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The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

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Re: The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be interested. PG is amazing wrt the content, but the experience of actually reading the books is awful. My email is in my profile.

Agreed. Let's do something about our shared cultural history. Email is also in my profile.

Wow.

@ComputerGuru, SoftwareMaven, dankin I will contact you via mail in a bit.

Do you have experience in managing the level of discussion needed to get this right? What would be best? A public mailing list?

https://github.com/felix-faber/project-alexandria

Feedback very welcome.

Re: The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

#32
post #22

I'm not sure git's the best choice for handling multiple gigabytes of data. That estimate's based on their DVD releases. Oddly, I'm not positive that they're compressed. I've seen a proposal for using Usenet (or something like it) for Wikipedia; perhaps that would be appropriate here? Surfacing changes would be easier. And if you didn't want to follow each and every format available, you could. (Having every format i…

I wouldn't think that the whole of PG would be a single repository. What came to mind when I read the article was that each book would be in its own repository, and that seems to me to be well within Git's capabilities.

Oh, that would probably work well on the individual book level, with the right plumbing. Dealing with the quantity is another problem, but that might just require more plumbing.

Re: The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Let's do something about our shared cultural history. Email is also in my profile.

Wow. @ComputerGuru, SoftwareMaven, dankin I will contact you via mail in a bit. Do you have experience in managing the level of discussion needed to get this right? What would be best? A public mailing list? https://github.com/felix-faber/project-alexandria Feedback very welcome.

I'm interested in tossing my hat into the ring as well. I couldn't find a way to contact you in your profile or on github so here's me saying "me too!"

Re: The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

#38

Project Gutenberg is a complete mess. It took them years of discussion and they haven't yet chosen a master file format for their books.[1] As a consequence, they are hosting thousands of books in many different file-formats provided by distributed proofreaders[2] and some other sources. But since no master-format exists and conversion is .. well .. buggy, they have no leverage on their quality problems. The textual…

I'd like to throw into this. I started a mailing-list: http://groups.google.com/group/prj-alexandria What say we move the conversation there?

Re: The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Let's do something about our shared cultural history. Email is also in my profile.

Wow. @ComputerGuru, SoftwareMaven, dankin I will contact you via mail in a bit. Do you have experience in managing the level of discussion needed to get this right? What would be best? A public mailing list? https://github.com/felix-faber/project-alexandria Feedback very welcome.

I signed up to troutwine's mailing list and started following the github project.

I've participated in mailing lists for big projects before. They seem to work fairly well.

Re: The Case for a Git-Powered Project Gutenberg

#40

Project Gutenberg is a complete mess. It took them years of discussion and they haven't yet chosen a master file format for their books.[1] As a consequence, they are hosting thousands of books in many different file-formats provided by distributed proofreaders[2] and some other sources. But since no master-format exists and conversion is .. well .. buggy, they have no leverage on their quality problems. The textual…

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