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Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page
by JSeiko 5mo ago
Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg.
We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!).
If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/
- Falimonda 5mo agoThe book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement. Keep up the good work!
- JSeiko 5mo agogood feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!
- Falimonda 5mo agoAny interest in offering PG as a multi-lingual web e-reader in any language? I've since discontinued hosting it, but happy to add you all and merge into an official PG offering: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/VtYKxjrMme https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/VtYKxjrMme
- Falimonda 5mo agoMore content visible on various videos I took and posted to X https://x.com/abal_ai https://x.com/abal_ai
- samcollins 5mo agoVery cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links? (I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)
- e0d075b569cd 5mo ago[flagged]
- kay_o 5mo agoCheck out https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.
- JSeiko 5mo agonot yet, but that's not a bad idea imo. Dealing with Ai crawler traffic is definitely a challenge if that's what you were referring to.
- ancientcatz 5mo agoOPDS?
- gluejar 5mo agoOPDS 2.0 coming RSN. email us if you want to test. OPDS 0.x is currently available (not recommended) by adding .opds to the end of a url
- jzs 5mo agoNow i'm not associated with gutenberg in any form, but they do have a page for offline consumption: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there. However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
- xrd 5mo agoThank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.
- ExtremisAndy 5mo agoOh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!
- JSeiko 5mo agoThanks! We're currently working on a design update of the page of any specific book. Should be online soon (next 1-2 weeks or so)
- excitednumber 5mo agoThank you for being one of the best places on the internet
- shuvrojit 5mo agoGreat Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.
- JSeiko 5mo agohttps://github.com/gutenbergtools https://github.com/gutenbergtools autocat3 and gutenbergsite are repos responsible for generating gutenberg.org
- smallnix 5mo agoThere's a minor bug with chrome in android where the menu will not close when you tap outside the menu or on the menu link/button
- BiraIgnacio 5mo agoThanks so much for the work you and your team do!
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoWanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!
- JSeiko 5mo agoit's not my day job. PG is open-source. I'm "just" a contributor
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoOh, right. That makes sense.
- nomoreusernames 5mo ago[dead]
- jefurii 5mo agoWhen I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!
- JSeiko 5mo agosadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D
- Wistar 5mo ago♡
- ok_dad 5mo ago<3 Less than three is a classic!
- agys 5mo agoEss two is less than less than three, but also a classic. s2 < <3
- ricardonunez 5mo agoI like the design but liked the previous design as well, it was unique and Craigslistish, you knew what website you were visiting just by looking at it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 5mo ago>When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. I suppose a printed book, black ink on paper, is "brutalist" and unpleasant to look at? The text of a book shouldn't be encrusted with format, your reader or browser should contain the presentation that you want to see, find appealing, or need (accessibility).
- freedomben 5mo agoI can't say for project Gutenberg specifically, but in general a huge issue I see is OCR errors. What do you all do to address OCR?
- lapetitejort 5mo agoI uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar
- gluejar 5mo agoCheck out Distributed Proofreaders: https://pgdp.net https://pgdp.net
- jfengel 5mo agoI didn't realized DP was still around. I used to do it quite a bit, 15 years ago, but OCR has improved considerably since then.
- tangledhelix 5mo agoOCR has improved a lot since then, but OCR is just step 1 of reading in text. They make a lot of errors (even now, especially on old worn out paper pages) and even if they didn't, one has to format the book, deal with footnotes, sidenotes, illustrations, etc. DP is very active, we will welcome you back with open arms :)
- zamadatix 5mo agoThanks for the free work! Project Gutenberg is nice to have :). On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?
- JSeiko 5mo agoyou can open an Issue at https://github.com/gutenbergtools/gutenbergsite https://github.com/gutenbergtools/gutenbergsite
- lucb1e 5mo agoHuh that's interesting: 4.5 seconds for the TCP handshake and an additional 9.2 seconds for the TLS handshake. Is this some kind of captcha, since most bots would disconnect before that, so if you complete it once then it knows you're good? (Until the bots catch on of course, but so long as it works it's relatively unintrusive and not discriminatory against uncommon client software (that is, non-Chrome/ium).) The rest of the requests were lightning fast Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!
- codys 5mo agoI think their site is just slow, potentially because more people than they are used to are trying to view it. I was unable to load it initially (got an error from firefox) and had to re-attempt. Still slow if one forces a reload (shift-r, etc, to not use local cache).
- JSeiko 5mo agowe are having occasional lows in page speed performance due to LARGE amounts of bot traffic. full disclosure - we've not really been able to resolve this fully/well. Let us know if you have a good idea for how to deal with it
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoCF cache?
- lucb1e 5mo agoI'm only a small-scale sysadmin but the way that I understand the internet is that you send abuse notifications to the IP address block owner and, if it doesn't get resolved, you block. The whois/rdap database reveals which IPs all belong to the same hosting provider or ISP, so you can summarize that all to one list of IP addrs + timestamps per some time period The ISP actually knows which subscriber is on that line, can send them notices, block them, terminate them... loads of things that you simply cannot do because you have no relation to this person. And frankly I wouldn't want to need to have a personal relation with every website that I visit; my ISP can reach me if there is anything relevant to continued use of the internet. From personal experience, when I was a teenager, the ISP cutting our household off after an abuse report was an effective way of stopping what I was doing
- svat 5mo agoHave you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans. I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.
