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.
par Marie Lebert, 15 août 2005
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!