Please give me some book recommendations :)
Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
101–110 of 300 posts
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
maybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438 could be a trick to ease that fear :D
I've found that the larger open-weight AI models do a great job of explaining the old non-fiction content on PG, particularly magazine articles which are a good size for the AI to handle. It breaks down the long wall-of-text paragraphs for you and explains all the historically relevant background that would've been assumed to be known back in the day. If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present d…
so maybe Karpathy has a point that LLM-assisted reading should be a thing. Would be cool if that worked on E-Reader screens as well. Maybe when the browsers on E-Readers become good enough ...
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#103Worth mentioning the Project Gutenberg ZIMs. You can download the entire ENglish Gutenberg corpus for about 60GB (English Wikipedia ZIM complete with images is ~120GB):
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#104I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work. Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right. Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now. Thanks for sticking with the project!
that's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...
That is doable. Most of my work was regexp and repetitive stuff. And the typograhpy stuff is achievable with the current state of the art models. Not that I remember what I did, it was 30 years ago.
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#105Looks 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
Haha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#106Hi! 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/
I 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?
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.
It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it. If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to g…
that would be great! Sadly I'm not very confident that that will actually happen ...
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#108Hi! 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/
I 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?
I 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
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#109Please give me some book recommendations :)
Not a recommendation per se but I used to use Amphetype on Gutenberg texts to practise touch-typing. There's something about writing out a book that hits differently to reading it. You skip less, odd parts stick with you.
I think the last one I tried was The Island of Dr Moreau.
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.
Arguably https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bookdesign... should ~~be~~ EDIT have been ENDEDIT opensource --- it does at least work to support Project Librivox (or at least that's my understanding) Seems to no longer be available (see below)
I'm getting "We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server." if I go to the link