The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002
by Jim Tinsley
Important: This file is posted to the Project Gutenberg archives
not as a current guide, more as a historical reference. I hope
that future FAQs will be posted, as the project evolves, but
this one is of its time.
If you want the most up-to-date information from PG, please
see the current version of the FAQ, from the Project Gutenberg
site, or, at the time of posting, at:
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/faq/gutfaq.txt
or
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/faq/gutfaq.htm
Acknowledgements
Writing a FAQ for an organization of fanatical proofreaders has
its ups and downs! I'd like to thank all those who corrected
my facts and my typos, and especially the people who pointed out
the lack of clarity in certain answers. The remaining errors and
opacity are all mine.
Preface to the archive edition
Ironically, Project Gutenberg, which preserves the writings of
others, doesn't have much written history itself. There are
scraps of e-mails and guidelines, but many newsletters and other
internal writings before 1996 have gone to the great bit-bucket
in the sky.
The later half of the '90s marked a graceful blooming of Project
Gutenberg's growth. Three related technical factors contributed: the
explosion in home PCs brought standardization, which made it easy
for non-techies to install scanners, which, in response to the new
demand, became plentiful and cheap. And, of course, these years saw
the rise in popularity of the Internet, which has always been PG's
main channel of communication and distribution.
However, while PG's production expanded geometrically, at Moore's
Law rates, there were barriers to participation. Most volunteers had
to find an eligible book, scan or type it, and proof the resulting
text all by themselves. This was and is a fairly significant amount
of work: 40 painstaking hours would be a typical commitment for one
book.
Beyond that, simply learning the mechanics of producing e-texts
could be a serious challenge for newcomers. Nearly all internal
PG communication, except for the Newsletter, was by private e-mail,
and instructions had to be repeated many times to individual new
volunteers, all of whom showed up with great good will, but most of
whom vanished after a week or two.
Michael Hart was unstinting in his editing of incoming texts and
handling questions by e-mail, but any one person has only so many
hours.
The Directors of Production at the time -- Sue Asscher, Dianne Bean,
John Bickers and David Price -- served as contact points for advice
and help, made enormous efforts of production themselves, and tried
to share the scanned texts among new volunteers for proofing. They
made a huge contribution to building community in PG.
Pietro Di Miceli set up a web site for the project in 1996, and with
the popularization of the Web (as opposed to the Internet), this became
a beacon for readers and new volunteers.
All of these people reached out to willing volunteers, drew them in,
helped them, encouraged them. The Project and all of the readers of
the books, now and in the future, owe these people a great debt.
Without them, Project Gutenberg could not have achieved what it has.
But still, for the most part, each volunteer worked alone.
In 1999, I wrote, in response to an offer to volunteer:
I think I can best answer your offer, and many others like it,
by giving an extended description of what actually happens in
the making of PG texts, and why it's often not easy to get
started.
There is no agenda, no master list of tasks ready to be given to
volunteers. This is often the hardest thing to get across to new
volunteers. I know I waited quite a while after volunteering for
someone to give me a job to do before I realized it.
Exactly five steps are normally performed in the publishing of
an e-text.
1. Someone, somewhere gets a public-domain copy of a text they
want to contribute.
2. That volunteer confirms its PD status by sending TP&V to
Michael, and getting copyright clearance.
3. Someone, usually the same volunteer, scans and corrects the
text, or, if skilled in typing, types the book into an e-text.
4. Someone, often a different volunteer, second-proofs the
e-text, removing the smaller errors.
5. The e-text is sent to Michael for posting.
There are three barriers which make it difficult for most people
to contribute:
1. Getting a PD book.
2. People without scanners and typing skills have no way of
turning a book into an e-text.
3. Even with a scanner, turning a book into an e-text is not
easy or quick.
Since, generally, people who have a PD book don't just want to
send it off to a stranger for scanning, the people who produce
e-texts have to get over all three of these barriers. This is
the bottleneck in production. It's relatively easy to get an
e-text second-proofed; making it in the first place is the
hardest part. You need to have a book, the means to turn it into
an e-text and the time and will to do it.
After that comes second proofing. There are two problems here.
One is that there may not be enough texts for all the people who
want to second-proof; the other is that a lot of beginners just
abandon texts given to them for second-proofing, which holds up
the process and is discouraging for others. So a lot of
volunteers do their own second-proofing or send their texts to
established contacts with a track record of finishing the job,
rather than making them available to newbies. The Directors of
Production do serve as contact points, and at any given moment
may have some texts for proofing, but they can only distribute
the texts that have already been made.
With that explanation out of the way, I can better address your
question of what you can do.
Second-proofing is an easy way to start, but material isn't just
waiting for you. If you want to look for some, post your offer
here and wait a week or so. If no takers by then, e-mail Michael
and ask if there are any texts available; he may be able to
refer you to a Director of Production who has something current.
You may not get an e-text immediately, but you will get one. Of
course, you can also look here for offers of e-texts ready to
proof.
Your other option is to take on a book yourself. In your case,
you already have a scanner, so you are equipped to become a
producer. You need to find a PD book.
Getting PD books means finding and borrowing or buying them. You
can do this through used bookshops, libraries or book sites on
the Internet. I mention a few net sites in the FAQ in the link
below. I get all my books through them, since they make it easy
for me to find the books I want. Prices range from $5 up to (in
my case) about $30.
The best advice I can offer here is: pick a book that you _want_
to contribute, and a book you'll enjoy working with--you'll be
living with it up close and personal for quite a while.
In March and April of 1999, Pietro created the PG Volunteers'
WWWBoard and Greg Newby set up the mailing list gutvol-d, and, for
the first time, volunteers who hadn't been introduced to each other
by Michael or the Directors could meet online and communicate
directly. A few FAQs and HOWTOs were written, covering the basics,
the nitty-gritty of producing books. All of this activity made it
much easier for people to get involved, and the Project experienced
a new influx of interested volunteers. Improved OCR software was
also a factor at this time: in response to the commoditization of
scanners, there was rapid improvement in the quality of OCR, and
better OCR made for easier production of e-texts. More work was
shared out in co-operative proofing experiments.
It was in this new, expansive atmosphere, with ideas flooding in
from enthusiasts newly energized by the project, that Charles Franks
(Charlz) came up with the idea of a web site that would serve to
distribute the work of proofing a book among many volunteers. But
not only did he think of the concept; he went ahead and did it!
In April 2000, Charlz first requested comments on his idea in
a post on the Volunteers' WWWBoard, and by the end of September,
the first e-texts were queueing up on the production line.
On October 9th, Charlz wrote:
Number of pages proofed by date:
2nd 6
3rd 6
4th 20 <-- Newsletter
5th 27
6th 25
7th 29
8th 30
9th 45!! (and the day ain't over yet)
(The "Newsletter" is a reference to the site being mentioned in
the PG Newsletter on October 4th, 2000).
Distributed Proofreaders, or DP, simply kept growing from there, as
Charlz kept scanning and adding more books and features and
proofers, and its simple organic growth produced 600 e-texts in two
years, but when Charlz asked for more help on Slashdot, a popular
technical news site, on November 8th, 2002, the response blew the
roof off! The pages per day figure jumped from 1,000 to about 10,000
for a while, then settled down at its current 4,000. 4,000 pages,
even given that each page is proofed twice, is a lot of pages. 2,000
produced pages per day is about five full books per day. DP has
formed the backbone of PG's production ever since. Whatever the
future of DP's production, its effect on shared knowledge and
resources, and the communication and community it has built, ensures
that Project Gutenberg will never be the same again.
I began writing this FAQ in March 2002, and was essentially finished
around December 2002. It sat around, with a few tweaks here and
there in response to comments, until the start of September 2003.
Today, it is a useful guide to Project Gutenberg norms and practices.
By the time you read it, it may be ancient history ("Hey, Grandad,
did you REALLY scan things from paper? Why didn't you use your
brain implant?" :-) But it is one record of How Things Were in
Project Gutenberg during this time of change.
jim
September 7th, 2003.
Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002
I have a question not answered in this FAQ. How do I ask it?
If it's about how to produce a text, the Volunteers' Board at
<https://www.gutenberg.org/vol/wwwboard/> is generally the best
place to ask.
If it's a question of active interest to the general body of
volunteers, you can ask it on the gutvol-d mailing list. See
<https://www.gutenberg.org/subs.html> for joining it.
For other questions, you should check our Contact Information page at
<https://www.gutenberg.org/contactinfo.html> and e-mail the appropriate
person.
About Project Gutenberg:
G.1. What is Project Gutenberg?
G.2. Where did Project Gutenberg come from?
G.3. What has Project Gutenberg achieved?
G.4. Who runs Project Gutenberg?
G.5. How many people are in Project Gutenberg?
G.6. How can I contact Project Gutenberg?
G.7. How can I help Project Gutenberg?
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G.9. What is the relationship between Project Gutenberg, Projekt
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About Project Gutenberg publications:
G.10. Does Project Gutenberg publish only books?
G.11. What books does Project Gutenberg publish?
G.12. What other things does Project Gutenberg publish?
G.13. How does Project Gutenberg choose books to publish?
G.14. What languages does Project Gutenberg publish in?
G.15. Why don't you have any / many books about history, geography, science,
G.16. Why don't you have any books by Steven King, Tom Clancy,
Tolkien, etc.?
G.17. Why is Project Gutenberg so set on using Plain Vanilla ASCII?
Readers' FAQ
About Finding eBooks:
R.1. How can I find an eBook I'm looking for?
R.2. Can I get a complete list of Project Gutenberg eBooks?
R.3. How can I download a PG text that hasn't been cataloged yet?
R.4. You don't have the eBook I'm looking for. Can you help me find it?
R.5. Where else can I go to get eBooks?
R.6. I see some eBooks in several places on the Net. Do different
people really re-create the same eBooks?
About Using the Web Site:
R.7. Why couldn't I reach your site? (or: Why is your site slow?)
R.8. I get an error when I try to download a book.
R.9. I searched for a book I know is in Project Gutenberg, but got no
results.
R.10. Can I copy your website, or your website materials?
R.11. Your site doesn't look right in my browser.
I clicked on a button, and nothing happened.
R.12. What does that thing about "Select FTP Site" mean?
R.13. What exactly is an FTP site anyway?
R.14. Can I become an FTP mirror?
R.15. Can I make a private FTP mirror for my school, library or
organization?
R.16. When I clicked on the file I want, nothing happened.
R.17. How many texts are downloaded through the web site?
R.18. What are the most popular books?
About Downloading and Using Project Gutenberg eBooks:
R.19. Should I download a ZIP or a TXT file?
R.20. I've got a ZIP file. What do I do with it?
R.21. I tried to unzip my file, but it said the file was corrupt, or
damaged.
R.22. I see gibberish onscreen when I click on a book.
R.23. Can I download and read your books?
R.24. What am I allowed to do with the books I download?
R.25. Does Project Gutenberg know who downloads their books?
R.26. I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text.
How should I report them?
R.27. I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text.
Who should I report them to?
R.28. I've reported some typos. What will happen next?
R.29. I've got the text file, and I can read it, but it seems to be
double-spaced or it has control characters like ^J or ^M at
the end of every line.
R.30. When I print out the text file, each line runs over the edge
of the page and looks bad.
R.31. I can read the text file, but a few characters appear as black
squares, or gibberish.
R.32. Can I get a handheld device for reading PG texts? Which device
should I get?
R.33. How can I read a PG eBook on my PDA (Palm, iPaq, Rocket . . .)
About the Files:
R.34. What types of files are there, and how do I read them?
R.35. What do the filenames of the texts mean?
R.36. What is the difference within PG between an "edition" and a "version"?
R.37. What is the difference between an "etext" and an "eBook"?
R.38. What are the "Etext/Ebook numbers" on the texts?
R.39. What do the month and year on the text mean?
Copyright FAQ
C.1. What is copyright?
C.2. Does copyright differ from country to country? From state to state?
C.3. What are the copyright laws outside the U.S.?
C.4. Why does Project Gutenberg advise only on U.S. copyright issues?
C.5. I don't live in the U.S. Do these rules apply to me?
C.6. What is the public domain?
C.7. What can I do with a text that is in the public domain?
C.8. How does a book enter the public domain?
C.9. How does a copyright lapse?
C.10. What books are in the public domain?
C.11. My book says that it's "Copyright 1894". Is it in the public domain?
C.12. How can a copyright owner release a work into the public domain?
C.13. When is an author not the owner of a copyright on his or her works?
C.14. What does Project Gutenberg mean by "eligible"?
C.15. I have a manuscript from 1900. Is it eligible?
C.16. How come my paper book of Shakespeare says it's "Copyright 1988"?
C.17. What makes a "new copyright"?
C.18. I have a 1990 book that I know was originally written in 1840,
but the publisher is claiming a new copyright. What should I do?
C.19. I have a 1990 reprint of an 1831 original. Is it eligible?
C.20. I have a text that I know was based on a pre-1923 book, but I
don't have the title page. Can I submit it to PG?
C.21. How does Project Gutenberg "clear" books for copyright?
C.22. I want to produce a particular book. Will it be copyright cleared?
C.23. I have some extra material (images, introduction, preface, missing
chapter) that should go into an existing PG text. Do I have to
copyright-clear my edition before submitting it?
C.24. I see some Project Gutenberg eBooks that are copyrighted. What's
up with that?
C.25. What are "non-renewed" books?
C.26. How can I get Project Gutenberg to clear a non-renewed book?
Volunteers' FAQ
About the Basics:
V.1. How do I get started as a Project Gutenberg volunteer?
V.2. What experience do I need to produce or proof a text?
V.3. How do I produce a text?
