Many of us dream of a universal digital library freely available on the web, i.e. available anywhere and at any time. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and others, we are getting there, at least for the books from public domain. The process began a while ago with a few pioneers – It is running at full speed now. We still need to see copyright issues worked out in order to provide free access to as many works as possible. We still need large scale knowledge-building projects to get reliable reference, scholarly and educational content. We still need better quality OCR technology and in the future, go back to the original image files to provide a higher quality book. We still need more efforts, there are currently 25 million books belonging to the public domain and as of mid-2007, just over 2 million freely available on the internet.
Las líneas que siguen están dedicadas a todos los voluntarios del Proyecto Gutenberg en los cinco continentes. Gracias a ellos, más de 20.000 clásicos de la literatura mundial ya están disponibles en la red, en una versión gratuita y de gran calidad, con una previsión de una biblioteca de un millón de libros.
En 1971, Michael Hart creó el Proyecto Gutenberg con el objetivo de difundir gratuitamente bajo forma electrónica las obras literarias que pertenecían al dominio público. Hasta hoy, nadie consiguió obrar con más éxito para poner los clásicos de la literatura mundial a disposición de todos. Ni tampoco crear con tan pocos gastos una red tan inmensa de voluntarios en el mundo entero, sin derroche de competencias y de energía.
With reference to this Times Online article, it seems that the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader are to be made available in the UK sometime over the next few months — it’s about bloody time!
…the launch of two rival devices due to come on sale in Britain over the next few months – Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle.
Although I already have my own Sony Reader, which I purchased while still working on the cruise ships out of Florida, I’m hoping this will mean I can start to purchase books for it from the Connect store. At present I have to settle for public domain books (PG, manybooks.net, etc) or download PDF’s from eBooks.com.
After all these years of saying free eBooks were anathema to the Olde Boye Networke of the publishing world….
The publishers are finally realizing that when eBooks are given away free of charge actually increase paper sales–not that there weren’t any number of academic studies and articles saying this from the very beginning.
So, if any Project Gutenberg volunteers ever needed kinds of vindication, it doesn’t get much better than this…at least until we find there are more eBook going out for consumption than paper books….
Michael Hart mailed a ‘Top Listing’ for the various eBook languages posted to the Project Gutenberg archives, with the totals for each language included.
As to be expected, English comes in at the top, French a clear second with over one thousand eBooks posted to the archives. With the great number of Chinese texts posted in the later part of 2007, China is now in joint 6th place with Portugal having 195 eBooks each.
A Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan — and Counting
Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.
Most of the scanning has been done as part of the library’s controversial deal with Google. The search giant is working with dozens of major libraries around the world to scan the full text of books to add to its index. But Michigan is one of the only institutions to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright.
This article is dedicated to all Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders volunteers on the five continents, who offer us a free library of 16,000 high-quality eBooks, mainly classics of world literature, with a goal of one million eBooks in ten years. This article is also available in French.
Ce dossier du Net des études françaises (NEF) est aussi une communication du troisième symposium international sur les études françaises valorisées par les technologies: langages et dialogues interculturels (octobre 2005, Université York, Toronto, Canada). Les lignes qui suivent sont dédiées à tous les volontaires du Projet Gutenberg et de Distributed Proofreaders sur les cinq continents. Grâce à eux, plus de 16.000 classiques de la littérature mondiale sont déjà en ligne, dans une version gratuite et de grande qualité, avec une prévision d’un million d’ici dix ans. Ce même dossier est disponible en anglais.
Sony’s Reader Digital Book and Amazon’s Kindle are battling over their reading devices and the books that they offer. $1.99 at Amazon gets you one public domain book. Amazon boasts: “To use the search feature, simply type in a word or phrase you’re looking for, and Kindle will find every instance…”. Whoops! No combinations of words, no relevance ranking, possibly even no indexing.
Suggestion: Go to WordsCloseTogether.com and download the free copy of The Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens onto your Windows XP or Vista computer. Also download the free WCT (Words Close Together) Reader. Open the book, read, browse, and search with a “research quality” search engine — combinations of any words whatsoever, inexact phrases (for example — a better thing I do), all with relevance ranking that would make Google green with envy.
If you receive the PG Newsletter each week you will know that I am stepping down as the editor. I’ve had a great time and I am very grateful to Michael and Greg for giving me a chance to try my own ideas for the newsletter, including starting up the Gutenberg News website. If you’re wondering, yes, Gutenberg News will stay live and up-to-date. I will continue on as webmaster.
As my last entry I would like to introduce the new Newsletter Team!
Michael Hart mailed a ‘Top Listing’ for the various eBook languages posted to the