The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter 30th April 2003
eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971
Part 2
We have now completed 7803 ebooks!!!
In this part of the Project Gutenberg Weekly newsletter:
1) Editorial
2) News
3) Notes and Queries
4) This week in history
5) Mailing list information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
1) Editorial
Hello,
And there went 7800!!!
It's nice to see these milestones go crashing to the ground. Another
couple of landmarks are mentioned below, and here at the newsletter we
have teamed up with the Gutenberg Gazette. More details below.
Happy reading,
Alice
(newsletter at schiffwood dot co dot uk - If you hit reply, the mail you
send does not reach me and disappears into the ether.)
We welcome feedback, critisism (of any kind), ebook reviews, featured
author suggestions, writings and awkward questions at the address above. Please feel free to send our general ramblings to a friend.
I'm sure my English teacher at school, told me never to start a
sentence with and. I never did understand why - answers on the back of
a stamped addressed email please.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
2) News
Morpheus Ruling
As mentioned in headline news in part one of this weeks newsletter. A
federal judge has ruled that companies such as Morpheus are not guilty
of copyright infringement if users share copyrighted music via the
companies peer to peer software. This is an important issue for PG, as
it will affect the way our texts could be distributed. Our very own
Greg Newby gave evidence in the case, and he made a "declaration" in
the case on behalf of PG. Essentially (and as cited in the ruling),
he demonstrated significant non-infringing uses of the file sharing
software, for exchanging PG's eBooks.
It's appropriate for us to encourage PG readers to share files via
peer to peer software such as Grokster, Morpheus and Kazaa.
The court understood that a technology company shouldn't be held
responsible for every misuse of the products they build, otherwise the
VCR, the photocopier and the PC would all have been stillborn.
Meanwhile, the entertainment industries will doubtless be appealing
today's ruling. An appeal should take 12-18 months to resolve, followed
by possible recourse to the Supreme Court.
The ruling is 34 double-spaced pages and can be found here:
http://www.eff.org/IP/P2P/MGM_v_Grokster/030425_order_on_motions.php
We are grateful to Fred von Lohmann
Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Electronic Frontier Foundation
for the further information and web address stated above.
-------------------
Radio Gutenberg
As featured today on Page 8 of The Australian (go and buy it if you can)
Books talk on the web
By: Bernard Lane
WHAT a surprise to hear Captain Nemo resurface on the internet,
courtesy of Radio Gutenberg, where fine old writing meets the geeks.
A multimedia company in New Orleans has begun free web broadcasts of classic
books from the online library of Project Gutenberg, an idealistic
venture named after the father of modern printing. Captain Nemo, in
Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, can be heard in streamed
stereo by tuning your computer and media player to Radio Gutenberg at
www.etc-edu.com/.
On the mono channel this week is Edward Gibbon's long-scribbled history of
the rise and fall of the Roman empire. Other audio books could be
plucked from the library, marked up and fed through the digital voice
machine on request, said Mike Eschman, of Enigma Technologies Corp,
which hosts Radio Gutenberg. He offered as an inspirational example a
Gutenberg volunteer, ``Ann in Michigan'', who had ``spurred us to make
an audio reading of `The Unwilling Vestal,' an exciting and sexy
pot-boiler about ancient Rome that gives an unusually clear and
precise view of the life of the vestal virgins''. At this stage the
digital narrator's voice is rather robotic and book downloads can take a while.
But one commentator on the Slashdot technology news site in the US had a
more basic objection: ``Does anyone find it weird that they're using
Gutenberg in a phrase related to sound, not sight? Gutenberg helped end the
need for everything to be said.''
The newspaper also ran a short editorial ...
The Australian WED 30 APR 2003, Page 012
Internet offers a creative chaos
IN some circles, it is still fashionable to dismiss the internet as a jungle
thick with trivia, porn stars and scam emails from Nigeria. There's plenty
of this, it's true. But there's plenty of everything online and more of it
every day. That's the real story.
As publishers let fine titles go out of print, as libraries turf out books
they can no longer house, the net keeps extending its catholic embrace of
every imaginable human interest, from the banal to the sublime.
In its short, chaotic history the net has always been a good place for those
who are intelligent, cultured and idealistic. They're well aware of the
shortcomings of the net, but they don't make the mistake of ignoring the
many virtues of what is a revolutionary form of social communication.
