IN DEFENSE OF PROJECT GUTENBERG


Project Gutenberg offers everyone their opportunities
"to paint on our canvas, with our paints and brushes:
but what we haven't offered them is an opportunity to
paint over all that others have painted in 35 years."


Introduction of June 15, 2006

Most people would think that a project to create and hand out
free books of general interest to the world at large may have
little to worry about in the way of attacks, but I assure you
that each and every year we get strong messages from those in
opposition to what we are doing.

They adamantly tell us that we are doing eBooks all wrong and
should let them decide how eBooks should be done; and a list,
several lists now, of their complaints and demands are below,
along with specific answers to each one.

In return, we offer them all our resources to assist them for
the purpose of setting up a site for examples of their eBooks
to show the world, along with an opportunity to place a blurb
in our Project Gutenberg Newsletters, seeking our volunteers,
espousing their new eBook standards, even pointing to sites a
person might have of their own.

Very rarely do any of these accept our offers, they seem to a
person to have a preference for telling us what to do, rather
than to actually doing it themselves, even if only to a point
of providing a few dozen samples to show the world what their
new eBook standards would look like in practice:  even though
most of these new standards would take only a 1% total change
from the eBook already produced to match these new standards.

It's really amazing sometimes to see a person with at least a
thin veneer of rationality tell us that without their changes
the eBooks are worthless, but would be incredibly valuable if
we would only make those 1% of changes they recommend.

This is a collection of responses to these attacks I provided
as a sort of FAQ [Frequently Asked Questions] for those I saw
having some difficulties with current such messages.



Introduction of June 14, 2006

This is a series of responses to various attacks made year in
and year out by a handful of people who would take over eBook
standards and practices that are too loosely held as per more
rigid points of view.

My own view as the one who started all this is that we should
keep as open a mind as possible and resist the temptations of
those who would prefer we become more elitist in structure.

There is room for nearly everyone in Project Gutenberg, and I
include those who have attempted various takeovers and should
continue their efforts in the future.

Those people keep us aware of the potential futures of eBooks
and we continue to offer them their own resources on servers,
newsletters, etc., copyright research, etc., to enhance their
own ideas and ideals of how eBooks should be.

In most cases it is obvious that these people would prefer to
blow hot air at the situation for years without actually some
real example of a dozen or so eBooks being created to start a
new possible pattern in eBook production or distribution.

A happy counterexample to that is the recent addition of cell
phone eBooks to our collection by John Mizzi.


*

Note:
This portion added as we approach 20,000 eBooks by the counts
that do not include the 100 eBook collections donated through
The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center.

Several people would prefer not to allow various editions and
various formats of eBooks to be counted in Project Gutenberg,
but the truth is that as per our Mission Statement:

"To Encourage The Creation And Distribution Of eBooks"

it is our duty to encourage new editions and formats, as much
as is commensurate with our standards of 99.95% accuracy, and
a few other standards such as copyright research etc, and not
to spend too much time stating what is NOT Project Gutenberg,
and shooing away other potential donors of eBooks.

I make no claims that Project Gutenberg is perfect for any of
the various aspects of eBooks we represent, and never have.

Project Gutenberg is a PROCESS.

eBooks do not have to achieve even our 99.95% accuracy levels
before being accepted into the PrePrints Section, and certain
more strict standards will be applied before they leave these
PrePrint areas to reside in main collection.  In addition the
PrePrints items may be eligible for inclusions in the Project
Gutenberg Consortia Center collections, which have a standard
separate from that of the main collection and which fulfilled
all the requirements for a Project Gutenberg site in 2003.

When in doubt err on the side of our other Mission Statements

"Give The Most eBooks To The Most Possible People"

and

"Help Break Down The Bars Of Ignorance And Illiteracy."

Keeping track of which eBooks should be allowed into sections
of which kind, and how and if they should be catalogued is an
exercise that all too often is used to keep others out of the
ranks of Project Gutenberg, so let's be clear on this:

Project Gutenberg was designed to make it easy for persons to
give eBooks to the world at large.

