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Archive for the ‘Project Gutenberg’ Category

By David Rothman

None other than Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart has broached the topic of testing Google ads on at least some Gutenberg-related sites, and volunteers so far seem generally open to the idea.

What do you think? Google ads, as I see it, would be a positive if they helped keep Gutenberg sustainable, were done with taste, and came with full disclosure of the way the money was spent. The group should recognize Michael’s many years of dedicated service to Gutenberg and err on the side of generosity toward him, especially since he is at a time in life when his medical needs may soon grow. The important thing is to be open, not just about expenditures but also how they compare with those of similar organizations

PG trademark: Registered in Michael’s name by top lawyer with King estate and Disney among “representative” litigation clients—but read on for context

Yet another improvement, as I see it, would be group ownership of the Project Gutenberg trademark, an integral part of the organization’s activities in the legal sense. That would simplify fundraising.

Notice the partial screenshot to the left from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s records on the Web? In his personal name, Michael apparently registered the Gutenberg trademark with legal help from the office of William H. Brewster, a well-connected, well-regarded University of Virginia law grad in Atlanta whose specialties include intellectual property, and whose powerful firm, Kilpatrick Stockton, long ago secured the first federal registration for another brand name, none other than COCA-COLA. Among the firm’s “high profile clients,” going by a Wikipedia list, is Google, though I don’t see any connection with the ad proposal, just an indication of the caliber of Michael’s trademark-related connections.

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By David Rothman

Here’s a plot for a mystery novel. Who killed the writer? Perhaps an ancient Egyptian mummy whose spirit hated a book that a Victorian author had churned out about him? Not because it was racist but because it was so mind-numbing?

Such thoughts came to me after reading Bad writing from a long time ago, an Arabist.net post on some “dreadfully dull” writing of yesteryear.

I’ll share a gem the Arabist site dug up from The Spell of Egypt, by Robert Smythe Hichens, tactfully mentioned as an “otherwise a relatively capable early fantastic/mystery writer:”

“The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose.”

Actually Hichens did come up with the 1905 novel on which Hollywood based The Garden of Allah film. The poster showing Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer was for the Italian version of the movie.

If you want to see racism from the past, a number of old Gutenberg classics will do. No, I would not want them stricken from the online archives: let’s stay true to literature and history and appreciate how far we’ve come. For a possible example, read Tarrano the Conqueror, complete with references to “the Anglo-Saxon Republic” and pesky immigrants from the planet Venus. Where is the killer mummy when we need him?

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By David Rothman

So which science fiction novels are life-changers or at least major enlighteners? My first choice would be 1984, with its depiction of a war-driven, snoop-centric society—more timely than ever in the America of 2008, even if we’re not there yet. Branko just might name Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We instead. Why isn’t this 1921 work digitized for the public domain, given the novel’s influence on 1984 author George Orwell, Ayn Rand and others? (Update: Answer.) Yes, that’s Zamyatin in the photo.

Also, as a waker-up, how about Brave New World to remind us of the perils and opportunities of the bio frontier?

Meanwhile the io9 site has come up with its own list of life-changing SF books—named below in the order of publication rather than importance. I’ll provide links to e-freebies at Manybooks.net and Feedbooks, with a reminder that you might also try Project Gutenberg.

Frankenstein (1818), by Mary Shelley (Manybooks, Feedbooks)
The Time Machine (1895), by H.G. Wells (M, F)
At the Mountains of Madness (1931), by H.P. Lovecraft (M, F)
I, Robot (1955), by Isaac Asimov
The Dispossessed (1974), by Ursula LeGuin
Kindred (1979), by Octavia Butler
Wizard (1979), by John Varley
Consider Phlebas (1987), by Iain M. Banks
He, She, and It (1991), by Marge Piercy
Sarah Canary (1991), by Karen Joy Fowler
A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), by Vernor Vinge
The Bohr Maker (1995), by Linda Nagata
The Sparrow (1996), by Mary Doria Russell
Cryptonomicon (2000), by Neal Stephenson
The Mount (2002), by Carol Emschwiller
Perdido Street Station (2002), by China Mieville
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), by Cory Doctorow (M, F)
Pattern Recognition (2003), by William Gibson
Newton’s Wake (2004), by Ken MacLeod
Glasshouse (2006), by Charles Stross

Outside the SF realm but also of possible interest for some freebie fans: The Kid Was a Killer, Caryl Chessman’s pulp novel—now available via Munseys.  He sat on Death Row for years and his case was often cited in the fight against capital punishment. Among those pleading for Chessman’s life to be spared were Aldous Huxley (yes, author of Brave New World), Ray Bradbury, Norman Mailer and Robert Frost.

