Live data from Hacker News

Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

gutenberg.org

181–190 of 300 posts

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#182
post #2

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/

Hi 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.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#183
post #181

I love Project Gutenberg, don't get me wrong... but frankly, Anna's is better.

in which way? (genuine question)

Well, mainly in the fact that Anna's has several orders of magnitude more books, and includes research publications and more, ah, contemporary materials to boot.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#185

Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others. > 23644 downloads in the last 30 days. I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot? [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855

For context, here is the first paragraph of the book's preface:

How best to perform construction work and what it will cost for materials, labor, plant and general expenses are matters of vital interest to engineers and contractors. This book is a treatise on the methods and cost of concrete construction. No attempt has been made to present the subject of cement testing which is already covered by Mr. W. Purves Taylor's excellent book, nor to discuss the physical properties of cements and concrete, as they are discussed by Falk and by Sabin, nor to consider reinforced concrete design as do Turneaure and Maurer or Buel and Hill, nor to present a general treatise on cements, mortars and concrete construction like that of Reid or of Taylor and Thompson. On the contrary, the authors have handled the subject of concrete construction solely from the viewpoint of the builder of concrete structures. By doing this they have been able to crowd a great amount of detailed information on methods and costs of concrete construction into a volume of moderate size.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#186
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Used to be one could sort of get that with the Project Librivox: https://librivox.org/ e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox). FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the…

I'm working on audiobook app that integrates the Libivox catalog. Only on Windows right now - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n1z76ffb3fc?hl=en-US I'll release Android, IOS, Mac & Linux versions soon.

I love librivox! please add me to your ios release list. my HN username at g mail

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#187
post #177
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we 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

If it's purely bot traffic, then Anubis could help You could have seen it on some websites already https://anubis.techaro.lol/

anubis only works against lazy scrapers, and at a cost to your users. I'd prefer people not use it.

Bot traffic comes from machines that usually have a lot of idle cpu (since they're largely blocked on network IO as they scrape a bunch of sites in parallel), so they can trivially solve the anubis "proof of work" challenge, save the cookie, and then not solve it again for that site.

The only reason scrapers don't solve it is if the developers were too lazy to implement it... and modern scrapers also do, codeberg stopped using anubis because modern scrapers were updated to solve it.

The "proof of work" has to be easy or else people on old cell phones couldn't access your site (since an old android phone would start to overheat and throttle trying to solve a challenge that would take a modern server even several seconds), and it also consumes your cell-phone user's batteries, which is a really precious resource for them compared to the idle cpu on a server.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#188

The best thing I ever did for my father was to buy him a kindle and an access point and show him how to use Project Gutenberg to get books. He loved the old writings (he being a GED holder who was in the Navy during Korea yet had read the entire Harvard Classics). He had a special rolled up towel he used to prop it on his lap in his favorite chair and he read and read and read. When he passed he was reading "Legends…

This was very touching, thanks for sharing. Sorry for your loss.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#189
post #2

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/

Great 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.)

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#190

Project Gutenberg feels like the opposite of modern internet design philosophy. Quiet, useful, accessible, and built to last.

Project Gutenberg is awesome and amazing.

I was visting the ruins of a monestary the other day, and one of the texts listed that it had a library of 320ish books.

I chucked because I have almost 200 books in my personal Kindle library, but I was wrong. I actually have 75000+ books, thanks to Project Gutenberg.

I just haven't downloaded them all yet.

Post reply on HN