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Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

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Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#231

Post by tangledhelix »

eulerpoolapi wrote: post #219
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/

The biggest lever: make the reading experience great. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/245/pg245-images.html is still hard to read: lines are tooo long (macbook), no great way for pagination/remembering where I was, notes

The ebook editions are very good for this. Most of the e-reader software provides all the amenities (bookmarks, highlighting, notes, control of margins, etc).

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#232

Post by JSeiko »

tmoertel wrote: post #185
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

For context, here is the first paragraph of the book's preface: How best to perform construction work and what it will cost for materials, labor, plant and general expenses are matters of vital interest to engineers and contractors. This book is a treatise on the methods and cost of concrete construction. No attempt has been made to present the subject of cement testing which is already covered by Mr. W. Purves Taylo…

exciting :)

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#233

Post by tangledhelix »

miki123211 wrote: post #214
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,…

The problem with this approach is that modern scrapers use hordes of residential proxies and quickly rotate through IP addresses which belong to ASes you get a lot of real traffic from. There's nothing you can do if the ISP won't take any action against the customer.

Worse than that - even if they would take action, you can't possibly orchestrate filing all of the complaints. It's a drown-in-quicksand problem, you can't fight quicksand one grain at a time.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#234

Post by JSeiko »

gofreddygo wrote: post #147
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)…

Interesting. Do you "just" use the browser's built-in capabilities or also some browser extensions?

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#235

Post by JSeiko »

shevy-java wrote: post #211

All the books should be there. I understand that current society has restrictions, what with near infinite copyright and other shenanigans - but I don't see any of these as reason to hide information from mankind. Eventually we'll free all the information. Remuneration will have to occur in other ways than the current status quo.

hopefully!

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#236

Post by drzaiusx11 »

SwampertX wrote: post #223
eulerpoolapi wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest lever: make the reading experience great. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/245/pg245-images.html is still hard to read: lines are tooo long (macbook), no great way for pagination/remembering where I was, notes

Firefox's reader mode works amazingly for these situations.

A while back I attempted to extract the FF reader code to make it a front end to various non-web clients (email with pine key bindings etc)

I got it to a prototype level but then shelved it after having difficulty getting good results with various test datasets. Probably would make a fantastic ereader though

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#237

Post by tangledhelix »

8bitsrule wrote: post #189
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/

Great project. Are many of the books in a format that can easily be converted into audio? Is there a way to search for them, and information on what software your readers find useful for this purpose? (Note: A lot of print media these days has switched to far-to-small font-sizes. Less of a problem for (zoomable) digital media, but for many that's still a barrier.)

There are many books available as audio, some are human-read, some were automated. You can see lists here:

human-read: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1

computer-generated: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/2

IIRC many of the human-generated ones come from LibriVox, many of the computer-generated ones came from a collaboration with Microsoft.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#238

Post by tangledhelix »

jfengel wrote: post #152
gluejar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Distributed Proofreaders: https://pgdp.net

I didn't realized DP was still around. I used to do it quite a bit, 15 years ago, but OCR has improved considerably since then.

OCR has improved a lot since then, but OCR is just step 1 of reading in text. They make a lot of errors (even now, especially on old worn out paper pages) and even if they didn't, one has to format the book, deal with footnotes, sidenotes, illustrations, etc. DP is very active, we will welcome you back with open arms :)

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#239

Post by natex »

acabal wrote: post #225
idoubtit wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression. I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think so…

> The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight".

Curious. Why even bother?

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