Technorati Tags: Mary Shelley,H.G. Wells,H.P. Lovecraft,Cory Doctorow

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By David Rothman

In a preview of what will be possible for poor kids in Peru or Nigeria—once memory prices drop—I’ve gotten an 8G memory card working on my OLPC XO.

So it can now store 8,000+ books of typical length.

All the more to enjoy with FBReader!

Yes, the estimate is conservative for text-only books, especially if you’re using ASCII, .epub or MobiPocket rather than PDF format. Oh, well. The new card means I don’t have to worry quite so much about PDF bloat.

Library potential

In developing countries, yes, cheapie memory cards would be one way of giving kids access to scads of books without the need to use wireless connections, even though that’s vastly preferable—the XO after all is intended for communications and collaboration.

Here in the States and other countries with good public library systems, just imagine the eventual possibilities for  libraries that can catch up with XOs. They could store not just public domain books and suitable Creative Commons works, but also locally originated content, such as agricultural information or scans of documents associated with local history.

Still buyable

The card for now is still available from TigerDirect for $40. Now if the gods are on my side, I’ll be able to pick up my main library of public domain goodies in one swoop. There is a catch. My HP Pavilion, several years old, can’t read the A-Data 8GB SDHC Class 6 card, but my plan, when I have time, is just to transfer the library to a USB memory key and do a copy command on the XO.

Long term, is the solution a more up-to-date card reader than the one built into the Pavilion, which acts as if the card doesn’t exist? Will I need a new driver, too?

Hardly the first

No, I’m hardly the first to install an 8G card for the XO, and the new frontier is in fact 16G; but it’s still fun see the A-Data working on my XO. Installation instructions for memory cards for the XO are here. Consider attaching Scotch Tape to the card so you can more easily pull it out.

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By Jon Noring

(This article announces the launch of the Digital Text Community, a new mailing list for serious discussion on the digitization of “ink-on-paper” texts, such as books, periodicals, documents, etc. Please join our community!)

Like many of you, I daily follow and contribute to dozens of blogs, mailing lists and forums to keep abreast of digital publication related news, opinions, and developments.

David Rothman should be happy to know that the TeleRead blog is the first place I go to every day to stay up-to-the-minute on digital publishing news and views.

Considering the vast number of blogs, mailing lists, and forums on the Internet, one wonders if there’s any topic which is not somehow covered in some way, including topics in digital publishing.

“Digital Text Community” launched

Recently, it became clear that for one topic, the digitization of “ink-on-paper” texts, there indeed was a void. Certainly there are discussion forums associated with specific projects to digitize texts (e.g., Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders.) However, these forums tend to be for in-house project planning and not intended to be neutral meeting places for the many independent projects (both non-profit and commercial) which are digitizing “ink-on-paper” texts. (Yes, Martha, there’s a LOT more going on than just Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders!)

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By Branko Collin

Project Gutenberg present an advent calendar for 2007: twenty four books (presumably holiday themed) “to read to your children.” The idea of an advent calendar is to open one door per day (often leading to chocolates). That means you do not know what is behind a door until you have opened it, but alas, the project’s webmaster hasn’t gone so far as to recreate the secretive part of the concept: you can “open” any “door” of the calendar whenever you like.

Project Gutenberg have also got a Christmas Bookshelf. “Bookshelves” are gutenberg.org’s way of letting readers organize content, and if you haven’t been to the site for a while because you found it hard to find anything, I can advise you to try again and browse through the many bookshelves.

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By Paul Biba

Just some things that came to my attention this morning:

1. Silk Pagoda is running a sale for the Sony Reader. 10,000 books in lrf format for $9.95. This is a pretty good deal. Here is the blurb from the site:

"1 DVD containing 10,000 books in .lrf format, searchable, sorted by category, and specially configured to fit perfectly on your Sony PRS-500 (Sony Reader), device. This is the legendary Blackmask DVD, albeit without the zipped HTML backup (the .lrf files take up all the space), and of course without those other titles."

2. Over at Fictionwise I just noticed the stats counter at the bottom of their page. They have served up 485.5 billion words and have 43,195 titles available. Wow!

3. Project Gutenberg has regional sites—for example, in Canada and Australia. Here are some details.

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By Branko Collin

This earth all spann’d with iron rails, with lines of steamships / threading in every sea, Our own rondure, the current globe I bring. (from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman). Photo: Eugene de Salignac, 1913.

I never shall quite forget the time when the rumour was started in our town that old Mr. M—-, our librarian–a gentle, furtive, silent man–a man who (with the single exception of a long white beard) was all screwed up and bent around with learning, who was always slipping invisibly in and out of his high shelves, and who looked as if his whole life had been nothing but a kind of long, perpetual salaam to books–had been caught dancing one day with his wife.