Our history has been to accept 98-99% of all propositions for
the addition of new eBooks, new formats, new experimentations
and all the other things that might, just might, lead to some
increase in the accomplishment of our goal of bringing eBooks
to the world at large.

Having said all that:  let me continue to be one of the first
to say that the 99.95% accuracy Library of Congress level has
been in effect for well over a decade, and it is time to move
to a higher level of accuracy, perhaps 99.75% or 99.95%.

June, 2006

*

This next portion is from an online discussion on May 14, 2006

It illustrates quite well some of the situations I refer to.

#1 says that this is where we part company,
[only #1 never seems to actually part company with us]
trying to tell us what Project Gutenberg should be doing.
[#1 also frequently denies telling us what to do, or that
any kind of takeover of Project Gutenberg is intended.]

#2 reminds #1 that Project Gutenberg was already well founded
before #1 ever came upon the scene.

[This entire conversation is a response to a renewed attempt
to force Project Gutenberg into a certain mold of eBooks and
to then force all Project Gutenberg volunteers into that mold.]

#1 says that Project Gutenberg eBooks should be "authentic"
to an original paper edition, but admits that deciding what
is an authentic edition might be problematic.

#2 reminds us that this topic has been discussed ad nauseum,
by #1 and a few others, on previous occasions.

#2 then describes me as an artist painting on the canvas of
technology of society at large, then invites others who have
different artistic views to make their own paintings.

I remind all concerned that Project Gutenberg has offered #1
many times over:

"to paint on our canvas, with our paints and brushes,
but what we haven't offered them is an opportunity to
paint over all that others have painted in 35 years."

[This is a reference to the fact that everyone is welcome
to create their own version of Project Gutenberg and with
the resources of Project Gutenberg at their disposals, so
they won't have to bear the cost in terms if time, effort
and money of setting up their own such systems.  We get a
number of suggestions each year, telling us how we should
do eBooks in some other way that would work much better--
and we offer each one of these our resources, not only to
put up a test site to house the first few dozen examples,
but also space in our Newsletter to attract attention for
volunteers to help with the new project, and then to host
the whole project for them at our expense if it takes off
and grows even larger than the original Project Gutenberg
site has become.  We encourage all such projects as per a
Mission Statement:

"To Encourage The Creation And Distribution Of eBooks"

We even went to Google exactly a year before their big PR
blitz of December 14, 2004, and answered all their eBooks
questions for hours, but obviously they didn't take these
comments much to heart.

Nevertheless, we do encourage, "Creation And Distribution
Of eBooks" every chance we get, no matter what formats or
whether the proposed operation is commercial or nonprofit
or any mixture of the two.

The point of this particular section is that we try to do
everything we can:

"To Get The Most eBooks To The Most People"

no matter who is doing it or how.

However, it becomes only too obvious in these discussions
that many of the people talking to us are really trying a
takeover attempt of the eBook world at large, and want to
delete all other eBooks and replace them with their own.

This is why we invite them:

"to paint on our canvas, with our paints and brushes,
but what we haven't offered them is an opportunity to
paint over all that others have painted in 35 years."

*


Note:

Next portion added in response to various FlameBait comments,
made circa May 8, 2006

The portion below that is from May 28, 2004.  Somehow it seems
that springtime is when a lot of these take place.

The original portions, not cited here, were to those messages
starting in the second half of March, 2003, similar flames to
the same points, from person #1.

These replies are posted here as opposed to on the listservs,
due to an ever growing culture of political censorship.


***


Those Who Try to Put eBooks On The Defensive


Interestingly enough about half of the messages that required
the most defensive remarks about eBooks have been from people
who profess to LOVE eBooks, and the other half have been from
who seem to HATE eBooks, and the reasons are as widely varied
as are the senders.


The Complainers

The complainers, and their complaints, as mentioned below, do
fall into the two major categories mentioned above.

