Talk:Project Gutenberg

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[edit] Miscelaneous

There is a big shortcoming with Project Gutenberg - the lack of documentation of its texts. To find the works of (say) Shakespeare without being told which edition of Shakespeare has served as source - as in fact Gutenberg does not - is to make these texts worthless for serious scholarly research, and less than ideal for casual readers. The editions of many authors vary, sometimes dramatically, from one public domain version to another.

Daniel Eisenberg, daniel.eisenberg@bigfoot.com

Shouldn't it rather read "without restrictions" in the last sentence of the first chapter? Tobias

The Distributed Proofreaders for Project Gutenberg, http://texts01.archive.org/dp/ Is a great place! I've really been enjoying the proofing process.

Where does the $100,000,000 figure for the value of the computer time come from, please? Every reliable source I've ever seen said $100,000, and I was the one who straightened out all PG's accounting records when I formally organized it as a trust and got it a tax i.d. for Michael. -- isis 02:07 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

The number has nothing to do with PG's accounts; rather it is the arbitrary value placed on the time he was allowed on the mainframe at the university before he started the project. See http://promo.net/pg/history.html and http://www.gutenberg.net/fundraising/hart-his.txt -- Stephen Gilbert 02:22 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

No, my point was that when I reviewed all the documentation going back to the beginning to create its accounting history, they all had $100,000 as the value Michael put it on it during the first 20+ years. It's only within the past less than a decade that he's started using the inflated figure, and you know how he is with numbers, using them figuratively to make a point, much as people did in Gutenberg's time. I assure you the number we reported to the IRS was a hundred thousand, not a hundred million, and I think that makes the lower figure the better one to go with in an encyclopedia article. (And I'd really hate to have the IRS after me wanting to know why I reported only a thousandth of that "income.") -- isis 02:38 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Ah, I see. We can't have the IRS tracking you down. However, I suspect you're in more danger because of the Gutenberg report of 100,000,000, not ours. :) I will certainly take your word for it Isis, but it does leave us with a problem. The official PG website lists $100,000,000; if we list $100,000, that puts our article in conflict with the history page at PG. I don't suppose you could convince Michael to knock off those extra zeros, could you? Barring that, I see two options:

  1. Reduce the number to $100,000 and explain in the article the descrepency. This leaves us with the annoying problem of having to correct the article constantly when people add those zeros back on.
  2. Remove the number althogether, and reword thatsection so that we can convey that he was given some extremely valuable computer time without pinning down the exact number.

What do you think? -- Stephen Gilbert 03:10 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

How about if we lay it at Michael's door by saying he estimated it as worth a hundred thou then and calls it worth a hundred mill in today's dollars? Or that what seemed to be worth a hundred thou then has turned out to be worth a hundred mill now? Or something like that. I don't mind being in conflict with PG's webpage, because there's no real authority for its figures about this or how many e-texts there are or anything -- Michael doesn't even count dates by any real-world convention. If you know him, you know his mind is completely unfettered by such mundane limitations. -- isis 03:22 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Sounds good. I'll make the changes and then go to bed. Oh, and I don't know Michael personally, but I've heard the rumours. :) -- Stephen Gilbert 03:34 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

Ok, I've changed it to this:

He was given an operator's account with a vast amount of computer time; sources differ on whether it was $100,000 or $100,000,000 worth.

How's that? I'm off to bed now; I'll check in tomorrow. -- Stephen Gilbert 03:42 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

I've added a couple of interviews with Michael to his article page for the cultural enrichment of those who don't know him in person. -- isis 04:31 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

There is no way it could be $100,000,000 in 1972 dollars or 2002 dollars. I worked for a company in 1988 (now deceased) that had $100 million in annual revenue. It had 900 employees, a five-story headquarters building and a factory, sales offices in 40 cities and a dozen countries, etc etc etc. I don't think PG has ever been quite so big. Ortolan88

As I understand it, he was given that much in computer time. That figure was the abitrary value set on the computer time in Hart's account, but no one was actually paying for it. The operators of the university computer were free to give out the time as they saw fit. Look at it this way. At my university, print credits cost 10 cents a page. If I was a university sysop, I wouldn't have to pay for my printing. I could set the value of my print credit account to $100,000,000, which simply means I have unlimited printing privleges, not that I actually have something worth $100,000,000. -- Stephen Gilbert 19:54 Dec 11, 2002 (UTC)

