E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (essential reading .TXT) 📕

thing, but luckily Fred Ranck stopped me,

and we just posted a notice in what would later become

comp.gen

I think about 6 out of the 100 users at the time downloaded

it… .

Q. Between 1971 and 1993 you produced 100 e-texts. And then,

in less than 9 years, an additional few thousand. What

happened?

A. People rarely understand the power of doubling something

every so often.

In 1991 we were doing one e-Book per month. This was totally

revolutionary at the time. People kept predicting that we

couldn’t continue, but we were planning on doubling production

every year, which we did for most years. We are now adding 200

e-texts a month.

Q. Can you give us some current download statistics?

A. As for stats, this is pretty much impossible since we don’t

directly control any but one or two of what I presume are

hundreds of sites around the world that have our files up for

download. What I can tell you is that the one site we have the

most control of gives away over a million e-Books per month.

Q. The Internet is often castigated as an English-language,

affluent people’s toy. PG includes predominantly English

language, Western world, texts. Do you intend to make it more

multicultural and multilingual?

A. I encourage all languages as hard as I possibly can.

So far we have English, Latin, French, Italian, German,

Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Swedish, Danish, Welsh,

Portuguese, Old Dutch, Bulgarian, Dutch/Flemish, Greek,

Hebrew. We have texts in Old French, Polish, Russian,

Romanian, and Farsi in progress.

I wonder if we should count mathematics as a language?

I was surprised at how many people were interested when we

first uploaded Pi to a million places…

Q. Why are standalone images (e.g., films, photographs) and

sound excluded or rare?

A. We have tried some, but haven’t received much feedback.

Still, we will continue to experiment with all formats.

Also, these files are total hogs for drives and bandwidth.

Our short movie of the lunar landing is twice as big as

Shakespeare and the Bible combined in uncompressed format.

It’s only a couple minutes long, and low-resolution. Think how

big a whole movie would be, even not at hi-resolution. It

would take up a couple CD-ROMs… .

Q. PG now makes files available as DOC/RTF and HTML - as well

as plain vanilla ASCII. Yet, plain text delivery seemed to

have been a basic tenet of the Project. What made you change

your mind?

A. We’re willing to post in all kinds of file formats, but the

only format everyone can read is Plain Vanilla ASCII, so we

always try to include that. PG has been available on CDs for

years.

Q. The failure of the advertising-sponsored revenue model

forces Internet-based content generators and aggregators to

charge for their wares. Will PG continue to be free - and, if

so, how will it finance itself? Example: who is paying for the

hosting and bandwidth now?

A. It’s all volunteer… . And the number of sites continues

to grow, and to reach more and more regions around the world

for easier local access.

Actually, all the hosting, bandwidth, etc. are voluntary, too.

However, we desperately need donations to do copyright

research, cataloging, to hire librarians and Library and

Information Science professors, to support the Project

Gutenberg spin-offs in other languages and countries, not to

mention mundane things such as phone and utility bills,

computers, drives, backups, etc. We need volunteers equally

desperately.

Volunteering is perhaps the only way for one person to work

for a week or a month on a book and get it to a hundred

million people… .

Q. The reaction to e-books fluctuates wildly between euphoria

and gloom.

A. This is only the commercial point of view… They want to

take it over or sink it to the bottom…There are no other

commercial perspectives. Between 1500-1550, thanks to the

Gutenberg Press, more books were printed than in all of

history previous to Gutenberg. I have hopes like that for eBooks… .

Q. Some say that e-books are doomed, having miserably failed

to capture the public’s imagination and devotion. Others

predict a future of ubiquitous, ATM-printed, e-books, replete

with olfactory, tactile, audio, and 3-D effects. What is your

scenario?

A. The main trouble with these predictions is not only that

they are made solely with the commercial aspects in mind, but

that they are made by an assortment of people from pre-e-Book

generations, who have no idea that you could use the same

gizmo to play MP3s as to read or listen to e-Books.

The younger generations have no doubt about e-Books.

It’s only the dinosaurs that have no idea what’s going on. We

are still getting email stating that not one person is ever

going to read books from computers!

Who will be the more well-read - those who can carry at most a

dozen books with them, or those who have a PDA in their pocket

with a hundred or more e-Books in it?

Who will look up more quotations in context? Who will use the

dictionary more often? Who will look up geographical

information more often?

These are all things I do with my little antique PDA and the

new ones are already a dozen times more powerful.

I want to tell you the story of when I first realized that

Project Gutenberg was going to work. It was about 10 years

before we published our 2,000th E-text. We had only about a

dozen e-books online. At the beginning of 1989 there were only

80,000 host computers in the entire Internet - though by

October that year the number had doubled.