First let us toss out the gadflies:  those who would complain
just for the sake of drawing attention to themselves when the
truth is that they are making little enough contribution to a
new world of eBooks.  These same people complain:  year after
year after year, and the lists they complain on have now come
to the obvious conclusion that they are just making noise and
tell them so immediately on receiving such messages.

Some say that no one should reply to the messages at all, but
others feel that the new readers who have not seen previously
posted similar complaints over the years should be warned for
the sake of saving them from encouraging such "flaming."



The Complaints


1.  Not enough eBooks/Too Many eBooks

2.  Not enough like the original paper editions.

3.  Not in the format/font/margins/pagination I want.

4.  Not in the colors I want.

5.  Not an accurate count of how many eBooks there are:  what
    about duplicate copies, etc., when eLibraries combine.


Quick Answers


1.  Not enough eBooks/Too Many eBooks

I am frequently teased that I didn't produce enough eBooks to
give to the world sooner than I did.

This is obviously by people who don't know the limitations of
the computers and the networks of the times.

I lobbied long and hard just to get the space for the files I
did get online back in the 1970's, and the U.S. Constitution,
for example, was turned down over and over again, until there
was such a big stink during the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial that a
copy was finally allowed to be posted for online downloads.

However, this was the exception rather than the rule for that
period of computer history, and my statements that we must do
all the great classics including Shakespeare's Complete Works
were ridiculed to the extreme, even by those who were helping
me the most in getting Project Gutenberg started.

Of course, there was some logic to this, as our computers had
5 megabyte hard drives, and a complete Shakespeare is larger,
not to mention that just one download of such a file would be
enough to bring the fledgling Internet to its knees.

On the other hand, there have always been those who said only
the elite scholars should have access to eBooks, and the rest
of us should have to "do it the hard way."  Among these are a
choice few who believe that Project Gutenberg's efforts to do
"Unlimited Distribution" of entire libraries is "tatamount to
casting pearls before swine."

The fact is, and a great defense of eBooks it is, is that the
eBOOKS HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO VALUE UNLESS SOMEONE USES THEM!!!


2.  Not enough like the original paper editions.

This is the same argument that has been used against the very
inventions that make up our modern world.  The same thing was
said about Gutenberg's original publications, about steel and
glass skyscrapers, the automobile, the airplane or everything
in between.

"FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION!"

What need does an eBook have for; page headers, page footers,
page numbers, end-of-line-hyphenation, footnotes on the pages
they refer to, illustrations interrupting text, etc?

There are no pages in eBooks. . .other than by fabrication.

Each person should be allowed to choose their own favorites:
fonts, margin size, screen size, background/foreground colors
and all the other settings and options.

However, I should add that some people I love and respect had
just the opposite opinion, and think that these variable NOT!
be the choices of the reader, but of the publisher, who needs
to be able to determine the "look and feel" of the eBook.

Personally, _I_ am the sort of reader who does not even "see"
the page, but rather I "see" the characters and the action.


3.  Not in the format/font/margins/pagination I want.

As above, sorry I got carried away and answered ahead.


4.  Not in the colors I want.

As above, sorry I got carried away and answered ahead.

However, I leave these questions in this order because I have
received SO many complaints about each one of these points.


5.  Not an accurate count of how many eBooks there are:  what
    about duplicate copies, etc., when eLibraries combine.

During the recent conversation on this topic, I sent this:


As I usually do when confronted by such statements as:

"Most libraries won't waste space and budget on duplicate books."

I simply checked with my own library a few blocks down the street.

They tell me that at least 10% of their orders for books are sent
in for multiple copies of the same edition of the same book.

As others have mentioned, you will obviously get duplications for
more books when combining the collections of multiple libraries.

However, one should also be aware that most libraries count those
separate editions as separate titles, not to mention large print,
audio books, and other editions that contain the same works.

