amazon's pluck References: <26fa0.3600d482.392abfda@aol.com> <4BFE1FD4.7030109@perathoner.de> Message-ID: <976271422.357424.1274961485793.JavaMail.mail@webmail06> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Thu May 27 17:07:54 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Thu, 27 May 2010 20:07:54 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 16 of 32 Message-ID: <1d494.57f9f914.3930635a@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** oops! i'm sorry, i was very busy yesterday, so i forgot this! today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 3 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 118: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle03poee#page/118 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341337.us.archive.org/2/items/worksofedgaralle03poee/worksofedgaralle03poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 118: > > 118 WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE > > a meckamcal ingenuity so much, superior to our > own. One finds it difficult, too, to conceive the > vast masses which these people handle so easily, > to be as light as our own reason tell us thej^ > actually are. > > Api'il 8th. ??? Eureka! Pundit is in his glory. > A balloon from Kanadaw spoke us to-day and > threw on board several late papers ; they contain > some exceedingly curious information relative > to Kanawdian or rather Amriccan antiquities. > You know, I presume, that laborers have for > some months been employed in preparing the > ground for a new fountain at Paradise, the Em- > peror's principal pleasure garden. Paradise, it > appears, has been, literally speaking, an island > time out of mind ??? that is to say, its northern > boundary was always (as far back as any record > extends) a rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm > of the sea. This arm was gradually widened > until it attained its present breadth ??? a mile. > The whole length of the island is nine miles; > the breadth varies materially. The entire area > (so Pundit says) was, about eight hundred years > ago, densely packed with houses, some of them > twenty stories high: land (for some most unac- > countable reason) being considered as especially > precious just in this vicinity. The disastrous > earthquake, howev' r, of the year 2050, so totally > uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was > almost too large to be called a village) that the > most indefatigable of our antiquarians have > never yet been able to obtain from the site any > sufficient data (in the shape of coins, medals or this appears to the human eye to be a very clean page, but we have errors where there was a mild imperfection on the page, including "mechanical" and "they" at the top, "april" in the next paragraph, and "however" further down. (the "kanawdian" and "amriccan" spellings were intentional.) and the o.c.r. was set to ignore the italics, so they're missing. so even with a clean page, we can get some o.c.r. errors, enough that -- when hundreds cumulate over a book -- it can take roughly one hour per book to fix all of them. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 28 00:01:08 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 03:01:08 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 16 of 32 Message-ID: <2468.55c2bafe.3930c434@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** oops! i'm sorry, i was very busy yesterday, so i forgot this! today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 3 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 118: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle03poee#page/118 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341337.us.archive.org/2/items/worksofedgaralle03poee/worksofedgaralle03poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 118: > > 118 WORKS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE > > a meckamcal ingenuity so much, superior to our > own. One finds it difficult, too, to conceive the > vast masses which these people handle so easily, > to be as light as our own reason tell us thej^ > actually are. > > Api'il 8th. ??? Eureka! Pundit is in his glory. > A balloon from Kanadaw spoke us to-day and > threw on board several late papers ; they contain > some exceedingly curious information relative > to Kanawdian or rather Amriccan antiquities. > You know, I presume, that laborers have for > some months been employed in preparing the > ground for a new fountain at Paradise, the Em- > peror's principal pleasure garden. Paradise, it > appears, has been, literally speaking, an island > time out of mind ??? that is to say, its northern > boundary was always (as far back as any record > extends) a rivulet, or rather a very narrow arm > of the sea. This arm was gradually widened > until it attained its present breadth ??? a mile. > The whole length of the island is nine miles; > the breadth varies materially. The entire area > (so Pundit says) was, about eight hundred years > ago, densely packed with houses, some of them > twenty stories high: land (for some most unac- > countable reason) being considered as especially > precious just in this vicinity. The disastrous > earthquake, howev' r, of the year 2050, so totally > uprooted and overwhelmed the town (for it was > almost too large to be called a village) that the > most indefatigable of our antiquarians have > never yet been able to obtain from the site any > sufficient data (in the shape of coins, medals or this appears to the human eye to be a very clean page, but we have errors where there was a mild imperfection on the page, including "mechanical" and "they" at the top, "april" in the next paragraph, and "however" further down. (the "kanawdian" and "amriccan" spellings were intentional.) and the o.c.r. was set to ignore the italics, so they're missing. so even with a clean page, we can get some o.c.r. errors, enough that -- when hundreds cumulate over a book -- it can take roughly one hour per book to fix all of them. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 28 00:03:12 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 03:03:12 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 17 of 32 Message-ID: <250c.68b392c4.3930c4b0@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is again from our friend from baltimore, edgar allen poe, this time volume 10 of his collected works. here's the scan for page 43: > http://www.archive.org/stream/worksofedgaralle10poee#page/43 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia341315.us.archive.org/0/items/worksofedgaralle10poee/worksofedgaralle10poee_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 43: > > THE RATIONALE OP VERSE 43 > > add anything about their equality, we are merely > floundering in the idea of an identical equation, > where, x being equal to x, nothing is shown to be > equal to zero. In a word, we can form no con- > ception of a pyrrhic as of an independent foot. > It is a mere chimera bred in the mad fancy ot a > > ^^F^m what I have said about the equalisation > of the several feet of a line, it must not be de- > duced that any necessity for equality in time ex- > ists between the rhythm of several lines. ^ A > poem, or even a stanza, may begin with lam- > busses, in the first line, and proceed with ana > psests in the second, or even with the less accor- > dant dactyls, as in the opening of quite a pretty > specimen of verse by Miss Mary A. S. Aldrichj > > The wa ] ter H 1 ly sleeps \ in pride 1^^^ > Down in the depths of the [ azure | lake. | > > Here azure is a spondee, equivalent to a dactyU > > lake a caesura. ^i, ? ?? ? ??+;? ?~i > > I shall now best proceed m quotmg the mitiaJ > lines of Byron's "Bride of Abydos:" > > Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle > > Are emblems of deeds that are done i^/.^^J^. fi;? ???~ > > Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle > Now meltmto softness, now madden to crime? > > TCnnw ve the land of the cedar and vine. > > Where'the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shi^. > > And the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume. > > Wax faint o'er the gardens of Gul ia their bloom? > > Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit > > And the voice of the nightingale never ig mute? ? > > > Where the virgins are soft as the roses they twine, > > And all save the spirit of man is divine . ? ?? well, here's another crooked page... i wonder how it gets _anything_ right, since every line is equally crooked, right? -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Fri May 28 12:57:27 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Fri, 28 May 2010 15:57:27 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] the problem with the e-books from the internet archive -- 18 of 32 Message-ID: <2b71f.74e09b8d.39317a27@aol.com> for 32 days, i am showing samples of the problems with the text in e-books from the internet archive... *** today's example is from "the turn of the screw". here's the scan for page 123: > http://www.archive.org/stream/twomagicsturnofs00jameuoft#page/123 here's the o.c.r. for the whole book: > http://ia331312.us.archive.org/0/items/twomagicsturnofs00jameuoft/twomagicsturnofs00jameuoft_djvu.txt and here's the o.c.r. for page 123: > > THE TURN OF THE SCREW 123 > > He turned it over. " Very likely. But what > things ? " > > " The things you've never told me. To make up > his mind what to do with you. He can't send you > back " > > " Oh, I don't want to go back ! " he broke in. " I > want a new field." > > He said it with admirable serenity, with positive > unimpeachable gaiety ; and doubtless it was that very > note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the > unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappear > ance at the end of three months with all this bravado > and still more dishonour. It overwhelmed me now > I that I should never be able to bear that, and it made > i me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the > I tenderness of my pity I embraced him. " Dear little > Miles, dear little Miles 1 " > > My face was close to his, and he let me kiss him, > simply taking it with indulgent goodhumour. " Well, > old lady ? " > > " Is there nothing nothing at all that you want to > tell me ? " > > He turned off a little, facing round toward the wall > and holding up his hand to look at as one had seen > sick children look. " I've told you I told you this > morning." > > Oh, I was sorry for him ! " That you just want me > not to worry you ? " > > He looked round at me now, as if in recognition of > my understanding him; then ever so gently, "To let > me alone," he replied. > > There was even a singular little dignity in it, some- spacey quotes, spacey question-marks, spacey exclamation-points, an exclamation-point misrecognized as "1", missing em-dashes and a missing end-of-line hyphen, are all errors occurring on this page. in addition, and more subtle, there are some extra characters at the left-hand margin in the middle of the fourth paragraph. i looked at other scan-sets of this book too, and found that many had been marked by patrons, introducing yet another ironic fact -- the more popular a book is, the more times it has been checked out, and the greater the likelihood that a patron has made marks in it... -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From Bowerbird at aol.com Mon May 31 19:20:24 2010 From: Bowerbird at aol.com (Bowerbird at aol.com) Date: Mon, 31 May 2010 22:20:24 -0400 (EDT) Subject: [gutvol-d] another month, another million Message-ID: <844b.236ce9d9.3935c868@aol.com> 2 million ipads sold to date, exactly as i predicted last month, once again doubling the rate achieved earlier by the iphone, and said to be the fastest to $1billion by any tech product... > http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/05/31ipad.html i think i said they'd hit 3 million by the fall, and 4 by year-end, which -- at this time -- is beginning to look fairly conservative. -bowerbird -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: