Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!
it's not my day job. PG is open-source. I'm "just" a contributor
Oh, right. That makes sense.
Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
91–100 of 300 posts
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#92Earlier 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
♡
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#93Looks 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
bot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#94I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#95I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work. Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right. Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now. Thanks for sticking with the project!
that's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#96I keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#97I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI
maybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438 could be a trick to ease that fear :D
I've found that the larger open-weight AI models do a great job of explaining the old non-fiction content on PG, particularly magazine articles which are a good size for the AI to handle. It breaks down the long wall-of-text paragraphs for you and explains all the historically relevant background that would've been assumed to be known back in the day.
If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present day it will also do that very nicely, highlighting the places where the text shows old-fashioned viewpoints that would be sharply criticized today.
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#98I keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR
I've reported it.
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.
It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it.
If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).
Re: Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
#100Earlier 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.
Arguably
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bookdesign...
should ~~be~~ EDIT have been ENDEDIT opensource --- it does at least work to support Project Librivox (or at least that's my understanding)
Seems to no longer be available (see below)