I was on the phone one day, with the Executive Director of

Common Knowledge, a project to put the Library of Congress

catalogs into public domain MARC (Machine Accessible Record

Catalog) records. During the conversation, there was this huge

noise. She dropped the phone and ran off. She was back in a

minute, and laughing her head off, she told me:

Her son had been playing around with her computer, and found

this copy of Project Gutenberg’s “Alice in Wonderland” and had

started to read it. He mentioned this at school, and a few of

the kids followed him home to see it. The next day even more

kids followed. Eventually the number of kids grew so great

that they were hanging off this huge oak chair.

Eventually this oak chair had so many kids all over it,

reading “Alice in Wonderland”…that it literally separated

into all its parts and kids went tumbling in all

directions….At that very moment, in 1989, I realized that Ebooks were going to succeed, no matter what any of a number of

adults thought. To the next generation, this will be how they

remember Alice in Wonderland, just as my memory of it was a

golden inscribed red leather edition my family used to read

from together.

Four years later, in 1993, there were still under 100 Project

Gutenberg e-Books.

A neighbor dropped by to talk to me one day and in the course

of the conversation mentioned he had read the Project

Gutenberg Alice in Wonderland. I had no idea his interests

even included computers. He had found a few errors. I hurried

home to correct them and to put the new edition online.

At first I was in happy shock just because I could improve our

edition, but then it occurred to me that perhaps the more

important aspect was that someone I knew had downloaded Alice

all on his own, then read the entire book from “cover to

cover” on his computer thus putting paid to the naysayers who

said no one my age would read e-Books.

There are lots of stories like this: professors who tell me

their students will not read paper textbooks, Texas preparing

for all textbooks to be e-Books… .

Q. PG is a prime example of two phenomena characteristic to

the early Internet: collaborative efforts and volunteering.

With the crass commercialization of the Net - will people

continue to volunteer and collaborate - or will corporate,

brick and mortar, behemoths take over?

A. Well, the commercialization of the Web started in 1994, and

that didn’t wipe us out. It took us 30 years to do our first

5,000 e-Books, and I’ll bet you a pizza that it will only take

30 months to do our second 5,000!!! Then we write up a

schedule for 1,000,000!!!!!!!

Q. In other words: PG is the reification of the spirit of the

Internet.

A. Definitely…So was “Ask Dr. Internet”, another of my

personas…

Q. Should the Internet change dramatically - what will happen

to PG? Will you ever consider going commercial, for instance?

If not, how do you plan to adapt?

A. Why should we go commercial…that just invites a

downfall if the money goes away. Which they would love to

happen -and would probably encourage it. It’s hard to kill off

something that doesn’t have a physical plant or a budget. .

.and cannot be bought. We will adapt by doing the entire

public domain, including graphics, music, movies, sculpture,

paintings, photographs, etc. …

Q. PG makes obscure and inaccessible texts as well as seminal

works - easily and globally available. Doesn’t this lead to an

embarrassment of riches or to confusion? In other words: all

PG e-texts are “equal”. It is a “democratic” system. There is

no “text rating”, historical context, peer review, quality

control, censorship …

A. This is because I am not a very bossy boss…I encourage

our volunteers to choose their own favorites, not just what

“I” think they should do. However, I am sure we will get all

the warhorses done.

Q. The e-texts posted on PG are copyright free or with

permission from their authors and publishers. How do you cope

with the inordinately extended copyright period in the USA?

A. I just finished up years of working on an Amicus Brief for

the Supreme Court in the hope of overturning the latest

copyright extensions. As for coping, you just do the best you

can with the cards you are dealt.

Q. What are the effects of such legislation on public

literacy?

A. The US used to say we would send aid to the entire world,

in the form of food, clothing, medical supplies, as much as we

could afford. But now that literacy can be disseminated at no

expense, we refuse to do it by pretty much stifling the public

domain.

Q. PG has a mirror site in Australia where copyright law is

less stringent.

 

A. Actually, they are a totally separate organization, using

our name with permission, just as does the Gutenberg Projekt-DE in Germany.

Q. Are such “backdoors” the solution? What about the DMCA

(Digital Millennium Copyright Act)?

A. I am so a-political that you could call me anti-political.

I would prefer a copyright of 10 years or so. .

Only the biggest of the best sellers might make 10% more after

10 years, and they don’t need it.

Do we really want laws that support only the biggest and

richest?

I love “The Bridges of Madison County”, but I don’t think 95

years, or even 75 years, or even 56 years of corporations,

family and other heirs should be supported by it. It then

becomes the “Duchy of Madison County” and we are stuck with

generations of “Dukes of Madison County.”

What we will end up with under these copyright laws is a

“landed gentry of the information age” who just keep

inheriting …

Copyright should expire soon enough that the authors, if they

want to keep getting paid, have to come back to work again.

After all, there is no other job in the world in which one

piece of work can keep paying off for 95 years.

By the way, do you realize that Ted Turner made millions,

probably hundreds of millions, from the copyright extension of