The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter 16th July 2003
eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971
Part 2
We have now completed 8705 ebooks!!!
In this part of the Project Gutenberg Weekly newsletter:
1) Editorial
2) News
Radio Gutenberg Update
3) Notes and Queries
4) Mailing list information
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1) Editorial
Hello,
Much progress this week, a mention in the New York Times and
improvements already to the website. More below.
Happy reading,
Alice
(news at pglaf dot org - If you hit reply, the mail you
send does not reach me and disappears into the ether.)
We welcome feedback and awkward questions at the address above. Please
feel free to send our general ramblings to a friend.
Does anyone even read this bit?
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2) News
Newsletter Website Update
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/newsletter/index.html
What? You've changed the website address already? You've only had it a
week. Well, this is true, but we promise not to do it again. Honest!
Added to the website this week, the New York Times Article reproduced
below and the beginning of the ebook listings. Last month's listing is
in the process of being reformatted to make it slightly more
readable. While this is happening, work has also begun on getting some
of the old listings onto the site. The first one is from September
1994. Contrast the 200+ books from last month with a list of just
nine. Yes, that's right, nine. Included in this motley bunch are
several gems that newer readers (and me) may not be aware of, such as
a stereo version of Beethoven's fifth symphony and classics from
Thomas Hardy and Wilkie Collins.
-------------------
The Beagle has landed
"Fancy a trip to Milton Keynes?" *
"Why?"
"To go and see a man about a log"
"We already have a cat, anyway there's an RSPCA... Oh! LOG! Well
there's plenty of trees in the park, don't need to go there"
"Wrong sort of log"
"What other sort is there?"
Well, how about a ships log, in this case, the spacecraft type. Thanks
to Radio Gutenberg, the team at Milton Keynes has granted the use and
broadcast of the log of the Beagle Lander. Beagle is just part of the
European Space Agency Mars Express mission to Mars that took off from
Kazakstan in June. Beagle is due to land on Mars on December 25th, so
hopefully, shortly afterwards we will be off to collect the first instalment.
* After many surveys, we believe this to be the equivalent of taking a
trip to any one of the following places:
Adelaide, Australia
Etal, Germany (summer only)
Hanover, Germany
Northampton, UK
Waterloo, Ontario
Sackville, New Brunswick
St. Johns, Newfoundland
Enid, Oklahoma
Boring, Oregon
Rockford, Illinois
Newark, New Jersey (the UK version also counts)
Springflake, New Jersey
Akron, Ohio (although we disagree with this one, but we've never been
there)
Oracle, Arizona
Des Moines (possibly)
New York City
Hawaii (Yes, really)
and the entire state of Pennsylvannia
Our advice - take a book.
-------------------
PG mention in NY Times:
We reproduce here a story run in the New York Times on
Monday. Normally, we would give the link, but as this involves either
subscribing or hunting through Google it seems far easier to put in
the whole article*.
Harry Potter and the Internet Pirates
By AMY HARMON
JC, a 36-year-old Harry Potter fan in Kansas City, Mo., decided he was too
old to go chasing after the fifth book in the popular series when it came
out last month. Instead, he downloaded the book, "Harry Potter and the Order
of the Phoenix" from the Internet, conveniently avoiding both bookstore
crowds and the $29.99 cover price.
"I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much
better," said JC, who insisted on being identified only by the online
nickname because he thinks that what he did was illegal. He said he still
intended to buy the book to read to his 8-year-old son.
So far, authors and publishers have mainly stood on the sidelines of the
Internet file-swapping frenzy that has shaken the music industry and aroused
fear among makers of motion pictures. But the publishing phenomenon around
the young wizard appears to be forging a new chapter in the digital
copyright wars: Harry Potter and the Internet pirates.
A growing number of Potter devotees around the world seem to be embracing
the prospect of reading the voluminous new book (766 pages in the British
edition; 870 in the American version) on the screen. And at least some of
them are assisting in the cumbersome process of scanning, typing in or
translating the book, which its author, J. K. Rowling, has not authorized
for publication in any of the existing commercial e-book formats.
Last week, enthusiastic readers put unofficially translated portions of
"Order of the Phoenix" on the Web in German and Czech, only to remove them
after the publishers that own the rights in their respective countries
threatened legal action.
English-language copies of the book - along with fan-written stories
masquerading as the real thing - are available on all the major file-sharing
networks in a variety of file formats.
The choices include Adobe's ubiquitous PDF and text files that can be opened
in a word-processing program. There is also Microsoft's fancier LIT format -
which requires use of its free e-book reader software and opens in a narrow
window that looks a lot like a book, although with hyperlinks to each
chapter and the ability to search for terms like Quidditch.
"What is unusual for us as people who deal with piracy of books is that
these are people who are not directly making money for having put them on
the Internet," said Ian Taylor, international director of the Publishers
Association in Britain. "That is obviously what's been happening with
peer-to-peer music, but it's not something we've had to deal with before."