V.4. Do I need any special equipment?
V.5. Do I need to be able to program?
V.6. I am a programmer, and I would like to help by programming.
V.7. What does a Gutenberg volunteer actually do?
V.8. Can I produce a book in my own language?
V.9. Does it have to be a book? Can I produce pieces from a magazine
or other periodical?
V.10. Do I _have_ to produce in plain ASCII text?
V.11. Where do I sign up as a volunteer?
V.12. How do PG volunteers communicate, keep in touch, or co-ordinate work?
V.13. Where can I find a list of books that need proofing?
V.14. Is there a list of books that Project Gutenberg wants?
V.15. I have one book I'd like to contribute. Can I do just that without
signing up?
About production:
V.16. How does a text get produced?
V.17. How long must a text be to qualify for PG?
V.18. What books are eligible?
V.19. Are reprints or facsimiles eligible?
V.20. What is the difference between a reprint and a facsimile?
V.21. What is the difference between a reprint and a "new edition"?
V.22. What book should I work on?
V.23. I have a book in mind, but I don't have an eligible copy.
V.24. Where can I find an eligible book?
V.25. What is "TP&V"?
V.26. What is "Posting"?
V.27. I think I've found an eligible book that I'd like to work on.
What do I do next?
V.28. What books are currently being worked on?
V.29. How do I find out if my book is already on-line somewhere?
V.30. My book is not on the In-Progress list, and I can't find it on-line.
V.31. My book is on-line, but not in Project Gutenberg. What should I do?
V.32. My book is already on-line in Project Gutenberg, but my printed book
is different from the version already archived. Can I add my version?
V.33. I see a book that was being worked on three years ago. Is anyone still
working on it?
V.34. I've decided which book to produce. How do I tell PG
I'm working on it?
V.35. I have a two- or three-volume set. Should I submit them as one text,
or one text for each volume?
V.36. I have one physical book, with multiple works in it (like a
collection of plays). Should I submit each text separately?
V.37. How do I get copyright clearance?
V.38. I have a two- or three-volume set. Do I have to get a separate
clearance on each physical book?
V.39. I have one physical book, with multiple works in it (like a
collection of plays). Do I have to get a separate clearance
for each work?
V.40. Who will check up on my progress? When?
V.41. How long should it take me to complete a book?
V.42. I want/don't want my name published on my e-text
V.43. I'd like to put a copy of my finished e-text, or another
Gutenberg text, on my own web page.
V.44. I've scanned, edited and proofed my text. How do I find someone
to second-proof it?
V.45. I've gone over and over my text. I can't find any more errors,
and I'm sick of looking at it. What should I do now?
V.46. Where and how can I send my text for posting?
V.47. What is the "Credits Line"?
V.48. How soon after I send it will my text be posted?
V.49. I found a problem with my posted text. What do I do?
V.50. Someone has e-mailed me about my posted text, pointing out errors.
V.51. Someone has e-mailed me about my posted text, thanking me.
About Proofing:
V.52. What role does proofing play in Project Gutenberg?
V.53. What is Distributed Proofing?
V.54. What do I need to proof an e-text?
V.55. Do I need to have a paper copy of the book I'm proofing?
V.56. What's the difference between "first proof" and "second proof"?
V.57. What do I do with an e-text sent to me for proofing?
V.58. What kinds of errors will I have to correct?
V.59. How long does it take to proof an e-text?
V.60. Are there any special techniques for proofing?
V.61. What actually happens during a proof?
About Net searching:
V.62. I've found an eligible text elsewhere on the Net, but it's not
in the PG archives. Can I just submit it to PG?
V.63. I've found an eligible text elsewhere on the Net, but it's not
in the PG archives. Why should I submit it to PG?
V.64. I have already scanned or typed a book; it's on my web site.
How can I get it included in the Gutenberg archives?
V.65. I have already scanned or typed a book; it's on my web site.
The world can already access it. Why should I add it to the
Gutenberg archives?
V.66. I have already scanned or typed a book, but it's not in plain text
format. Can I submit it to PG?
About author-submitted eBooks:
V.67. I've written a book. Will PG publish it?
V.68. I have translated a classic book from one language to another.
Will PG publish my translation?
V.69. OK, this is one of the cases where PG will publish it.
What do I do next?
V.70. I hold the copyright on a book. Can I release it to the public domain?
V.71. I hold the copyright on a book. Do I have to release the book
into the public domain for Project Gutenberg to publish it?
V.72. I hold the copyright on a book, and would like Project Gutenberg
to publish it. Can I choose what rights to assign?
About what goes into the texts:
V.73. Why does PG format texts the way it does?
About the characters you use:
V.74. What characters can I use?
V.75. What is ASCII?
V.76. So what is ISO-8859? What is Codepage 437? What is Codepage 1252?
What is MacRoman?
V.77. What is Unicode?
V.78. What is Big-5?
V.79. What are "8-bit" and "7-bit" texts?
V.80. I have an English text with some quotations from a language that
needs accents--what should I do about the accents?
V.81. I have some Greek quotations in my book. How can I handle them?
V.82. I want to produce a book in a language like Spanish or French
with accented characters. What should I do?
About the formatting of a text file:
V.83. How long should I make my lines of text?
V.84. Why should I break lines at all? Why not make the text as one
line per paragraph, and let the reader wrap it?
V.85. Why use a CR/LF at end of line?
V.86. One space or two at the end of a sentence?
V.87. How do I indicate paragraphs?
V.88. Should I indent the start of every paragraph?
V.89. Are there any places where I should indent text?
V.90. Can I use tabs (the TAB key) to indent?
V.91. How should I treat dashes (hyphens) between words?
V.92. How should I treat dashes replacing letters?
V.93. What about hyphens at end of line?
V.94. What should I do with italics?
V.95. Yes, but I have a long passage of my book in italics! I can't
really CAPITALIZE or _otherwise_ /mark/ all that text, can I?
V.96. Should I capitalize the first word in each chapter?
V.97. What is a Transcriber's Note? When should I add one?
V.98. Should I keep page numbers in the e-text?
V.99. In the exceptional cases where I keep page numbers, how should
I format them?
V.100. Should I keep Tables of Contents?
V.101. Should I keep Indexes and Glossaries?
V.102. How do I handle a break from one scene to another, where the
book uses blank lines, or a row of asterisks?
V.103. How should I treat footnotes?
V.104. My book leaves a space before punctuation like semicolons,
question marks, exclamation marks and quotes. Should I do
the same?
V.105. My book leaves a space in the middle of contracted words like
"do n't", "we 'll" and "he 's". Should I do the same?
V.106. How should I handle tables?
V.107. How should I format letters or journal entries?
V.108. What can I do with the British pound sign?
V.109. What can I do with the degree symbol?
V.110. How should I handle . . . ellipses?
V.111. How should I handle chapter and section headings?
V.112. My book has advertisements at the end. Should I keep them?
V.113. Can I keep Lists of Illustrations, even when producing a
plain text file?
V.114. Can I include the captions of Illustrations, even when producing
a plain text file?
V.115. Can I include images with my text file?
About formatting poetry:
V.116. I'm producing a book of poetry. How should I format it?
V.117. I'm producing a novel with some short quotations from poems.
About formatting plays:
V.118. How should I format Act and Scene headings?
V.119. How should I format stage directions?
V.120. How should I format blank verse?
About some typical formatting issues:
V.121. Sample 1: Typical formatting issues of a novel.
V.122. Sample 2: Typical formatting issues of non-fiction
V.123. Sample 3: Typical formatting issues of poetry
V.124. Sample 4: Typical formatting issues of plays
About problems with the printed books:
V.125. I found some distasteful or offensive passages in a book I'm
producing. Should I omit them?
V.126. Some paragraphs in my book, where a character is speaking,
have quotes at the start, but not at the end. Should I close
those quotes?
V.127. The spelling in my book is British English (colour, centre).
Should I change these to American spellings?
V.128. I'm nearly sure that some words in my printed book are typos.
Should I change them?
V.129. Having investigated what looks like a typo, I find it isn't.
Do I need to do anything?
V.130. Aarrgh! Some pages are missing! Do I have to abandon the book?
V.131. Some words are spelled inconsistently in my book (e.g. sometimes
"surprise", sometimes "surprize"). Should I make them consistent?
Word Processing FAQ
W.1. What's the difference between an editor and a word processor?
W.2. Should I use an editor or a word processor?
W.3. Which editor or word processor should I use?
W.4. How can I make my word processor easier to work with for plain text?
W.5. What is the difference between proportional and non-proportional
fonts?
W.6. I can't get words in a table or poem to line up under each other.
About using MS-Word:
W.7. I've edited my book in Word - how do I save it as plain text?
W.8. Quotes look wrong when I save a Word document as plain text.
W.9. Dashes look wrong when I save a Word document as plain text.
W.10. I saved my Word document as HTML, but the HTML looks terrible.
Scanning FAQ
S.1. What is a scanner?
S.2. What types of scanners are there?
S.3. Which scanner should I get?
S.4. What is ADF?
S.5. Should I get ADF?
S.6. What's a "TWAIN driver" and why do I need one?
S.7. How do I scan a book?
S.8. My book won't open flat enough for a good scan, and I don't
want to cut the pages.
S.9. How long does it take to scan a book?
S.10. What scanner settings are best?
S.11. Can I use a digital camera in place of a scanner?
S.12. What is OCR?
S.13. What differences are there between OCR packages?
S.14. How accurate should OCR be?
S.15. Which OCR package should I get?
S.16. What types of mistakes do OCR packages typically make?
S.17. Why am I getting a lot of mistakes in my OCRed text?
S.18. I got an OCR package bundled with my scanner. Is it good enough
to use?
S.19. I want to include some images with a HTML version. How should I
scan them?
S.20. I want to include some images with a HTML version. What type of
image should I use?
S.21. Will PG store scanned page images of my book?
HTML FAQ
H.1. Can I submit a HTML version of my text?
H.2. Why should I make a HTML version?
H.3. Can I submit a HTML version without a plain ASCII version?
H.4. What are the PG rules for HTML texts?
H.5. Can I use Javascript or other scripting languages in my HTML?
H.6. Should I make my HTML edition all on one page, or split it into
multiple linked pages?
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Programs and Programming FAQ
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Formats FAQ
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Volunteers' Voices - Volunteers talk about PG
Amy Zelmer
Ben Crowder
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Bookmarks - web pages commonly referred to in the FAQ
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Please see also the FAQ [F.1] "What formats does Project Gutenberg
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Readers' FAQ
About Finding eBooks:
R.1. How can I find an eBook I'm looking for?
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When we post a book, the posting information contains title and
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After posting, our catalogers get to work and add more information
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People who want to bypass the search on the website and find books
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R.3. How can I download a PG text that hasn't been cataloged yet?
In short, just browse to:
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choose the schedule year of the text (newly-posted texts will usually
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In general, you need to know:
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The fastest and safest FTP site to use for this is ftp.ibiblio.org,
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two, the file may not be available immediately.
You can get the schedule year and basename of the text from its line
in GUTINDEX.ALL. Let's take an example. The file
Mar 2004 The Herd Boy and His Hermit, by C. M. Yonge [#32][hrdbhxxx.xxx]5313
has been posted just a few hours ago as I write this. From the
GUTINDEX entry, the schedule year is 2004, and the basename of the
text is hrdbh.
We divide our texts into directories (folders) based on the schedule
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have directories starting at 90, running through the 90s and then 00,
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directory, so if you're looking for
Dec 1971 Declaration of Independence [whenxxxx.xxx] 1
or
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As it happens, ibiblio supports both HTTP (web) and FTP access to the
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If you want to automate this, you could also use the more direct
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Either way, we see a long page of files, in alphabetical order. Scroll
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This means that both plain text and HTML formats are available,
and you can choose to download them either zipped or uncompressed.
For more detail about conventions for filenames, see the FAQ "What
do the filenames of the texts mean?" [R.35]. The main thing you need
to know is that any file beginning with hrdbh is some format or
edition of this book.
Finally, all you have to do is click on the format you want to
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R.5. Where else can I go to get eBooks?
The On-Line Books Page <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/> and the
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Searching them is a good place to start.
If you're looking for commercial books, like current textbooks or
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R.6. I see some eBooks in several places on the Net. Do different
people really re-create the same eBooks?
It does happen, but mostly by accident. Anyone experienced in eBook
creation will first search the usual places to see whether anyone else
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transcribed, they will not duplicate the effort.
Etexts that are in the public domain very often float around the Net
for years--stored in a gopher server here, posted to Usenet there,
held on someone's local computer for a year or two and then
reformatted as HTML and uploaded to a web site somewhere else. And
this is good, because we want texts to be copied as widely as
possible.
Public domain eBooks are fair game for anyone to copy, correct, mark
up, package and post: that's what being in the public domain means.
Project Gutenberg eBooks are often quickly copied and reformatted, and
posted on other sites like Blackmask at <http://www.blackmask.com>.
If you find an eBook in many different places, the odds are good that
it came from one original source, and was copied around.
It does sometimes happen that people duplicate the transcription of
books already made into text. Sometimes it's because they didn't find
the version already made. Sometimes they have a different edition, and
want to transcribe that. Mostly, though, we all try not to do more
work than we have to.
About Using the Web Site:
R.7. Why couldn't I reach your site? (or: Why is your site slow?)
This isn't common, but it happens. Project Gutenberg is a very busy
site, probably one of the busiest non-commercial sites on the Web, and
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There may also be a bottleneck somewhere else between you and the
site. If at first you don't succeed, _don't tell us_, just try, try
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http://promo.net/pg/
or
https://www.gutenberg.org/
R.8. I get an error when I try to download a book.
We do not keep e-text files on this site. Instead, many FTP sites
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You can find a list of FTP sites that hold Gutenberg texts at
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When you're searching or browsing for titles and authors, you're on
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on the filename, your browser contacts an FTP site and tries to
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the FTP site is busy, or because there's a network traffic bottleneck
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is missing from that FTP site.
Usually, the easiest solution is to choose another FTP site to
download your text from. Go to the Search page, choose a different FTP
site, and search again for your text.
Tip: You should always try to choose the FTP site closest to you. Not
only are you helping to minimize Net traffic by choosing a nearby
site, but your file will download faster!
If all else fails, note the year and the filename of the book you
want, choose an FTP site from this list and click on one of them. Then
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For example, if you find "Lady Susan" by Jane Austen, you will see
that it was published by Gutenberg in 1997, and its filename is
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browser) on the file lsusn10.txt.
R.9. I searched for a book I know is in Project Gutenberg, but got no
results.
First go to the Advanced Search page. Sometimes you may miss in
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Tips.
If that fails, you can Browse through the site catalog. Let's say
you're looking for "The Wandering Jew" by Eugene Sue.
Go to the PG Home page: <https://www.gutenberg.org/>
Once on this page, click on: "Browse" in "Browse by Author or Title"
You are then brought to a new page, asking you to select an "FTP
site". Further details on how and why to choose an "FTP Site" are
available on this page.
Select an FTP Site from the Selection List available at the bottom of
the page, then click on "Select".
You get a new page, Click on "S", initial for "Sue, Eugene"
You should now see a list of all of the Authors whose Last name starts
with "S". Scroll down till you find the direct links to the Sue,
Eugene works.
Click on the work you are interested to, then click on the file link
found on the page you were brought to, Etext Card ID -3987- when
selecting the work, as immediately above.
On this page, above the teaser, there are two working links:
DOWNLOAD:
· es12v10.txt - 2.95 MB
· es12v10.zip - 1.10 MB
Click on the link of your choice in order to get the book.
If you can't find your text either way, the book has not been
cataloged. The site catalog always lags behind the postings, since we
need to collect extra information about the book and the author before
it goes into the full catalog. If you know that the book has been
posted recently, and maybe hasn't made it into the catalog yet, read
the FAQ "How can I download a PG text that hasn't been cataloged yet?"
If even this doesn't help, don't despair! We don't have it, but it may
be elsewhere on the Web. Go to the major search engines and try there.
You can also try looking in the Book Search section of The On-Line
Books Page <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/> or the Internet
Public Library <http://www.ipl.org>, and if you have no luck with
that, you might be able to find it listed as being In Progress
somewhere on their Books In Progress and Requested page at
<http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/in-progress.html>.
R.10. Can I copy your website, or your website materials?
No.
Keeping the PG site updated with the latest e-text releases is an
ongoing job, and our experience is that people, however
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partial copies scattered around the net would be a bad thing.
We welcome mirrors and copies of our e-texts, in new FTP sites [R.14],
but the main web site itself is copyrighted and may not be copied.
R.11. Your site doesn't look right in my browser.
I clicked on a button, and nothing happened.
We take a lot of trouble to ensure that our website uses only valid,
standard HTML, and we're not even slightly tempted to use glitzy
features that look good in one browser but don't work in another, so
we can promise you that our site is not the problem.
The site uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a W3C standard since 1996.
Some older browsers have a buggy implementation of CSS, and this can
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or doesn't know about CSS at all (as in the case of Lynx, for
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If you actually clicked on a button, like the Search button or the
Post button on the Volunteers' Web Board page, and nothing happened,
you might be behind a proxy or web filter that doesn't like you making
POST requests. If you have a web filter switched on, turn it off,
reload the page and try again.
R.12. What does that thing about "Select FTP Site" mean?
Our texts are not actually held on the website. The website just holds
an index; the files themselves are held on many sites throughout the
world, called FTP sites. When you have found the book you're looking
for, and you make that final click to get it, you're not actually
talking to our website any more--you are transferred to the FTP site
you selected. Some FTP sites are near you; some are far away. Some may
be faster than others, even if they are about the same distance; some
may have temporary technical problems.
You should usually select the FTP site nearest you. If you find you're
having problems with that one, you can select another.
R.13. What exactly is an FTP site anyway?
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, one of the oldest and most
reliable protocols of the internet. This is the method by which a file
can be copied from one computer to another.
An FTP site, or FTP server, is a computer that holds files that people
can upload and download. In the case of PG, the Posting Team upload
our texts when they're ready to two main FTP servers,
<ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org> and <ftp://ftp.archive.org>, which serve as
our master copies.
Other FTP sites around the world automatically download the files from
these master sites, so they have a full set of PG publications for you
to download. Because they only check for updates and new files at
intervals, some FTP sites may be a day or two behind. Some FTP sites
don't have space available for everything, so they may hold only the
zipped versions of the files. But most FTP sites will have the
entire PG collection. These are called FTP "mirrors", since they are a
copy of the original.
Many FTP sites exist that offer a full PG mirror but are not on our
FTP sites list. Commonly, these are in schools, where they serve the
local students, but don't have enough bandwidth to offer downloads to
worldwide users.
R.14. Can I become an FTP mirror?
Yes! We're always looking for more FTP mirrors.
If you manage an FTP site with a few GB of space, please check our
Contact Information page <https://www.gutenberg.org/contactinfo.html>
and contact the appropriate person, who will make the arrangements for
you. If space is a problem, you can consider holding only zipped
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you want more or less traffic.
R.15. Can I make a private FTP mirror for my school, library or
organization?
Yes.
We like all FTP mirrors to be open to as many people as possible, but
we know that not all schools have the resources to be a public mirror,
so we welcome all mirrors.
And anyway, you don't even have to ask, because we don't control
what happens to our texts once we post them!
R.16. When I clicked on the file I want, nothing happened.
When you select a file for download, your request goes to the FTP site
you selected, not to our website. If the FTP site you selected is
having problems, or if there is the Net version of a traffic jam
between you and it, you may have problems downloading.
Select a different FTP site [R.12] and try again.
R.17. How many texts are downloaded through the web site?
We don't really do statistics, but in one particular month for which
we did, we had a figure of about 800,000 searches completed. Since the
final request for download goes to the FTP site selected and not to our
website, we can't confirm that all of these were actually downloaded,
but we expect that most people who have gone all the way through the
search will finish the job.
In another month, we had about 1,000,000 downloads of files from
ftp.ibiblio.org, our main FTP site. This does not count downloads from
other FTP sites, of course. Why are there more downloads than
searches? Because people who are already familiar with getting PG
texts can skip the website search and download straight from the FTP
sites.
R.18. What are the most popular books?
