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Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

gutenberg.org

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Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#281

Post by mrob »

jcurtis wrote: post #208
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…

You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes.

When I tried this in the past, it was non-trivial because the editorial changes are mixed with the technical changes. Reverting the editorial changes broke the technical changes.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#282

Post by Jiro »

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/

I don't know what the status of this is today, but a number of years ago my biggest complaint about Gutenberg is that a lot of books had images added back when low resolution images were the standard, so you have a ton of books with image resolutions from the year 2000.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#285

Post by [deleted] »

JSeiko wrote: post #86
jefurii wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!

sadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D

[deleted]

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#286

Post by 8bitsrule »

OfflineSergio wrote: post #222
8bitsrule wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

For the Audio part, I suggest https://desktop.with.audio

IMO, most audio read by humans (esp. voice actors) are far preferable to machine readings. Also, I found no demos on that page.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#287

Post by condwanaland »

AdamN wrote: post #202
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 sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.

SE is an amazing and wonderful resource

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#288

Post by Jolter »

lucb1e wrote: post #262
Jolter wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See the other comments in this thread. The perpetrators are unknown and are jumping between residential IPs. Possibly botnets?

Then see my other replies in the thread where I've specifically addressed residential IPs, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163060

This is the post I’m talking about. Make sure you understand how it would not be productive to go after each ISP individually when the traffic is from all of them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155512

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#289

Post by sgc »

gluejar wrote: post #250
0x0203 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

only 20% of our books have original publication data in the db. We have a project to add another 40% or so from another database, let us know if you want to help.

I have the same problem on catholiclibrary.org, but insist on having something as the book date for every work. My solution is to temporarily default to the author dates until the book date can be refined. If there is no known author date I at least have a date range, hopefully to century or better.

Author dates are a much smaller data set, can be generally supplemented from public marc records (viaf, loc, etc - I don't do that, but it's an option) and at least provide basic filtering / sorting.

Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

#290

Post by GJim »

JSeiko wrote: post #139
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...

I asked Claude to research the background story: "In May 2020, the Court of Rome ordered Italian ISPs to seize/block a list of domains as part of a criminal case (the 52127/20 R.N.R. you're seeing) targeting sites and Telegram channels distributing pirated newspapers and magazines. 28 domains were on the list, and Project Gutenberg got thrown in alongside the actual pirate sites." apparently this situation hasn't bee…

> I asked Claude

Please don't do this.

Quote an authoritative source, not some AI bot known for ~~hallucinating~~ bullshitting.

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