Comment by JSeiko

15 hours ago

Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/

60 comments

JSeiko

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svat  11 hours ago

Have you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans.

I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.

  • gluejar  10 hours ago

    We're using git repos internally to keep history for each book. They existed on github for a while, but our implementation was awkward, and too big of project for the volunteer dev team. But it's likely that we'll evolve towards that.

  • JSeiko  10 hours ago

    I believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar

jefurii  13 hours ago

When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!

lucb1e  11 hours ago

Huh that's interesting: 4.5 seconds for the TCP handshake and an additional 9.2 seconds for the TLS handshake. Is this some kind of captcha, since most bots would disconnect before that, so if you complete it once then it knows you're good? (Until the bots catch on of course, but so long as it works it's relatively unintrusive and not discriminatory against uncommon client software (that is, non-Chrome/ium).) The rest of the requests were lightning fast

Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!

  • codys  11 hours ago

    I think their site is just slow, potentially because more people than they are used to are trying to view it.

    I was unable to load it initially (got an error from firefox) and had to re-attempt. Still slow if one forces a reload (shift-r, etc, to not use local cache).

  • JSeiko  11 hours ago

    we are having occasional lows in page speed performance due to LARGE amounts of bot traffic. full disclosure - we've not really been able to resolve this fully/well. Let us know if you have a good idea for how to deal with it

    • gropo  10 hours ago

      Do you host a torrent?

      I have about 50k of the books, I would have used a torrent of just the txt files if it was prominent.

    • lucb1e  11 hours ago

      I'm only a small-scale sysadmin but the way that I understand the internet is that you send abuse notifications to the IP address block owner and, if it doesn't get resolved, you block. The whois/rdap database reveals which IPs all belong to the same hosting provider or ISP, so you can summarize that all to one list of IP addrs + timestamps per some time period

      The ISP actually knows which subscriber is on that line, can send them notices, block them, terminate them... loads of things that you simply cannot do because you have no relation to this person. And frankly I wouldn't want to need to have a personal relation with every website that I visit; my ISP can reach me if there is anything relevant to continued use of the internet. From personal experience, when I was a teenager, the ISP cutting our household off after an abuse report was an effective way of stopping what I was doing

      3 replies →

0x0203  9 hours ago

As long as you're taking suggestions, since many of the books are quite old, adding a publication date or date range to the search functionality might be nice. I personally would find it very useful since I have a tendency to look for things that are older than year _x_ when researching various things.

Thanks for all the effort put into the site!

Guestmodinfo  6 hours ago

Hi for the past 20 years I have known about Project Gutenberg and I used to read a lot from it. One of the obstacle that I face is that there is no way to arrange the books in the order of their original publication. Do you know of any such way. Surely we can arrange the books by their release date on Gutenberg but it has long baffled me as it feels to me the most useless way of sorting the books. Thank you for Project Gutenberg.

Falimonda  15 hours ago

The book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement.

Keep up the good work!

8bitsrule  3 hours ago

Great project. Are many of the books in a format that can easily be converted into audio? Is there a way to search for them, and information on what software your readers find useful for this purpose?

(Note: A lot of print media these days has switched to far-to-small font-sizes. Less of a problem for (zoomable) digital media, but for many that's still a barrier.)

freedomben  12 hours ago

I can't say for project Gutenberg specifically, but in general a huge issue I see is OCR errors. What do you all do to address OCR?

  • lapetitejort  12 hours ago

    I uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar

samcollins  15 hours ago

Very cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links?

(I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)