We very rarely do statistics, but on one occasion in late 1999 when we
did, we found the top author searches to be:
1 shakespeare
2 poe
3 doyle
4 melville
5 dante
6 joyce
7 shaw
8 christie
9 conrad
10 porter
11 verne
12 hemingway
13 darwin
14 miller
15 woolf
16 zola
17 king
18 eliot
19 churchill
20 smith
21 twain
and the top individual books searched for to the point of downloading
were:
1. Lady Susan, by Jane Austen
2. 1st PG Collection of Edgar Allan Poe
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
5. A Christmas Carol, by Dickens
6. The King James Bible
7. Twelve Stories and a Dream, by H.G. Wells
8. Stories by Modern American Authors
9. Lock and Key Library, Magic & Real Detectives
10. [Hans Christian] Andersen's Fairy Tales
11. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving
These numbers vary a lot. When a movie based on a classic is released,
downloads of that eBook go through the roof!
About Downloading and Using Project Gutenberg eBooks:
R.19. Should I download a ZIP or a TXT file?
If you know how to unzip a file, then downloading the zip is faster.
For some non-text eBooks that contain multiple files, like HTML with
included images, only a zip file may be available. For some other
formats, like MP3 or MPEG, there may not be a zipped version available
because the native format of the file is already compressed enough
that zipping it doesn't save much.
R.20. I've got a ZIP file. What do I do with it?
Unzip it.
If you want a free program, you could try the open source Info-Zip
software available at
<http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/tools/zip/info-zip/> for Mac, MS-DOS,
Unix, Windows and just about everything else you might have.
If you want a commercial program, PKZIP from <http://www.pkware.com>
and WinZip from <http://www.winzip.com> are among many popular
shareware utilities that allow you to unzip files.
Mac-users using Stuffit Expander may like to set a preference (File /
Preferences / Cross Platform) to "Convert text files to Macintosh format
. . . When a file is known to contain text". This gets rid of strange
characters (linefeeds), which are not wanted on a Mac, at the beginnings
of lines. MacZip is another free program for Macs. Mac users can also
try ZipIt or other shareware programs available from the Info-Mac
archives, e.g. from
<ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/_Compress_&_Translate/>.
R.21. I tried to unzip my file, but it said the file was corrupt, or
damaged.
The chances are that it didn't download correctly. Try downloading it
again. If you don't succeed the second time, try downloading the
unzipped version.
R.22. I see gibberish onscreen when I click on a book.
To save download time, our etexts are stored in zipped form as well
as text form. Zipped files are smaller, and take less time to transfer
to your computer, but you need a program to unzip them. If you try to
view a zipped file directly, it looks like gibberish.
You can recognize zipped files easily because their filenames end in
.zip.
If this happens, either make sure you're asking your browser to Save
the file rather than display it (often, you right-click the file and
choose Save) or else click on the version of the file that ends in
.txt instead of .zip. You don't need a zip program to view .txt files.
Looking at a zip rather than a text file is by far the most common
reason for this problem, but there are some others. If you're quite
sure that you're not looking at a zip file, then it could be that the
file you downloaded is in a character set that your viewer doesn't
recognize, like Big-5 [V.78] for Chinese texts, or Unicode [V.77].
If this is the case, you will have to find a viewer that works on your
computer for the specified character set. We may also have an ASCII
version of the same text available for you--we do try to have ASCII
versions for everything [G.17], but some languages, like Chinese,
just cannot be sensibly expressed in ASCII.
If you can see _most_ of the characters, enough to be able to make out
the text, but there are regular gibberish characters, black squares,
empty boxes or obviously missing characters scattered about through
words, then you are probably looking at an "8-bit" text [V.79], with
accented characters, and your viewer doesn't handle the character set.
See the FAQ "I can read the text file, but a few characters appear as
black squares, or gibberish" [R.31].
If there are a very few gibberish characters, black squares or
obviously missing characters in the text, then it's likely that this
was intended to be a 7-bit text, but a few 8-bit characters like the
British pound symbol or accented letters slipped through.
R.23. Can I download and read your books?
Yes. That's what Project Gutenberg is all about--making texts
available free to everyone!
R.24. What am I allowed to do with the books I download?
Most Project Gutenberg e-texts are in the public domain. You can do
anything you like with these--you can re-post them on your site, print
them, distribute them, translate them to other languages, convert them
to other formats, or redistribute them in unchanged form. However, if
you distribute versions under the Project Gutenberg trademark, we do
impose some conditions, which are explained in the header and/or
footer in each text.
Some Project Gutenberg e-texts have copyright restrictions. You can
still download and read these, but you may not be allowed to
reproduce, modify or distribute them. When browsing or searching on
the site, you will see these copyright-restricted texts indicated in
the listings. For fuller information about them, download the e-text
and read the header or footer of the file, which will spell out the
conditions in detail.
R.25. Does Project Gutenberg know who downloads their books?
No, and we don't want to!
Like any Internet transfer, our sites have to know the IP addresses
that contact them; without that, no communication is possible. But we
do not trace, hold or examine them beyond what is necessary to deal
with any problems or maintain logs or statistics. We never identify IP
addresses with people.
Further, we encourage people, sites, schools around the world to
mirror, or copy, our texts to their sites. Once that happens, we have
no control over them, and we never have any idea who or even how many
people access them after that.
Even further, we encourage people to distribute the texts on disks,
CDs, paper, and any other storage format they can find. We encourage
them to convert the texts to other formats, and share them.
For most people reading this, anonymity is probably not an issue, but
you may live in a place or time where reading Paine, or Voltaire, or
the Bible, or the Koran, is considered suspicious or even subversive.
We don't know who you are, and what we don't know, we can't tell.
Currently (mid-2002), by means of DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions
Management) many commercial publishers can make a list of exactly
who is reading which of their eBooks. We _don't_ know, and we don't
_want_ to know.
R.26. I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text.
How should I report them?
The first thing to remember is that the people who actually make the
corrections you suggest are very experienced, and are used to seeing
lots of different types of errata reports. So the exact format of your
report isn't really very important--just get the report to us in any
clear form that we can understand.
Beyond that, here are some tips to avoid misunderstandings.
It's always helpful if you report the full title, etext number, year
and filename of the text you are correcting. We have multiple editions
and versions of some texts, like Homer's "Odyssey", and unless you
tell us exactly what text you mean, we may have to spend some time
searching and guessing.
Especially, _please_ check and report the exact filename of the text.
It is amazingly common for people to report problems with abcde10.txt,
when abcde11.txt is already posted, and has these and other errors
already fixed.
When there are only a few errors, it's usually easiest to cut and
paste the line or lines where the error is into your e-mail, with your
comment.
It can also be useful to give the line number of the place where the
error is, and some people who check texts regularly do this. If this
seems natural to you, do it; if it doesn't, don't.
An ideal report for a typical errata list might look like:
Title: The Odyssey, by Homer
Translated by Butcher & Lang
April, 1999 [Etext #1728]
File: dyssy08.txt
Line 884:
back Telemachus, who bas now resided there for a month.
