Comments on: Maksim Moshkow and lib.ru: What one man’s hobby can accomplish

By: warsystems » Free online library in Russia

warsystems » Free online library in Russia — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 01:56:07 +0000

[...] Moshkov created his library in 1994. Every day over 20,000 people visit lib.ru. http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=4053 How often do you receive new texts? On average, 10-20 texts per day. [...]

By: Zoran Stefanovic

Zoran Stefanovic — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 18:07:26 +0000

Happy New Year to Teleread community!

Thanks Branko for pointing me to this. As Mihailo said, we are seriously overworked. Main task in 2004 and 2005 was to build supranational structure which will serve to many cultures, not just exclusive club of few. We’re building it step-by-step through different paths: Rastko.net, PGE, DPE etc. … and most of it is still to be announced in months to come. For that reasons and with limited resources, we were forced to deliberately neglect Serb/Yugoslav part of the network [www.rastko.org.yu] in 2004 and 2005.

Having strong foundations almost built now–although, with pain and slowly–we expect to have Russian and Serbian books among top 10 language groups of PGE in 2006 or 2007.

Of course, having Moshkow’s Library [one of digital world eminent phenomena] and Maksim himself [Rastko's friend for many years now], we assume that task as realistic.

Sincerely,
Zoran Stefanovic,
Project Rastko Network

By: Quinn Anya Carey

Quinn Anya Carey — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 00:44:47 +0000

Thanks for clearing that up, Mihailo! I’m glad to hear that the different projects are working together. Good luck with the collaboration– I hope more people volunteer to help catch up with the backlog.

By: Mihailo Stefanovic

Mihailo Stefanovic — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 22:40:37 +0000

Hi, this is Mihailo (mikis) from Project Rastko. Zoran’s been very busy these days, so I’ll try to clarify.

Yes, both Project Rastko and Project Gutenberg Europe have plans and wish to collaborate with lib.ru, and publish as many books from it on PGE as possible.

However, we were quite overworked this year. You are correct that there are hundreds, if not thousands of Project Rastko e-books to be published on PG(E). Also there is almost 500 books on DP Europe (dp.rastko.net) waiting to be post-processed and published.

But, as Maksim said: publishing e-books is still process that takes money, not earn it. So let our Christmass wish be that all this happens in New Year

By: Branko Collin

Branko Collin — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 20:33:10 +0000

I’ll send an e-mail to Zoran, he should be able to answer your questions and is generally quite fond of partnering.

By: Quinn Anya Carey

Quinn Anya Carey — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 17:09:17 +0000

Branko, do you know if Project Gutenberg Europe has looked into partnering with/using texts from lib.ru? The Gutenberg Russian selection as it stands is dismal. What also strikes me as odd is that Gutenberg Europe says it’s “provided by Project Rastko”, but it only has the tiniest fraction of the Serbian texts digitized by that project.

The way these different digitization projects seem to not be working together (correct me if I’m wrong) strikes me as another limitation on the total growth of e-books. Like I wrote in my first post, the “why bother putting in the effort to share it– I have what I need” attitude with digitization projects is a problem in academia, too.

By: Branko Collin

Branko Collin — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 15:08:20 +0000

Russian books are more likely to be processed through Project Gutenberg Europe than through its American “mothership”, as the former understands the cyrillic script that most, if not all Russian authors use. The Distributed Proofreaders for Project Gutenberg of Europe is at http://dp.rastko.net .