- JSeiko 5mo agoThat's an interesting idea. not a small feat to accomplish though ...
- JSeiko 5mo agoI believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar
- gluejar 5mo agoWe're using git repos internally to keep history for each book. They existed on github for a while, but our implementation was awkward, and too big of project for the volunteer dev team. But it's likely that we'll evolve towards that.
- marcprux 5mo ago> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…] Why?
- a2800276 5mo agoIt splits the community and number of possible volunteer hours for one. It also splits the canon into different versions. More projects fight for the attention attention (and possibly donations) of the audience. There are lots of reasons it could be preferable to centralize. OTOH their mission is limited and some competition is healthy, if only to explore alternative ways to do things.
- 0x0203 5mo agoAs long as you're taking suggestions, since many of the books are quite old, adding a publication date or date range to the search functionality might be nice. I personally would find it very useful since I have a tendency to look for things that are older than year _x_ when researching various things. Thanks for all the effort put into the site!
- gluejar 5mo agoonly 20% of our books have original publication data in the db. We have a project to add another 40% or so from another database, let us know if you want to help.
- sgc 5mo agoI have the same problem on catholiclibrary.org, but insist on having something as the book date for every work. My solution is to temporarily default to the author dates until the book date can be refined. If there is no known author date I at least have a date range, hopefully to century or better. Author dates are a much smaller data set, can be generally supplemented from public marc records (viaf, loc, etc - I don't do that, but it's an option) and at least provide basic filtering / sorting.
- openclawclub 5mo ago[dead]
- Guestmodinfo 5mo agoHi for the past 20 years I have known about Project Gutenberg and I used to read a lot from it. One of the obstacle that I face is that there is no way to arrange the books in the order of their original publication. Do you know of any such way. Surely we can arrange the books by their release date on Gutenberg but it has long baffled me as it feels to me the most useless way of sorting the books. Thank you for Project Gutenberg.
- gluejar 5mo agoonly 20% of our books have original publication data in the db. We have a project to add another 40% or so from another database, let us know if you want to help. reply
- Guestmodinfo 5mo agoYes I am willing to help. Plz include me in your efforts. Thank you for this
- 8bitsrule 5mo agoGreat project. Are many of the books in a format that can easily be converted into audio? Is there a way to search for them, and information on what software your readers find useful for this purpose? (Note: A lot of print media these days has switched to far-to-small font-sizes. Less of a problem for (zoomable) digital media, but for many that's still a barrier.)
- OfflineSergio 5mo agoFor the Audio part, I suggest https://desktop.with.audio https://desktop.with.audio
- 8bitsrule 5mo agoIMO, most audio read by humans (esp. voice actors) are far preferable to machine readings. Also, I found no demos on that page.
- tangledhelix 5mo agoThere are many books available as audio, some are human-read, some were automated. You can see lists here: human-read: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 computer-generated: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/2 https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/2 IIRC many of the human-generated ones come from LibriVox, many of the computer-generated ones came from a collaboration with Microsoft.
- samwho 5mo agoLooking really good! Great work.
- shevy-java 5mo agoThere should be more books at Gutenberg. Also by the way I just searched for 3d printing and found nothing. Either there are no books, or the search query makes things too complicated, IMO.
- robin_reala 5mo agoGutenberg is nearly all books that have lapsed into the US public domain by dint of being published 95+ years in the past. Which broadly explains why you hit nothing for 3d printing.
- tangledhelix 5mo agoAs another commenter said PG is almost all books from 95+ years in the past due to copyright law in the US. We partner with a sister organization, the World Library Foundation, who have a self-publishing portal for modern works by authors who wish to put their own work in the public domain. You might want to look there for more modern material. https://self.gutenberg.org https://self.gutenberg.org
- eulerpoolapi 5mo agoThe biggest lever: make the reading experience great. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/245/pg245-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/245/pg245-images.html is still hard to read: lines are tooo long (macbook), no great way for pagination/remembering where I was, notes
- SwampertX 5mo agoFirefox's reader mode works amazingly for these situations.
- drzaiusx11 5mo agoA while back I attempted to extract the FF reader code to make it a front end to various non-web clients (email with pine key bindings etc) I got it to a prototype level but then shelved it after having difficulty getting good results with various test datasets. Probably would make a fantastic ereader though
- tangledhelix 5mo agoThe ebook editions are very good for this. Most of the e-reader software provides all the amenities (bookmarks, highlighting, notes, control of margins, etc).
- elch 5mo agoLines aren't too long. They look great on all my devices. Use ⌘ + + until you get the line length you like.
- windowliker 5mo agoFWIW I absolutely love how 'no-frills' PG is compared to so much of the bloated, over-engineered, script-riddled web these days. Please don't ever change that!
- Jiro 5mo agoI don't know what the status of this is today, but a number of years ago my biggest complaint about Gutenberg is that a lot of books had images added back when low resolution images were the standard, so you have a ton of books with image resolutions from the year 2000.