You're expressing my attitudinal problem with letting that value stand in an encyclopedia article. The truth (as nearly as I was able to reconstruct it a few years ago) is that there was no set amount of time in his account -- he was given free access, period. But if you remember how university computer centers operated in those days, usage was accounted at some ridiculous number of dollars per fraction of a second (that's actual processing time, not reading the cards in or printing or waiting in the time-sharing queue or such). Even if you figure it at only $1 per second, $100,000,000 isn't as outrageous a figure as it appears at first blush. But the reality is that it wasn't really "worth" that, even in an accounting sense, because the time the computer operators used was not billed to any department and so was "free" in virtually every sense of the word. -- isis 08:07 Dec 12, 2002 (UTC)

"Thus, PG Australia is able to produce and host e-texts that would be illegal for Project Gutenberg in the United States while some texts from the US project cannot be hosted there."

Can someone clarify the legal issues concerning the use of material which is public domain in one country but not in another? Scott McNay 04:53, 2004 Feb 14 (UTC)

It is hard to believe that the project startetd 1971 to provide texts "for the internet". pls correct.

Check http://www.gutenberg.net/about.shtml . Dysprosia 06:32, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

--I know. But ther haven´t be a term like that at that time, perhaps a vague imagination. Don´t take me wrong: it would just confuse readers. And I really don´t want to discuss who is the father/mother of the internet (and its birthday)

I don't quite understand what you're looking for, but if you feel you know how best to correct the article, you can be bold and edit yourself :) Dysprosia 06:39, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)
This also looked strange to me when I read it, even though it's explained later in the article. I've changed it to 'what would later become the Internet', which I think is correct. -- Lady Lysine Ikinsile 17:23, Jun 10, 2004 (UTC)

Hi, Dysprosia; your inter-country copyright clarification has me confused.  :(

You said "PG Australia is able to produce and host e-texts, that otherwise would be illegal for Project Gutenberg in the US to host" (you added "otherwise"), which makes it sound like the US Gutenberg is currently hosting them; is that what you intended?

The next sentence is unclear to me also; would texts in the US only be available in the US, and Ausralians would have to be blocked, and vice versa?

Scott McNay 07:45, 2004 Feb 18 (UTC)

[edit] $100.000 worth of computer time

I think this was misleading. The account given to Michael was never worth $100.00 or $100.000.000 as he never could have used up that time. This was just a quick way for the operators to make sure the account would never expire.

Also there are too much particulars that just slow down the reading and don't give much value to the reader, eg. the best friend of the brother etc. Cleaned up a bit.

Marcello 13:25, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Project Gutenberg linking to Wikipedia

I was nosing around Project Gutenberg just now (the site, not our article), whilst helping out in the development of {{gut-author}}, and discovered that PJ has lots of lovely links back to Wikipedia (take a look at this page and search the text for "wiki"…). When did this happen, how "official" is it, and is there any work needs doing to make sure PJ keeps up-to-date? --Phil | Talk 10:56, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)

The old author records had the capacity for "Interesting Links", the majority of which were to WP. It's very official (indeed, the capacity for them was added by User:Marcello above, who is the PG webmaster), and the only work to be done keeping the links up to date is emailing the PG catalogue email address about any authors with corresponding Wikipedia entries that aren't yet linked. — MikeX (talk) 12:37, Apr 15, 2005 (UTC)
As one of the editors of the PG online catalog, I believe that the two projects can be very complimentary. Wikipedia articles can benefit from having appropriate book-length items mentioned; Project Gutenberg can benefit by having encyclopedia-type articles for authors in the collection readily available.
I add reciprocal links between the two when I happen to come across them. There is one wikipedian — User:Grendelkhan — who is gradually working through the PG catalog and notifying me of author links to add to the PG catalog. However, this is rather a time-consuming task, and anyone who would like to help (perhaps by checking authors alphabetized under one particular letter) would be most welcome. Andrew Sly 06:21, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] That Thomas Edison files

I couldn't find the Thomas Edison files at Project Gutenberg that are mentioned in this article. --Abdull 23:42, 1 August 2005 (UTC)

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10137 AND http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10311 among others. Rick Boatright 01:10, 2 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Official and unofficial

Michael Hart has sent out an email saying that:

This is simply because a worldwide effort that was previously concentrated on the single site:

http://www.gutenberg.org

is now a multiple effort placed on several sites:

http://gutenberg.net.au http://gutenberg.cc http://pge.rastko.net [Project Gutenberg Europe] http://dp.rastko.net [Distributed Proofreaders Europe]

Not to mention upcoming sites for operations in:

Canada The Philippines Portugal

Thus, it is obvious that without counting all the eBooks as being present on one site, the count for that one site will no longer reflect the grand total.

