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Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

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Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#141

Post by charonn0 »

cosmos0072 wrote: post #137
cosmos0072 wrote: post #135

From Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome" Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...

Found: it's a sentence from 2020, and PG decided not to appeal (!?) Full story (in Italian) at https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenb...

Seems like a case for HTTP 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) rather than 404.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#142

Post by TurdF3rguson »

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

CF cache?

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#143

Post by lucb1e »

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'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

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#144

Post by jrmg »

Someone1234 wrote: post #19

I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).

If you don’t strip the Project Gutenberg license from the book text (leaving only the book text, which no-one disputes is public domain and freely distributable), you are required to give “pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes”

https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

[Way back in the early days of the iPhone, I sold a book reading app which was backed directly by Project Gutenberg texts, called “Eucalyptus”. I sent 20% of the gross profits to PG - which was never less than very supportive of the app - and felt good about doing so.]

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#145

Post by johndough »

cosmos0072 wrote: post #137
cosmos0072 wrote: post #135

From Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome" Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...

Found: it's a sentence from 2020, and PG decided not to appeal (!?) Full story (in Italian) at https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenb...

It looks like the issue was that, in Italy, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author or the first translator of a work.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#146

Post by JSeiko »

svat wrote: post #133
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/

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 believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#147

Post by gofreddygo »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #30

Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.) I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.) I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference. My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the…

I love, love, looove the fact that I can have a book's html version on project gutenberg bookmarked and continue to read across devices without ever having to login. I use the browser's inbuilt capability extensively to enhance my reading experience (fonts, backgrounds, text to speech, print formatting, share snippets). None of this is a good experience with pdf, epub or any other format.

I've read more (meaningful) text on PG than any other digital platform. Huge fan. Thanks for all the work and for keeping it clean and free

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#148

Post by why_at »

ssgodderidge wrote: post #89

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

It's got better reviews on Goodreads than Moby Dick too. I know what I'm reading next

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#149

Post by gropo »

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

Do you host a torrent?

I have about 50k of the books, I would have used a torrent of just the txt files if it was prominent.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#150

Post by gluejar »

svat wrote: post #133
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/

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…

We'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.
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