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GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

gitenberg.org

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Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#21

Post by bilinualcom »

maire wrote: post #15
sethish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. Apologies if that's not clear from the website. GITenberg started as an experimental fork of PG, but due to the work of Eric Hellman at the Free Ebook Foundation, much of the infrastructure such as metadata formats, CI/CD for building books, and DVCS backend are being ported upstream to the Project Gutenberg infrastructure.

Thanks for the clarification!

OP here, I doubt that the website is "a SUBSET of Project Gutenberg". This is not mentioned anywhere in the website. As mentioned in PG website, while you can use the book freely, "The name 'Project Gutenberg' is a registered trademark.". I guess this is the reason they didn't mention PG.

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#24

Post by sethish »

bilinualcom wrote: post #21
maire wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the clarification!

OP here, I doubt that the website is "a SUBSET of Project Gutenberg". This is not mentioned anywhere in the website. As mentioned in PG website, while you can use the book freely, "The name 'Project Gutenberg' is a registered trademark.". I guess this is the reason they didn't mention PG.

Now I remember, that was the reason I wasn't more clear about the connection to PG when I wrote the website https://github.com/gitenberg-dev/giten_site/. Since then my co-founder Eric Hellman has been doing engineering work for Project Gutenberg, as well as running the rest of the Free Ebook Foundation, which is the parent org of GITenberg, free-programing-ebooks, and Unglue.it.

I think that the GITenberg collection contains all of the books in PG. At this point, the creation of new repos is automatically done when Distributed Proofreaders creates a new book in PG. Originally, I didn't include around 400 PG books due to their creators claiming copyright, and didn't include Bruce Sterling's book because he wouldn't let me re-license it creative commons rather than his pseudo-public-domain license.

Not much has been happening with GITenberg itself in the past few years. But luckily, a lot of the concepts and code are getting upstreamed into PG. Which in my opinion, is way way better.

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#25

Post by sethish »

voldemort1968 wrote: post #22

What is improved by adding Git to PG?

It's not so much about just adding git to books, but git to the transcriptions of books from printed materials. There are errors in the transcriptions, many books are lacking formatting, and many books pre-date Unicode and are in ascii. Tracking the book's source files in git makes it easier to collaborate on making these changes, or seeing what changes have been made.

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#26

Post by sethish »

bilinualcom wrote: post #20
sethish wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Standard Ebooks]( https://standardebooks.org/ ) has accomplished a lot in producing better ebooks of public domain texts.

OP here, it seems standardebooks doesn't provide the books in PDF format. My side project, https://www.bilinual.com rebuild the ebooks in PDF format with translation hints, if you don't mind about learning a new language while reading your favourite books ;)

There are about 400 GITenberg books that have CC-by licensed covers provided by Recovering the Classics. If you're interested in using that art for your PDFs I can find you the index!

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#27

Post by bilinualcom »

voldemort1968 wrote: post #22

What is improved by adding Git to PG?

Well, for my side project, https://www.bilinual.com I needed version controlling for changes that are made on a book (fixed typos, ...) and I found GITenberg project. There are several interesting tools developed during the project accessible here: https://github.com/gitenberg-dev

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#28

Post by bilinualcom »

sethish wrote: post #26
bilinualcom wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here, it seems standardebooks doesn't provide the books in PDF format. My side project, https://www.bilinual.com rebuild the ebooks in PDF format with translation hints, if you don't mind about learning a new language while reading your favourite books ;)

There are about 400 GITenberg books that have CC-by licensed covers provided by Recovering the Classics. If you're interested in using that art for your PDFs I can find you the index!

Thanks, it would be great. I am curious to know why do they have CC license and not public domain?

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#29

Post by bilinualcom »

sethish wrote: post #24
bilinualcom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP here, I doubt that the website is "a SUBSET of Project Gutenberg". This is not mentioned anywhere in the website. As mentioned in PG website, while you can use the book freely, "The name 'Project Gutenberg' is a registered trademark.". I guess this is the reason they didn't mention PG.

Now I remember, that was the reason I wasn't more clear about the connection to PG when I wrote the website https://github.com/gitenberg-dev/giten_site/ . Since then my co-founder Eric Hellman has been doing engineering work for Project Gutenberg, as well as running the rest of the Free Ebook Foundation, which is the parent org of GITenberg, free-programing-ebooks, and Unglue.it. I think that the GITenberg collection…

Thanks for clarification.

Re: GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

#30

Post by robin_reala »

bilinualcom wrote: post #28
sethish wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 400 GITenberg books that have CC-by licensed covers provided by Recovering the Classics. If you're interested in using that art for your PDFs I can find you the index!

Thanks, it would be great. I am curious to know why do they have CC license and not public domain?

We have this problem with Standard Ebooks. The number of people that say things are public domain without actually checking it is very high. A CC0 licence is an explicit grant of public domain status by the licensor, and hence the legal issues rest with them in the event of any problem.

Public domain obviously can be ascertained, but if CC0 hasn’t been granted we rely on dated reproductions: basically a photograph of the artwork in question in a book or journal with a copyright date of 1924 or earlier.

(that’s obviously specifically a US legal reading, but SE from a legal point of view is a US project)

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