[edit] Uncategorised

That is, several of the related projects are official, and some are unofficial, contrary to some recent edits.--Prosfilaes 21:33, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Project Gutenberg has been around for a long time, and is quite well-known. Because of that, the potential list of "projects inspired by Project Gutenberg" could be very lengthy and already takes up a disproportionate amount of the article.
I would suggest changing the heading "Other projects inspired by Project Gutenberg" to "Affiliated projects" and only mention affiliated projects as described in the PG Faq. Any items which don't belong in that group can then be moved to List of digital library projects.

Andrew Sly 17:26, 22 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] See also from article

From the article:

For external links to Project Gutenberg content from wikipedia articles:
*Template:Gutenberg
*Template:Gutenberg author

[edit] Prosfilaes' ongoing vandalism

Oh my, they just made everything a thousandfold more complex. There used to be a time when you could just report destructive behaviour at a Vandalism In Progress page, but apparently that now only applies to specific types of vandalism.

What is going on: a while ago, some user removed factual data from the article, namely mentions of related projects, i.e. Aozora Bunko and Projekti Lönnrot. Especially the latter is only mentioned in this article, and would be otherwise hard to find.

When I put these back under the header Affiliated Projects, two users started reverting my changes, without as much as an explanation on the talk page, which is the bare minimum a Wikipedian should do when deleting facts.

From the Edit summaries it could be inferred, after much reverting to and fro, that Prosfilaes thinks these two projects are not affiliated with Project Gutenberg.

They may not be official affiliates, but neither are most of those in the list that remained. What's more, Project Gutenberg DE is listed as being not-affiliated (which is a lie, it is), so apparently there is room for unofficial affiliates.

Aozora Bunko and Projekti Lönnrot are more than just some electronic libraries; they are projects that aspire to be like Project Gutenberg. They may not be recognised by PG as friends of PG, but they are certainly related. The Finnish project is even run by PG volunteers, and would have been called Project Gutenberg Finland if the domain name had not been taken.

If, and this is a big if, these two projects should be banned from this page, then all projects that are not official affiliates should be, and Gutenberg-DE should be "re-instated" as an official affiliate.

How do I know what the official affiliates are? Well, Project Gutenberg lists the following names[1]: ClassicalArchives.com, LiteralSystems, Librivox.org, Project Gutenberg of Australia, Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Project Runeberg. With the exception of Project Gutenberg Australia, none of these are listed in Wikipedia's list of official Project Gutenberg affiliates.

Also, if the two projects I mentioned are banned, they should not just be removed from the site, but they should appear on a page that lists friends of PG. Any deletion of a fact is the worst type of vandalism known to Wikipedia, and not just a content dispute.82.92.181.129 23:58, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Dispute over mentioning other projects

First of all, thank you for caring about this Wikipedia article about Project Gutenberg.

I will begin by stating that I am the user who first removed the material under discussion back on September 18, 2005, as part of an overhaul of the whole article. Please note that my edit summary was: "Major reorganization, editing and expansion. Some material moved to other, more appropriate, articles." To my best recollection, the material removed was some links to other digital library projects, and some information about Distributed Proofers. I thought that I had ensured this was all accounted for in "other, more appropriate, articles"; my apologies if I missed any of it.

Also, I am not sure why you are suggesting that "Aozora Bunko" and "Projekti Lönnrot" should be mentioned in this article, but not the other projects that were removed, such as "The Hungarian Electronic Library", "Project Ben-Yehuda", and "Project Coster".

I would suggest being careful about inflammatory use of the word "vandalism". If you read Wikipedia:Vandalism, I believe you will find that the point of contention here does not match the definition of a "deliberate attempt to reduce the quality of the encyclopedia". Continuing to claim this is vandalism and accusing another user of lying could be taken as a sign of someone who is more interested in being confrontational and creating argument, rather than constructively dealing with differences of opinion.