"bas" should be "has"
Line 1491:
Ithaca yet stands. But I wouldask thee, friend, concerning
"would" and "ask" are run together here
Line 1563:
in his father's seat and the elders gave place to him
This is the end of a paragraph, and needs a period at end.
Line 15346-7:
'Hearken to me now, ye men of Ithaca, to the
will say. Through your own cowardice, my friends, have
I think there is something missing between "the" and "will"
But the following would get the job done as well:
In Homer's Odyssey, translated by Butcher and Lang, from /etext99,
file dyssy08.txt, I found the following errors:
Telemachus, who bas now resided
change "bas" to "has"
But I wouldask thee,
"would ask" run together
and the elders gave place to him
needs period
ye men of Ithaca, to the
will say.
line missing between "the" and "will"?
Where there are more than a few changes, it may be easiest all round
just to submit a corrected version of the file. However, if you do
this, please do not re-wrap the paragraphs unless it is really
necessary; we need to check your suggestions before reposting, and if
the file is very different, it is difficult and time-consuming for us
to find your real changes among all of the changes in the lines.
R.27. I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text.
Who should I report them to?
The Posting Team, who post the books, also make the corrections, and
ultimately, the corrections need to go to them.
Many producers put their e-mail addresses in their texts, specifically
so that readers can contact them when errors are found. If you see
that in your text, you should try to contact the producer first. This
is especially true if the corrections aren't obvious, as in the case
of missing words. The producer is likely to have the original book,
and will probably be able to confirm your corrections without visiting
a library. If the book needs the corrections, the producer can then
notify the Posting Team.
If you get no response from the producer, or if there is no e-mail
address listed, or if the corrections are small and obvious, you can
send them to any or all of the Posting Team directly.
R.28. I've reported some typos. What will happen next?
This varies wildly. Sometimes, you may just get a response e-mail in a
day or three saying thanks, and that we've fixed the typo. This is
normal when you've just reported one or a few obvious typos.
Where there is some text missing, or the changes you suggest are
otherwise not obvious, we may have to find someone with an eligible
copy of the book to confirm the changes, and that might take time.
Normally, you will get an e-mail explaining that within a week.
Sometimes, even though you've noticed only one or two small typos, one
of the Posting Team who was looking at it may find many more, and
decide that the whole text needs to be re-proofed. This may also take
time.
If the text needs a lot of changes, we may post a new EDITION [R.35]
of it, with a new filename: e.g. abcde10.txt may become abcde11.txt.
In this case, you will receive a copy of the e-mail sent to the posted
list announcing the new file. Our current rule of thumb is that we
create a new edition when we make twelve significant changes, but we
judge each on a case-by-case basis, and especially will usually not
make a new edition if the original was posted recently.
R.29. I've got the text file, and I can read it, but it seems to be
double-spaced or it has control characters like ^J or ^M at
the end of every line.
This is most often seen on Mac or Linux. If you want to dig into why
this effect happens, see the FAQ "Why use a CR/LF at end of line?" [V.85].
Perhaps viewing it in a different editor or viewer will help, but it's
usually easiest just to globally replace all of the control characters
(if you see them) with nothing, or to replace all double line-ends
with single line-ends.
R.30. When I print out the text file, each line runs over the edge
of the page and looks bad.
If you have a file ending in .txt from Project Gutenberg, it is
usually formatted with about 70 characters per line, and with a
Carriage Return/Line Feed pair (also known as a "Hard Return" or a
"Paragraph Mark") at the end of every line.
This is the most widely accepted format for text files, but it's not
ideal on all computers and all programs. 70 characters per line means
that if you are using an unusually large or small font to print it,
lines may wrap around or not reach across the page. The hard return
means that on some systems, the lines may appear double-spaced.
Unfortunately, we can't advise you how best to format texts on all
systems, mostly because we don't know every system! Here are a couple
of tips you might try:
If your font is too big or too small, try setting the font to Courier
size 10 or Times size 12. It may not be ideal, but it mostly works.
In a word processor, you may be able to remove the Hard Returns, but
beware! if you remove too many, the whole text will become one
paragraph. One common formula for removing the HRs goes like this:
1. First, all paragraphs and separate lines should be separated
by two HRs, so that you can see one blank line between them.
Where they aren't, as in the case of a table of contents or
lines of verse, add the extra HRs to make them so.
2. Replace All occurrences of two HRs with some nonsense character
or string that doesn't exist in the text, like ~$~.
3. Replace All remaining HRs with a space.
4. Replace your inserted string ~$~ with one HR.
R.31. I can read the text file, but a few characters appear as black
squares, or gibberish.
The text is using some character set that your editor or viewer isn't.
For example, the text is using ISO-8859-1, and your viewer is using
Codepage 850--or vice versa. You can see the plain ASCII characters,
but non-ASCII characters like accented letters display as nonsense.
Look at the top of the file for a clue to the character set encoding:
if it's there, it may help you to find which editor, or font, or
viewer you should be using.
R.32. Can I get a handheld device for reading PG texts? Which device
should I get?
To read eBooks on a handheld, you need three things: the eBook
content itself (which you can get from PG and other sites), a device
(which I will sometimes call a PDA, even though technically, the
RocketBook isn't a PDA) and the reader software that runs on the PDA.
In mid-2002, there are three main families of handheld devices people
use for reading eBooks: Palms, Pocket PCs and RocketBooks (or their
successor, REB1100s). In general, it is possible to use any of
these in combination with any common type of personal computer.
Palms are very common, especially when you count not just the Palm
<http://www.palm.com> itself, but PalmOS-based devices from other
manufacturers, like:
the Franklin eBookman <http://www.franklin.com/ebookman/>,
the Handspring Visor <http://www.handspring.com>.
the Sony Clie <http://www.sony.com> and
Because of the number of makers of PalmOS-based devices, you can buy
them with lots of combinations of features--color screen, audio,
different memory sizes. Of course, Palms have other applications
besides eBook reading. Palms are the smallest and most portable of the
three classes, and tend to have the best battery life for travelling,
but they also have the smallest screen. Just about all reader software
will run on Palms, except the Microsoft Reader, which runs only on
Pocket PCs, but you don't need the Microsoft Reader for Project
Gutenberg eBooks.
In Pocket PCs, the Compaq iPaq is by far the most common in mid-2002.
More expensive and bulkier than a Palm, it does have a bigger screen.
Like the Palms, it can perform many functions besides reading eBooks.
Only Pocket PCs can support the Microsoft Reader, but this is not
necessary for reading Project Gutenberg eBooks. <http://www.compaq.com>
The RocketBook, and its successor the Gemstar REB1100,
<http://www.gemstartvguide.com> are quite different from the others.
