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Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

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Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#201

Post by idoubtit »

marcprux wrote: post #174
svat wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have 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 ) 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 ete…

> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…] Why?

Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc.

When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#202

Post by AdamN »

idoubtit wrote: post #201
marcprux wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…] Why?

Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc. When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga…

SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#204

Post by samwho »

JSeiko wrote: 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/

Looking really good! Great work.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#206

Post by jimnotgym »

JSeiko wrote: post #136
lucb1e wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh 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 res…

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

I would love it if you could detect AI scraper bots, and feed them AI generated bs instead of the real books...

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#207

Post by jimnotgym »

jzs wrote: post #11
samcollins wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very 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?)

Now 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 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.

Presumably if you paid them enough money they would give you the books without you having to pay to scrape at all?

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#208

Post by jcurtis »

idoubtit wrote: post #201
marcprux wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…] Why?

Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc. When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga…

You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#210

Post by benj111 »

Project Guttenburg was my first introduction to the foss ethos. Well I suppose there was Wikipedia, but project Guttenburg really spoke to me. This was probably around 2003? So I'm glad to see it still going strong.

I just looked at the history (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60600/pg60600-images.ht...) and it dates back to the 70s. There was me thinking it was some new fangled web thing.

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