Obviously it would be fairly easy to claim a million eBooks in an
effort of similar cataloging rules if you had just 100,000 books,
and presented each one in 10 formats.

[snip]

Our policy has always been to list the same books from different
sources as individual editions and then often to reconcile those
editions into what is known as a "critical edition" of sorts.

However, unless there are special circumstances, just putting an
eBook into a new format would not get it another entry, as would
be included in a library with several hardback, paperback, trade
editions, along with large print, audiobooks, or those tinted in
that supposedly easy-to-read green coloration.  Each of those in
a bricks and mortar library would get its own entry.

*

Cataloguing a library is a LOT of work, and while I spend hot
hours counting and recounting the book production of the four
Project Gutenberg sites I report on in each weekly Newsletter
for our readers along with a lot of other statistics, I can't
keep track of other sites I don't have such direct access to,
and have to rely on information from their operators which is
often just an estimate, as they don't have time to count, and
recount, either, when their top priority is getting the books
out there. . ."The Most Books To The Most Readers."

If you call a library and ask how many total books they have,
their response is usually just an estimate as well, and might
include multiple copies of new best selling editions that are
in high demand, as well as large print editions, audio books,
and all sorts of other items that other might not include.

The truth is that many of the early eLibraries, "padded their
bibliographies," by doing such things as counting each one of
the AEsop's Fables as a catalog entry while Project Gutenberg
did just the opposite and posted their eBook #100 as just one
single listing of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

Only after many years of requests from people who wanted some
particular play or poem, and nothing else, were the works cut
into separate volumes for each play or major poem and one for
the complete sonnets.  The first editions of the Bible were a
similar example, and Project Gutenberg could easily have said
twice as many volumes were in the early collections simply by
claiming each of these two examples as 50+ volumes each.

If there is anything I have learned in my 35 years of working
with the publication of eBooks, it is that whatever you do it
will not please everyone, which is one reason I try NOT to do
all the specific choosing for our readers.  The are not free,
just free, to do what they want with Project Gutenberg eBooks
BUT they are ENCOURAGED to make these eBooks over in whatever
ways they see fit. . .including making their own catalogs, as
a number of prominent library professionals have done, with a
huge blessing and many thanks!

Any time anyone suggests a new way of counting eBooks we have
offered them all the encouragement and site support possible,
but none of them seem to want to do more than to complain and
we understand only too well that people do not complain about
services they are not interested in.



A More Detailed Explanation


Startup


For the first 17 years I worked on eBooks I literally got not
one single response about them, other than that I was a crazy
person to think that anyone would ever want books as computer
files for any purpose whatsoever; even my closest friends and
those who helped me the most were included.

I got my first positive response around 1988-1989, during the
first "Age of the Internet" when the number of Internet users
first passed 1/4 million and there were finally enough people
to have a discussion about nearly anything, including eBooks,
as it turned out.

As a result I started up the first Project Gutenberg listserv
program to discuss eBooks, which rapidly rose to the top of a
number of lists of the best and most popular listservers.

The next 17 years, bringing us pretty much up to date, were a
logarithmic growth pattern that still surprises people today.
[Examples on request]



The Complainers


Those who complain the most about eBooks are of two varieties
as I see it:

1.  Those who want eBooks to ONLY be the way THEY want them.

2.  Those who want ONLY paper books.


I often feel very much attacked by those who love my work the
very most, as they are so fanatical about eBooks that they do
not realize their own preferences and desires are outside the
realm of the attention of the normal reader, and it is normal
readers, and perhaps even sub-normal readers, that are my own
"designated drivers" of where eBooks should be going.  My own
goal is to increase general levels of literacy and education,
throughout the entire world.  The goals of so many who attack
seem to be to aim eBooks specifically at the most learned and
the most scholarly, not just without attention to the masses,
but even saying that presenting the masses with such editions
is tatamount to "casting pearls before swine."