Take Project Gutenberg, based in the US, which predates the net but makes
public-spirited use of it. Volunteers can ``adopt'' a Beethoven string
quartet, thereby helping PG make music freely available online as it has
done with out-of-copyright books. These books are not just well-known texts
from the western canon but include almost forgotten Australian curiosities
such as EJ Banfield's Confessions of A Beachcomber.
Now Radio Gutenberg has come on the air, thanks to a collaboration with a
multi-media company based in New Orleans, US. With a computer and standard
software, you can listen to a streamed broadcast of selected titles --
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example -- or download
them as MP3 files. True, the downloads are biggish and slow, and the
digitised narrator is no mellifluous Jeremy Irons. But enterprises such as
Radio Gutenberg hint at the promising convergence of advances in computer
hardware, software, and broadband.
Thanks to the internet, never before have so many of the fruits of human
creativity been available so immediately and inexpensively. But because
people also need information that is edited, authoritative, and non-chaotic,
it will thrive alongside, not at the expense of, traditional media such as
newspapers.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
3) Notes and Queries
Request for assistance
The newsletter has teamed up with the Gutenberg Gazette to help the
cause of PG. We are looking for volunteers translators to help with
foreign language editions of GG. As we only have approximately one
translator (+/- 1) at the moment your help would be invaluable. Please
contact me at the newsletter address if you can help, even in a small
way.
Also, if GG is looking for reviews, so if you would like to submit a
review to go into both electronic and printed mediums, here at the
newsletter and in GG. Get writing. Short or long, two lines or two
hundred. Again, mail me at the newsletter address and I will forward
your contributions.
Thanks,
Alice and Sally
-------------------
The Little Prince
From: Col Choat
This week we are posting Le Petit Prince by Saint-Exupery, in French. It is
our first ebook in a language other than English. It is a html with the
beautiful original illustrations drawn by the author.
A volunteer was working on an English translation, but seems to have given
up, as I have not heard from her for some time and she does not answer my
email. Unfortunately I lent here my copy of the French version of the book
to translate from and haven't seen it again either. C'est la vie.
If someone in a "plus fifty" country is interested in translating "The
Little Prince" into English and then giving Project Gutenberg of Australia
permission to use it, it would be appreciated. PG in the USA has done this
on a number of occasions, including a translation into English of Hermann
Hess's Siddartha, a book I heartily recommend.
Col Choat
colcc@gutenberg.net.au
{Bit of a theme this week. Ed}
----------------------------------------------------------------------
4) This week in history
Literary Dates of Interest this week
Birthdays this week:
April
30th Alice B Toklas, Jaroslav Hasek
May
1st Joseph Heller*, Giovanni Guareschi
2nd Novalis
3rd Juhani Siljo, Yehuda Amichai, Nick Joaquin, Niccolo Macciavelli
4th Elvi Sinervo, Tauno Yliruusi
5th Soren Kierkegaard, Henry Sienkiewicz, Amos Tutuola, Miklos Radnoti
6th Sigmund Freud(1), Gaston Leroux, Inoue Yasushi, Harry Martinson
Deaths
1708 Simon de Vries
1891 Sherlock Holmes**
1943 Beatrice Potter Webb
1956 Charles R Gallas
1968 Harold G Nicolson
1972 Hugo Hartung
1984 Piet van Aken
1994 Louis Calaferte
* Catch-22 Good book, great film, if a little confusing! I am not a
film critic, but I recommend it anyway.
** Yes, I know it's poetic license, but I'm in charge!
----------------------------------------------------------------------
5) Mailing list information
For more information about the Project Gutenberg's mailing lists
please visit the following webpage:
http://gutenberg.net/subs.html
Archives and personal settings:
The Lyris Web interface has an easy way to browse past mailing list
contents, and change some personal settings. Visit
http://listserv.unc.edu and select one of the Project Gutenberg lists.
Trouble?
If you are having trouble subscribing, unsubscribing or with
anything else related to the mailing lists, please email
"owner-gutenberg@listserv.unc.edu" to contact the lists'
(human) administrator.
If you would just like a little more information about Lyris
features, you can find their help information at http://www.lyris.com/help
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Credits
Thanks this time go to Brett and George for the numbers and
the booklists. Mark, Greg, Michael and Larry Wall. Entertainment for
the workers provided by Andrew Collins.
pgweekly_2003_04_30_part_2.txt
If you liked this post, say thanks by sharing it.