Comment by svat
13 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.
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.
> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…]
Why?
Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc.
When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.
SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.
It splits the community and number of possible volunteer hours for one. It also splits the canon into different versions. More projects fight for the attention attention (and possibly donations) of the audience.
There are lots of reasons it could be preferable to centralize. OTOH their mission is limited and some competition is healthy, if only to explore alternative ways to do things.
It’s a different mission.
PG focuses on an accurate digital translation of the source material, sometimes hosting multiple different versions of the same text, and doing things like putting work into recreating the adverts at the back of some novels.
SE focuses less of preservation and more on making readers’ versions of the texts, like other publishing imprints. So there’s typography standardisation, a light-touch moderinisation of hyphenation and soundalike spelling, and things like author-wide collections of short fiction and poetry even if it didn’t previously exist.
Both are valuable, but they serve different segments.
I believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar
That's an interesting idea. not a small feat to accomplish though ...