I see my own role in the world of eBooks as Johnny Appleseed,
carrying the seeds that will grow into worldwide orchards for
everyone to benefit from, not just one particular country, or
class of people.  When I receive messages from people who say
they wouldn't have ever found that book or read that book, if
not for Project Gutenberg, I know I have reached my audience.

This is NOT to say that I am not VERY appreciate of the facts
gleaned from Project Gutenberg for "The da Vinci Code," which
acknowledges our assistance right up there with "The Louvre,"
"The Bibliotheque National," "The Gnostic Society Library," &
"The Catholic World News, Royal Observatory Greenwich, London
Record Society, the Muniment Collection at Westminster Abbey,
John Pike and the Federation of American Scientists," etc.

That is QUITE a list in which to be included, particularly at
a spot very near the top of the list, so I am quite pleased--
it is not that often that one's work is acknowledged in books
that top the best seller lists for years of one's lifetime.

However I would GLADLY give up the 40 million acknowledgement
pages in those books just to give eBooks to 40 million more--
if you know what I mean.

My goal is to change the world from the bottom up, not from a
"trickle down" theory of Voodoo economics."

This does NOT endear me to the elitists and the scholarly who
would prefer NOT to have any competition from peanut galleria
types they wouldn't deign to notice on the street.

Me, I prefer my audience to BE those people on the street.



More About The Complaints


The greatest number of complaints about eBooks are from those
who want there to be no difference between eBooks and paper.

These people want there to be page breaks and page numbers in
a medium that doesn't HAVE pages, not to mention page footers
and page headers, where they appear.

These people want there to be specifically chosen fonts in an
eBook medium where anyone COULD choose their own fonts.

Sometimes these people go so far as to insist on end-of-lines
hyphenation in a medium that doesn't lose any extra paper for
the publisher if you don't cram as many words per line into a
book as is humanly possible.

Still others try to specify the color of the "page" when this
could easily be specified by the reader, along with the font.

And, of course, there are those [sic] fellowes who determined
that any errors in the original editions should be continued,
as "canonical errors" in all future editions, even if or when
those errors were introduced by the editors, proofreaders, or
typesetters, and never appeared in the original manuscript.

This, in my estimation, is one of the strangest complainings,
as the editors probably made a thousand changes from author's
manuscript pages in an average book, yet any error they might
have introduced are is now gospel.

By the way, I know where this originated, and the cause of it
was eliminated with the advent of The Gutenberg Press, so the
holier-than-thou approach to such error preservation is quite
out of date.

Unless you are quoting pre-Gutenberg works.



The Middlemen


There is ONLY ONE STANDARD for measuring a book's success:

how well it communicates from the author to the reader.


Everything else is the work of an army of middlemen.

Cover art
Advertising
Blurbs
Editing
Layout
Fonts
Etc.

and those middlemen get paid if the book sells or does not.

Only the author and publisher get more or less out of sales.

The rest is just gilding the lily, so to speak.

Before I go on, I should add that some of my good friends are
editors, proofreaders, etc. in the publishing industry, but I
am not interested in that sort of thing except in one case:

Where the meaning of the author can be clarified, by choosing
different words, grammar, punctuation, etc.

Sometimes the author does NOT want an idea clarified.

Sometimes they want the reader to WORK to get the meanings.

However once you starting putting this army of people BETWEEN
yourself and the author, you start having to wonder which the
words belong to.

If you gave the same book to a hundred different publishers--
you would never get the same book twice--a thousand different
changes would occur between one publisher and the next.

So why this religious prostration before words that have been
changed a thousands times by the publishers?

Because the publishers rule!













































***

When you said that I sounded defensive in one of my messages,
when we talked last Thursday, that stuck in my head, and I've
been thinking about it quite a bit, with a lot of the results
I'm including below, trying to find where the points are that
we can follow up on in agreement.

Of course, I think there ARE things to be defensive about, so
I'm including some of those, too.