If we look at the first user to revert your changes, we see that User:Superm401 is an administrator, and an experienced wikipedian. His edit summary stated: "those are not affiliated projects; they're similar projects, which is far to broad a category". Personally, I would agree with that. The two projects that you would like to have mentioned in this article do not (at first glance) belong under the heading "affiliated projects". (However, see my note about Projekti Lönnrot below.)

The second user to revert your changes, Prosfilaes, has shown himself to be a long-time, valuable contributor to Wikipedia, (and also incidentally to Project Gutenberg). He has made valid points that removing this material is not vandalism but "a content dispute"; and that removal of this material has already been discussed on this talk page.

You make a valid point that there is some confusion around the definition of a "Project Gutenberg affiliated project". To be honest, there is no "official" definition. (I say this as a volunteer who is very involved in PG, and has discussed the matter with others before.) A while ago, I mentioned the idea of trying to make a clear definition of affiliate status, but it has not yet happened.

The PG webpage you cite could use some updating. Please be assured that various organizations mentioned in the article do use the "Project Gutenberg" trademark with permission, and can beyond question be considered affiliated projects.

As for Projekt Gutenberg-DE, it asked for permission to use the Project Gutenberg name years ago, which was given. I understand that if it were to ask today, that permission would likely not be given. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say in the article "some do not consider it to be an affiliated project". What do you think of that? I believe Projekt Gutenberg-DE should be mentioned in this article, because of the potential for confusion if it is not, due to similarity of name.

Your argument for Projekti Lönnrot certainly makes it seem like a good candidate to be considered as a Project Gutenberg affiliate.

However, I still maintain that the Project Gutenberg article is not the place to mention every project which is "inspired by" or "similar to" Project Gutenberg. As soon as you have one, there is no reasonable argument for not including 20 more, at which point the article is over-balanced.

In an effort to make my meaning clear, I had written in the article:

For a list of other similar projects, some of which have been inspired by Project Gutenberg, see the list of digital library projects.

Can you suggest a better solution?

If you would like create an article along the lines of Projects similar to Project Gutenberg please go ahead and do so, although I would suggest that "list of digital library projects" is sufficient.

Andrew Sly 08:48, 19 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your intermediating (is that a word?).

A List of Digital Library Projects is fine.

"some do not consider it to be an affiliated project" contains that weasel-word some; but it is better than what there is now, considering that PG itself considers PG-DE an official affiliate.

I am not sure what you mean by "be assured that various organizations mentioned in the article do use the "Project Gutenberg" trademark with permission". Has the trademark been registered in any country beside the USA?

As you probably know, the formalizing of a PG "philosophy" is a pretty recent affair, and gutenberg.org's new description of PG-DE was only written last summer.

--82.92.181.129 15:53, 19 February 2006 (UTC)


Just to be sure we're on the same wavelength, here's a summary of what's been done so far.

  1. I've removed mention of Aozora Bunko per the reasoning mentioned above. The material is not lost, as it is identical to what appears in the article about that project, and it is linked to from the "list of digital library projects".
  2. I've reworded mention of Projekti Lönnrot in an effort to make its relation to Project Gutenberg clear.
  3. I've reworded mention of Projekt Gutenberg-DE to mention different opinions on PG affiliate status.

At this point, the most helpful thing to do would be to get some PG volunteers together to agree on a definition of what makes an affiliate, and update the page mentioned above.

Your point about trademarks is a good one, and I must admit that is an area I know little in. However, I have been told that the various projects listed, using the Project Gutenberg name, have been given permission to do so (whether or not it is legally required.)

Andrew Sly 20:45, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] e...

etext, e-text, ebook, etc. someone want to unify?

[edit] Self reference

== See also ==
Template:Gutenberg        
Template:Gutenberg author

I removed the above from the article because it looked like a self reference. I do agree it's useful, but I feel uneasy about including it in article space. --Kjoonlee 04:49, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

I've just removed Template talk:Gutenberg from the See also section. JRawle (Talk) 12:48, 21 September 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Full Plays on the Internet

Is is legal to put full plays on the internet??

Am a library and Information science lecture in Kenya Nairobi and would like my country to join the Project Guntenberg. Kindly advice on how to go about it. My e-mail address is rnamango@yahoo.com. Phone +254723 836185

Thank you for your kind cooperation.

[edit] Redirect

Do you think it is appropriate to put a redirect from "Project guttenberg" to here? I'm not sure if other people mis-spell this word that often, but I always forget to use one 't'. --Culix 06:17, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

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