Neil Blair, business manager at Christopher Little, Ms. Rowling's literary
agency, said the firm was aware of several unauthorized copies of the book
on the Web and was contacting Internet service providers to ask that they be
removed.
"E-book rights are reserved to J. K. Rowling," Mr. Blair said. "so any Harry
Potter novels on the Net are unauthorized. We also have an obligation to
protect the children who might believe they are reading the official work."
Mr. Blair said he did not expect the illicit e-books to have an impact on
sales of the printed book. More than 200 million copies of the first four
books have been sold in 55 languages. And the fifth book, released at
midnight on June 20 and published in Britain by Bloomsbury and in this
country by Scholastic, is ranked No. 1 on children's books best-seller
lists.
A spokeswoman for Scholastic said no one was available to comment. A
spokeswoman at Bloomsbury did not return calls last week.
Some publishing industry officials say the electronic Potter piracy may be a
perverse sign that the public is finally acquiring a taste for e-books.
"I used to joke in my speeches that e-books had not arrived because none of
the pirate sites were dedicated to books," said Michael Hart, founder of
Project Gutenberg, which began putting books whose copyrights had expired
online 32 years ago and has made nearly 9,000 books freely available. "It is
obvious that the infrastructure to make legal e-books is now so strongly
entrenched that people feel empowered to make their own, even when the
publishing industry refuses."
That is partly because fast scanners that cost hundreds of dollars a few
years ago now come free with many new personal computers. And free software
tools distributed by commercial e-book publishers like Microsoft and Adobe
also make it easy to format and correct errors.
If the heightened interest in e-books proves more enduring than the Potter
phenomenon, it may also reflect that people are increasingly accustomed to
thinking of the Internet as a vast library. Project Gutenberg's free books
are available from hundreds of Web sites. Roughly seven copies a minute are
downloaded from the 1,600 e-books available free on the University of
Virginia's Electronic Text Center, with "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
the leading title.
But ultimately, file-sharing software may be the most powerful force in
shaping the online distribution of books, as it has for other media.
Technical books and science fiction have long been available on newsgroups
like alt.binaries.ebooks, but many Internet providers refuse to carry such
forums. File-sharing software like KaZaA - which allows individual users to
make any kind of file available on their computers for others to copy - has
trained a generation of media consumers to turn to the Internet for movies,
music and games.
A 22-year-old university student in Britain, who calls himself Comrade Dave
and downloaded "Phoenix" recently using software called BitTorrent, said he
acquired the first four books the traditional way. But the student, who had
also downloaded a copy of the latest "Terminator" movie, said he saw the
book on a regular check of his favorite file-sharing site, SuprNova.
"When I saw HP I had to get it straight away because I've read all the other
books," wrote Comrade Dave, who switches over to reading "Phoenix" on his
desktop computer when he needs a break from his other work.
Particularly for experienced file-swappers, e-books have an obvious appeal:
they are smaller and therefore faster to download than most music or movie
files. Hundreds of e-books can be stored on a CD or in a hand-held device
like a Palm Pilot.
Wayne Chang, an American college student and computer systems administrator
who is in Tokyo for the summer, said it took him about three minutes to
download "Phoenix" to his laptop computer after searching local bookstores
in vain when the book came out.
Still, the same drawbacks that have thwarted the market for commercial
e-books for years afflict even the most eager electronic Potter fans: Mr.
Chang said he has stopped on Page 90 and is waiting for a colleague in the
United States to send him a hard copy because he wants "the real thing."
"It's like `Matrix Reloaded,' " Mr. Chang explained in an instant message,
with the hard-earned wisdom of a consumer of unauthorized digital media.
"You want to see it so bad that when they released it on the Internet two
days before it came out, you didn't download it," he said, because seeing it
on a large screen in a theater was an experience to be savored.
Yet for some fans in countries where the "real thing" is not due out for
months, an alternate experience looks just fine. The 15-year-old Web master
of a Harry Potter fan site, HP News (http://www.x.unas.cz) said he
downloaded and read a partial Czech translation of the book published by
another group of teenage fans before the Prague-based publisher, Albatros,
insisted that they remove it from the Internet.
A spokesman for Albatros said there had been a slight delay in the Czech
translation because the translator has been ill. It is scheduled to be
published on Feb. 1.
"Yes, I read the illegal translation," a correspondent named Hustey wrote in
an e-mail message. "I keep it in my PC. And I still waiting for next
translation, cause I don't want wait to next year for legal translation."
A group of German fans who formed a kind of Internet translating collective
also removed portions of their translation from the site
www.harry-auf-deutsch.de last week when Carlsen Verlag, the Hamburg-based
publisher, asserted that it was a breach of copyright. The project
continues, but the 800 or so participants now exchange the text only over
e-mail.
"We do not do anything against private initiatives," said Katrine Hogrebe,
Carlsen's press manager. "But at the moment when translated texts are
published, pieces of texts or whole texts, this is an infringement of
copyright."
