7 ms·
Project Gutenberg is a complete mess. It took them years of discussion and they haven't yet chosen a master file format for their books.[1] As a consequence, t
by felix_faber 15y ago
Project Gutenberg is a complete mess.
It took them years of discussion and they haven't yet chosen a master file format for their books.[1]
As a consequence, they are hosting thousands of books in many different file-formats provided by distributed proofreaders[2] and some other sources.
But since no master-format exists and conversion is .. well .. buggy, they have no leverage on their quality problems. The textual content may be fine, but the reading experience for the casual user shows how big the iceberg is under the surface.
Having seen endless flamewars[3] and several unsuccessful approaches to their formatting and complexity problems, I propose clear reset.
What about a nice fork with only a few important books that get proper treatment in regard to
- master file format
- conversion (mainly html, pdf and ereader formats)
- design and page layout (e.g. for pdf versions)
From then on, one could build a growing git repository of _nice_ books and build an infrastructure around that.
Tackling their current mess directly (and taking on the burden of their internal politics and historical toolchain) will be completely in vain, as the past has shown.
I don't have much time to spare. But for a really good cause (and the future of bookreading is a really good cause), I am willing to invest.
Who is in?
[1] This one is the latest candidate: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:RST http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:RST
Before that, there was one guy working on a simplified TEI format. But that never took off.
[2] http://www.pgdp.net/c/ http://www.pgdp.net/c/
[3] The home of many-a-flamewar: http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.literature.e-books.gutenberg.volunteers http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.culture.literature.e-books.guten...
- ComputerGuru 15y agoAny reboot of PG (if any at all) should from the ground up have a single master format for any given title, these master formats under DVCS, and an integrated automated build system for conversion to auxiliary formats. These are the very basic components of any large scale library being designed in this day and age, and ensure integrity, posterity, and availability.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI would be interested. PG is amazing wrt the content, but the experience of actually reading the books is awful. My email is in my profile.
- danking00 15y agoAgreed. Let's do something about our shared cultural history. Email is also in my profile.
- felix_faber 15y agoWow. @ComputerGuru, SoftwareMaven, dankin I will contact you via mail in a bit. Do you have experience in managing the level of discussion needed to get this right? What would be best? A public mailing list? https://github.com/felix-faber/project-alexandria https://github.com/felix-faber/project-alexandria Feedback very welcome.
- ch00 15y agoI'm interested in tossing my hat into the ring as well. I couldn't find a way to contact you in your profile or on github so here's me saying "me too!"
- danking00 15y agoI signed up to troutwine's mailing list and started following the github project. I've participated in mailing lists for big projects before. They seem to work fairly well.
- zem 15y agosigned up for troutwine's mailing list too
- DanBC 15y agoA decent master file system is good. Including conversion is sub-optimal. Have a sister project that creates and maintains good software for conversion. That would draw 2 crowds; people wanting to help PG and people unwilling to continue using Calibre.
- felix_faber 15y agoIMO, calibre is two-way. From any file format to any other. That is _hard_ to do really good. Text is the easy part. What about tables? What about image captions and footnotes? What such a project would need is one master file format from which other formats are derived. But not the other way around. Having disjoint repositories for books/software is a good idea though.
- troutwine 15y agoI'd like to throw into this. I started a mailing-list: http://groups.google.com/group/prj-alexandria http://groups.google.com/group/prj-alexandria What say we move the conversation there?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]