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It's great that these are in a consistent formatting style. When trying to extract some contents programmatically from some Gutenberg texts, I kept running into

by kevinh 7y ago

It's great that these are in a consistent formatting style. When trying to extract some contents programmatically from some Gutenberg texts, I kept running into different formatting styles. That combined with being able to check out the entire repository makes it much simpler to do data processing on the works. And, of course, fixing more errors is of course a noble goal. Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg?

souterrain 7y ago
> Standard Ebooks puts significant work into designing, formatting, marking up, and hosting our ebooks. While some think we could, or even should, release our work with some kind of copyright notice, instead Standard Ebooks dedicates the entirety of each of our ebook files, including markup, cover art, and everything in between, to the public domain. https://standardebooks.org/about/ https://standardebooks.org/about/
- matt4077 7y ago
  Public Domain projects that subtly argue for an extensive view of copyright in ambiguous (in the best case) situations make me somewhat suspicious. Editing is a lot work, and their efforts are appreciated. But most of that involves the application of existing rules (curly quotes etc.) and therefore doesn't meet the creativity standard of copyright. I guess the texts are out there anyway, and it doesn't make much of a difference. But I'm reminded of the art world, where many a painting is long out of copyright, yet only the Museums have access and the insist setting up a lightbox and taking a photo is a creative endeavour worthy of protection from the prying eyes of the non-paying public.
  - roryokane 7y ago
    I was curious about the copyright situation of photos of old paintings that you referenced in your last paragraph. I found this article that explains their status: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/museum-paintings-copyright_b_1867076 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/museum-paintings-copyright_b_.... The bottom line: > [T]hose who are hesitant to use photos of works that are in the public domain […] should know that under the law if the image is “slavish,” a mere reproduction, a plain unadorned exact image, they can use it and do not have to pay anyone a licensing fee.
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
> Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg? It's an issue worth raising to the team. In the spirit of GPL, I think reporting any instances of clear typos in the source text upstream would be a good idea. The problem is that so much work is done to the text as part of StandardEbook production that we can't exactly just submit a single patch or diff. It would be difficult to identify the textual corrections from stylistic changes in an automatic way, unless we were to enforce typo corrections to occur in a single commit. We're currently encouraged to use an [Editorial] tag when modernizing spelling such as "any one" -> "anyone", so perhaps we should see about a [Transcription Error] tag for obvious typos. The upshot is that all of the books' sources are hosted on GH. So an interested party could, in theory, review the commit history and pull out what look to be typo corrections. See, for example: https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge-case/commit/50958e4ed3cc22cf9afb26dabcd93d9f986f9b8a https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge... Failing that, the contributor could simply manually keep track of any typos they fix and report them to GP.
- Moru 7y ago
  On the other side, modernising the texts might not be what gutenberg wants, if they want to keep original errors from the books? Haven't looked it up but I have been in other book project where it was more important to keep everything as it was printed.
- the_duke 7y ago
  "Modernizing" is a very questionable thing to do IMO. Fixing typos is fine I guess, but books are the result of an era and grammar or writing style is an inherent part of a book that should not be altered.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    That's true, it changes the book materially, I think.
  - robin_reala 7y ago
    We’re pretty light touch. For an example, the biggest change a typical novel gets is amending “to-day” to “today”.
robin_reala 7y ago
Not all the sources come from Gutenberg for a start. But for those that do I usually keep a running list of proofing corrections as I go and submit them back. Gutenberg are pretty responsive to any changed submitted if you supply a link to source scans as well.

by kevinh 7y ago

souterrain 7y ago

> Standard Ebooks puts significant work into designing, formatting, marking up, and hosting our ebooks. While some think we could, or even should, release our work with some kind of copyright notice, instead Standard Ebooks dedicates the entirety of each of our ebook files, including markup, cover art, and everything in between, to the public domain. https://standardebooks.org/about/ https://standardebooks.org/about/

matt4077 7y ago
Public Domain projects that subtly argue for an extensive view of copyright in ambiguous (in the best case) situations make me somewhat suspicious. Editing is a lot work, and their efforts are appreciated. But most of that involves the application of existing rules (curly quotes etc.) and therefore doesn't meet the creativity standard of copyright. I guess the texts are out there anyway, and it doesn't make much of a difference. But I'm reminded of the art world, where many a painting is long out of copyright, yet only the Museums have access and the insist setting up a lightbox and taking a photo is a creative endeavour worthy of protection from the prying eyes of the non-paying public.
- roryokane 7y ago
  I was curious about the copyright situation of photos of old paintings that you referenced in your last paragraph. I found this article that explains their status: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/museum-paintings-copyright_b_1867076 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/museum-paintings-copyright_b_.... The bottom line: > [T]hose who are hesitant to use photos of works that are in the public domain […] should know that under the law if the image is “slavish,” a mere reproduction, a plain unadorned exact image, they can use it and do not have to pay anyone a licensing fee.

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

> Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg? It's an issue worth raising to the team. In the spirit of GPL, I think reporting any instances of clear typos in the source text upstream would be a good idea. The problem is that so much work is done to the text as part of StandardEbook production that we can't exactly just submit a single patch or diff. It would be difficult to identify the textual corrections from stylistic changes in an automatic way, unless we were to enforce typo corrections to occur in a single commit. We're currently encouraged to use an [Editorial] tag when modernizing spelling such as "any one" -> "anyone", so perhaps we should see about a [Transcription Error] tag for obvious typos. The upshot is that all of the books' sources are hosted on GH. So an interested party could, in theory, review the commit history and pull out what look to be typo corrections. See, for example: https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge-case/commit/50958e4ed3cc22cf9afb26dabcd93d9f986f9b8a https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge... Failing that, the contributor could simply manually keep track of any typos they fix and report them to GP.

Moru 7y ago
On the other side, modernising the texts might not be what gutenberg wants, if they want to keep original errors from the books? Haven't looked it up but I have been in other book project where it was more important to keep everything as it was printed.
the_duke 7y ago
"Modernizing" is a very questionable thing to do IMO. Fixing typos is fine I guess, but books are the result of an era and grammar or writing style is an inherent part of a book that should not be altered.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  That's true, it changes the book materially, I think.
- robin_reala 7y ago
  We’re pretty light touch. For an example, the biggest change a typical novel gets is amending “to-day” to “today”.

robin_reala 7y ago

Not all the sources come from Gutenberg for a start. But for those that do I usually keep a running list of proofing corrections as I go and submit them back. Gutenberg are pretty responsive to any changed submitted if you supply a link to source scans as well.