In the main, I think that liberals never fight as hard as the
conservatives do, pretty much anywhere in the world today.  I
wonder what differences between now and the 1770's-1780's may
be that would/could create this.  It would certainly appear a
lot of conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists have done a
HUGE amount in the last century and the only responses were a
set of defensive ones. . .and defense on the spot, not for an
historical perspective, even an historical perspective rooted
in a single spot such as the Maginot Line.

The point is that the people who are trying to take over this
project are playing hardball, while we are playing softball--
perhaps not to offend the very people we try to protect.  The
hardball actions are included in my thoughts below.

These people make no bones that one way to achieve their goal
would be to take over the Board of Directors by stacking with
lawyers and millionaires.  [BTW, I obviously feel comfortable
to an even lesser degree with Steve Harris than before.]

This approach of taking over the Board is hardball, there can
be no room left for any power for anyone else, and any bit or
piece thrown to us by such a stacked board would be only more
for show that they hadn't killed us off completely, than some
idealistic point of view.

Once such a board is in place there would be no turning back,
not only on political grounds, but since their avowed ticket,
such as it is, is aiming straight at making Project Gutenberg
dependent on money, thus creating the twin impenetrables that
support their takeover:  political power and money.

However defensive it may sound, we must answer that political
power and money are NOT among our primary goals, and that our
unwillingness to exercise political power isn't an invitation
to others to exercise it.

We must state our goal of individual and group freedom within
Project Gutenberg as a positive value for growth, not as mere
responses in a defensive posture. . .as a value we have held,
not just for years, but for decades, that is primary to great
cooperative efforts, as opposed to great efforts run by power
politics.  We must point out that NONE of these proposals has
been about making eBooks, perhaps even point out that persons
making these proposals have intentionally stopped production,
using the term mutiny to describe these actions.

Obviously these people think that making eBooks is secondary,
and taking political and financial control is primary, and as
much as said in plain words.

We must state that there IS no political or financial gain to
be had in Project Gutenberg; Project Gutenberg was DESIGNED a
long time ago just so there would NOT be these kinds of power
to attract potential takeovers.  We might also mention that a
number of takeover attempts have been launched in the past on
both political and financial grounds, and that they didn't do
even enough to leave a ripple in the historical record.

HOWEVER, we should also add that we recognize that many of an
astonishingly wide range of volunteers would prefer organized
control over the production process of a stronger nature, and
that such structure is a blessing for those who want/need it,
but that we must leave room for other kinds of structure, for
those for whom the proposed structures might not fit.  Again,
we should mention that these proposals don't really structure
anything to do with the production of eBooks, merely for some
kind of power over such production and distribution, and some
kind of financial power, even to the point of including dues.

Since Project Gutenberg is famous for FREE eBooks it may seem
somewhat contradictory to CHARGE FEES TO MAKE THEM.

My own interpretation of the proposed dues is that this would
simply be a means of elevating Project Gutenberg from a total
status of "anyone can join" to a status requiring membership,
significant dues, and all that comes with them.


     Project Gutenberg has never been about bureaucracy,
                       and never will be.


 Project Gutenberg has never been about financial concerns,
                       and never will be.


  Project Gutenberg has never been about political power,
                       and never will be.


Now, having said that, if we ever SAY it, there will be small
chance of anyone not realizing that such takeover attempts in
the future violate the founding premises of Project Gutenberg.



  Project Gutenberg has never been about political power,
                       and never will be.


Project Gutenberg would rather lead by example than by edict,
or decree, or bylaws.

The Project Gutenberg Board of Directors is not political and
never has been; they would never say the primary goals of the
project are money or political, nor do they want to hand over
financial or political control to those who do.

Not wanting political or financial power is not a weakness or
a sign of a power vacuum. . .it is a sign of idealism.

Project Gutenberg should be run by idealism, not by finances,
politics, or any other power structure.

Those who would use their political power to reduce the eBook
production obviously are not people who have eBook production
as their primary goal.  We must get back to eBook production,
that is our root, our strength, our cause of existence; these
other things are only distractions.