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Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

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Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#161

Post by 0x0203 »

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/

As 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!

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#162

Post by dgellow »

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...

It was also blocked in Germany for a while due to a court order https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#163

Post by Jolter »

lucb1e wrote: post #143
JSeiko wrote: 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

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,…

It’s effective against teenagers maybe. Not so much against Amazon, Meta or wherever botnet/crawler is coming out of China these days from up-and-coming AI companies.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#164

Post by dgellow »

JSeiko wrote: post #31
GaryBluto wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.

probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.

They do exist, since a pretty long time. I bought a pocketbook beginning 2010s. https://pocketbook.ch.

If you mean epub reader software Calibre and a bunch of others exist since pretty much the beginning of epub

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#165

Post by gman83 »

WillAdams wrote: post #64
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).

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.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#166

Post by lxgr »

the_af wrote: post #46
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 like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.

Not really, given that it can’t represent even basic formatting such as bold or italic text, chapter markers etc.

As an output format it’s ok, but as an input format, it’s almost as bad as PDF.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#167

Post by derekhdawson »

If you like Project Gutenberg, the closest analog for music is IMSLP, the Petrucci Music Library (imslp.org) — over 855,000 public-domain scores maintained by volunteers, with the same labor-of-love energy and the same perpetual scan-quality and copyright-jurisdiction headaches. Same ethos of "the works belong to humanity, not a storefront." Worth a bookmark for the musicians on HN.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#168

Post by tonetegeatinst »

Jolter wrote: post #163
lucb1e wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

It’s effective against teenagers maybe. Not so much against Amazon, Meta or wherever botnet/crawler is coming out of China these days from up-and-coming AI companies.

I mean you could block entire AS numbers that relate to amazon or big tech datacenters

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#169

Post by dredmorbius »

samcollins wrote: post #5
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/

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?)

Possibly ZIMs is of interest: https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html> (via: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152200>).
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