Bernd Koelemann, a computer engineer in Berlin who organized the project,
said the intention was to foster communication and education among Potter
fans. Mr. Koelemann had organized a smaller-scale electronic effort after
his daughter Anna, then 14, asked him in 2000 to translate the fourth book,
"Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.".
This time, hundreds of people had signed up to translate before the English
version of "Phoenix" went on sale. Under the rules of the collective, only
those who contribute by translating or proofreading may see the final
version. The portions of translation on the Web site were merely meant to
attract more readers to the project, Mr. Koelemann said.
Still, under an agreement with Carlsen, the Web site remains open along with
an active discussion about the book and the best way to translate it.
(Disagreements with "Fritz," as Carlsen's official translator, Klaus Fritz,
is referred to, abound.) It also includes a section called "cucumber salad,"
which highlights errors and omissions the translating group has identified
in the official published translations of the first four books
Britta Sander, 16, of Kaarst, Germany, who translated pages 709-711, the
part where a much-loved character dies, said she wished the unofficial
translation could be more widely distributed as an alternative to the
Carlsen version.
"I think it's unfair to the German fans, just because some people can't read
English and have to read the German book," said Ms. Sander, who did not have
that problem herself: having preordered the book in English from Amazon's
British Web site, she had finished it 31 hours after it was delivered on the
night of June 20.
Many of those reading unauthorized electronic versions of "Phoenix" last
week said they were doing so for the convenience and immediacy, not because
they were free.
"This shows that if authors and publishers choose not to make books
available legally, people are going to go out and steal them," said Mike
Seagroves, director of business development for Palm Digital Media, the
largest commercial distributor of e-books.
Mr. Seagroves said that when his company approached Scholastic, the American
publisher of the Harry Potter books, about an e-book version for the fourth
book, it was given the impression that Ms. Rowling wanted a $1 million
advance.
Since Mr. Seagroves estimates that only about $8 million to $10 million
worth of e-books will be sold this year, that seemed like a lot. Mr. Blair,
from Ms. Rowling's literary agency, said that the figure was incorrect but
that there were no plans to publish an e-book.
At least one fan of both Harry Potter and e-books is holding out, though.
Byron Collins, 42, of Oak Grove, Ky., is circulating a petition addressed to
Ms. Rowling asking her to consider publishing her books in e-book format.
Mr. Collins, a factory worker who has read Tom Swift novels, Shakespeare and
"Moby Dick" on his Handspring Visor, remarked, "I would just like the author
to consider the pros and cons."
*Given the subject matter, this does strike us as ironic.
-------------------
Improved service for screen reader users
In a bid to make the newsletter more helpful to readers who may be
blind or visually impaired and using screen reading software, we are
now able to offer the booklisting normally contained in part 3 in a
different format to make your life a little easier. An example of the
new style listing is given below. If you would like either a daily or
weekly version of this list please email me at newsletter at
schiffwood dot co dot uk, and state which version you require.
{Note to the unwary: this is an example, the real booklist is in part 3.}
34 NEW ETEXTS FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG US
A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman Mar 2005[esperxxx.xxx]7787
The Female Gamester, by Gorges Edmond Howard Apr 2005[fmgstxxx.xxx]7840
[Subtitle: A Tragedy]
A Primary Reader, by E. Louise Smythe Apr 2005[preadxxx.xxx]7841
[Also posted: illustrated HTML, zipped only - pread10h.zip]
The Rise of Iskander, by Benjamin Disraeli Apr 2005[?riskxxx.xxx]7842
[7-bit version with non-accented characters in 7risk10.txt and 7risk10.zip]
[8-bit version with accented characters in 8risk10.txt and 8risk10.zip]
[rtf version with accented characters in 8risk10r.rtf and 8risk10r.zip]
[rtf version has numbered paragraphs; txt version has no paragraph numbers]
The Happy End, by Joseph Hergesheimer Apr 2005[?hpndxxx.xxx]7843
[7-bit version with non-accented characters in 7hpnd10.txt and 7hpnd10.zip]
[8-bit version with accented characters in 8hpnd10.txt and 8hpnd10.zip]
-------------------
Radio Gutenberg Update
http://www.etc-edu.com
New books this week for Radio Gutenberg are Lewis Carroll's Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland, and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.
Listeners should be aware that Radio Gutenberg is likely to move
frequency shortly as they are changing ISP. Full details as soon as we
get them.
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3) Notes and Queries
Request for sponsorship
From Ted Garvin
There are some books of historical/literary significance that I would
like to get through ILL (Inter Library Loans). Only one problem (aside
from finding time to scan them, but I seem to manage in that area),
and that is lack of funds.
So this is a plea for sponsorship. Email Ted at garvint at yahoo.com
- Ted
-------------------
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Credits
Thanks this time go to Brett and George for the numbers and
the booklists. Mike Eschman for the RG updates, Mark for the tea,
Greg, Michael, and Larry Wall. Entertainment for the
workers provided by BBC 6music as always, and especially the teatime
gang for taking part in the survey, we hope you live somewhere interesting.
pgweekly_2003_07_16_part_2.txt
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