From Gerald Stanley Lee’s The Lost Art of Reading, a collection of essays currently being proofed at Distributed Proofreaders for inclusion at Project Gutenberg. The New York Times wrote in 1903 about this book and its author:

Mr. Gerald Stanley Lee, whose book on “The Lost Art of Reading” deserves further consideration, is a preacher of the gospel of “fullness and leisure and power of living”; of unconscious, of “not knowing what time it is.” He is an enemy of the modern forms of culture, reading, and especially of “analysis.” His whole attitude toward modern literature—he says so himself—is grouty and snappish, a kind of perpetual interrupted “what-are-you-ringing-my-doorbell-for” attitude. His book is not really all about reading; it has a good deal in it besides about various philosophies of life. But Mr. Lee connects it all with reading by processes of his own. He has a love for unconventional expression, and likes nothing better than to say things that are calculated to shock his readers.

Or as the project manager at Distributed Proofreaders writes:

Lee is a philosopher of the poetry of machines. His works are odd-seeming (nearly crack-pot) yet often quotable.

The Toziers got their hands on a number of Lee books, and are readying them for Project Gutenberg. In the meantime they quote liberally from mr. Quotable: Bill Tozier here, and Barbara Tozier here.

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By Paul Biba

And so said many, many women.

What most people don’t know is that Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) actually wrote his memoirs. And what a set of books they are! I was lucky enough to find the pbook set in yard sale a few years ago and they comprise 6 thick volumes. They have been long out of print. This excerpt from the Wikipedia article about him (see link above) will give you a taste of what they contain:

“Although best known for his prowess in seduction, he was recognized by his contemporaries as an extraordinary person. Prince Charles de Ligne, a great Austrian statesman who knew most of the prominent individuals of the age, thought that Casanova was the most interesting man he had ever met and said of him, “there is nothing in the world of which he is not capable”. Count Lamberg wrote that he knew “few persons who can equal him in the range of knowledge and, in general, of his intelligence and imagination”.

During Casanova’s numerous travels he encountered notable figures such as Pope Clement XIII, Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great (who afterwards commented on his good looks), Madame de Pompadour, Crebillon, who was also his French teacher, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, and many others. He was present at the premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and possibly made last-minute revisions to the libretto. Although Casanova took the role of businessman, diplomat, spy, politician, philosopher, magician, and writer, with more than twenty books and several plays credited to his name (including a translation of the Iliad and a history of Poland — “Istoria della turbolenze della Polonia”) — most of which were generally admired — for the greater part of his life he was a stranger to work, living largely on his quick wits, luck, social charm, and the money freely given to him by others.”

The Memoirs are well written, and absolutely fascinating as both a record of the man and a description of the time in which he lived. Luckily they are available from Manybooks and also from Project Gutenberg. Arthur Machen’s translation is very well done and is quite readable. This may be because Machen was a writer, himself, and brought his literary gifts to the art of translation.

These volumes are practically unknown, but remain a true gem. Highly recommended.

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By David Rothman

Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, says he’s open to creation of .epub files on the fly, via the main Gutenberg site. And he is also willing to consider links to sites that store IDPF-standard files in ready-to-go form.

At the same time, however, Greg writes on a Gutenberg list that he needs convincing evidence that .epub will indeed be an open, honest standard without gotchas coming in from Adobe or any other company. He’ll also need the right software tools—free and open source.

“On the fly” explained

But first, what does “on the fly” mean? It means that Gutenberg would treat .epub as it now does Plucker.

You’d type in a number to identify the e-book file, then wait while the conversion gears ground away and generated .epub from another format such as HTML or .txt. This isn’t an optimal solution, but it’s a good start, especially if Gutenberg also uses direct links to sites with ready-to-go .epub.

Catnip for consumers, if IDPF doesn’t play games

The benefit for Gutenberg visitors would be for future Sony Readers—expected to come with Digital Editions, Adobe’s software that can read .epub, not just PDF—to be able to read .the IDPF format without conversion hassles at the human readers’ end. The same could happen with Bookeen’s forthcoming Cybook Gen3; in fact, an entire generation of E Ink machines with .epub-reading capabilities, whether or not they originated from Adobe software, which apparently won’t happen in the case of the Cybook.

Adobe funds the IDPF, whose executive director, Nick Bogaty, is about to start a job there. While the public domain community will benefit from .epub and mustn’t walk away from the possibilities by ostracizing the IDPF just because Adobe’s involved, we also need verifiable assurances that no one will compromise the integrity of the standard. Integrity is the key to many different brands of commercial software and hardware—not to mention open source freeware and shareware programs—working with .epub from Gutenberg and other sites. (more…)

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