These were built specifically for reading eBooks, and do not have
additional functions. They are not, technically, PDAs. Their screens
are bigger, and excellent for reading, but do not offer color. They
also don't offer a choice of readers--the dedicated reader is built-in
to the device. Both of them require the eBooks you load to be
formatted for their reader, and files made for them usually have the
extension .rb for RocketBook. The REB1100 does not come with the
RocketLibrarian, which is the program you run on your PC to turn an
etext into a RocketBook file, but people are still making .rb files,
and the RocketLibrarian is still available and popular among an
enthusiastic group of Rocket users. (The REB1200 is entirely different
from the REB1100, and, as far as we know, PG etexts cannot easily be
transferred to it.)
In summary, the Rocket/REB1100 is a dedicated reader, with a good
screen, but limited to what it does.
Palms are relatively cheap and common, with a wide range of options,
and the capacity to function as PDAs as well. They can run all
common readers except the Microsoft one.
The iPaq <http://www.compaq.com> has a good color screen, but is
bulkier than a Palm, and can run lots of readers, including the
Microsoft one, but not all Palm readers are available for Pocket PC.
Like Palms, the iPaq can do other jobs besides displaying eBooks.
Different people make different choices among these for reading their
eBooks, and they all work well; it's a matter of personal taste.
R.33. How can I read a PG eBook on my PDA (Palm, iPaq, Rocket . . .)
To read a book on your PDA, you need to get the file into a format
that your reader software understands. Each PDA reader program will
work only with a specific format of file. Some will read several
formats, but, in general, it's a jungle of competing options.
Unless you use a Rocket or REB1100, you will need to install at least
one reader program, and many veteran readers install two or three to
deal with different formats. There are many of them available. In a
recent internal poll of Gutenberg volunteers who use PDAs,
C Spot Run <http://www.32768.com/bill/palmos/cspotrun/index.html>,
Mobipocket <http://www.mobipocket.com>,
PalmReader <http://www.peanutpress.com/>
Plucker <http://www.plkr.org>
were our favored choices for reader programs.
Further, the process may be different depending on which reader
software you're using. Each format that a reader understands has one
or more converter programs that run on your PC, and turn the plain
text file into that format. So in general, you have to:
1. Download the PG text
2. Edit the text for the layout the converter wants (often HTML).
3. Use the converter to create a file of the format the reader wants.
4. Transfer the converted file to your PDA.
If all this sounds too complicated, remember that many people take and
convert PG texts into many formats, and offer them for download from
their sites. Of course, there is no guarantee that someone will have
converted the particular eBook you want, but there are lots of
options. Try Blackmask <http://www.blackmask.com>, which lists
thousands of texts already converted for Mobipocket, iSilo, RocketBook
and the Microsoft Reader.
There are many other sites that serve pre-converted PG texts.
MemoWare <http://www.memoware.com> is also a useful resource for
converted eBooks, and has lots of information, including an excellent
map of the readers and formats jungle at
<http://www.memoware.com/mw.cgi/?screen=help_format>
Tecriture <http://www.tecriture.net> hosts a service that downloads
and converts PG texts on the fly, and delivers them straight to you.
If you're "rolling your own", you'll probably need to convert our
plain texts to HTML at some point, because a lot of converters require
HTML as input, and this is a common theme in readers' explanations of
how they get texts onto their PDAs. Don't panic! You don't have to be
a HTML wizard to do this--in fact, you don't need to know anything
about HTML at all! Usually, it's just a matter of removing some line
ends and Saving As HTML. You won't get a lot of fancy markup, or
images out of thin air, but you will get the book.
One of the main things you usually have to do in making HTML is unwrap
the lines. If you're making your HTML manually, this is usually done
by replacing two paragraph marks with some nonsense marker like @@Z@@,
replacing all single paragraph marks with a space, and replacing the
nonsense marker with a paragraph mark. After unwrapping, the text can
just be Saved As HTML.
There are some applications that specifically assist with
auto-converting text into HTML:
GutenMark <http://www.sandroid.com/GutenMark> was specifically written
for the purpose, and knows enough about PG conventions to do a very
good job.
InterParse <http://www.interparse.com> is a Windows-based generic text
parser that is very easy and intuitive to use.
The World Wide Web Consortium lists some other options at
<http://www.w3.org/Tools/Misc_filters.html>
If you're using a RocketBook or REB1100, you don't have either the
choices or the confusion to deal with. One of our volunteers who uses
a RocketBook offered this recipe for getting a PG text onto a
RocketBook:
On converting to Rocket:
1. Download text file.
2. Using your utility for showing formatting, enter your word
processing program's edit mode.
3. Replace all double paragraph marks with some nonsense sequence
that can't possibly actually be there, such as @@Z@@.
4. Replace all single paragraph marks with one single space
(enter).
5. Replace your nonsense sequence with one paragraph mark.
6. Convert all your double spaces to single spaces. Repeat this
until you get "0" for how many replacements were made.
7. Save in HTML.
8. Go into your Rocket Librarian. Use "import file using Rocket
Librarian." Go and pick up the file, which will be automatically
converted to .rb in this process.
This sounds long, but it usually takes me under three minutes except
for a very long text. I've never taken longer than five minutes. You
can just go in and pick up the text file with Rocket Librarian, but
what you get onscreen doing this looks very odd. Steps 2-7 are not
essential, and if I'm in a hurry to read something once I might skip
them, but if it's something I know I want to keep I use them.
This formula is not ideal for poetry or blank verse--if you want to
keep the lines unwrapped, you should avoid removing the paragraph
marks.
Another volunteer, who reads on Mobipocket <http://www.mobipocket.com>
offered this suggestion:
I use the MobiPocket Publisher, available free from
www.mobipocket.com. It wants to take a HTML file as input, so the
first thing I have to do is convert my PG text to HTML.
I usually do this by running GutenMark, available at
<http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark>. I can also do it in Microsoft
Word using the following sequence:
Edit / Replace / Special and choose Paragraph Mark twice (or, from
replace, you can type in ^p^p to get two Paragraph Marks) and replace
with @@@@. Replace All. This saves off real paragraph ends by marking
them with a nonsense sequence.
Now Replace _one_ Paragraph Mark (^p) with a space. Replace All. This
removes the line-ends.
Finally, replace @@@@ with _one_ Paragraph Mark. Replace All. This
brings back the Paragraph Ends.
Now I can Save As HTML.
GutenMark does a better job of converting to HTML than my simple Word
formula, since it recognizes standard PG features, and sometimes
Mobipocket doesn't like the HTML produced from Word--it complains of a
missing file, or doesn't recognize quotation marks.
Having got my HTML file, I open Mobipocket Publisher, choose "Project
Gutenberg", Add the File I created, and just Publish it to MobiPocket
.PRC format. Then I pick it up on my iPaq the next time I sync. The
whole process takes two or three minutes, and the results, since I
discovered GutenMark, are good.
I recently came across InterParse 4 at <http://www.interparse.com>. It
doesn't have the built-in knowledge of GutenMark, so the results aren't
as good, but it's really easy to use, and you can see the effect of your
changes onscreen as you do it. For most PG books, all you have to do is
just Open the text file and choose Options / Remove all CRLFs (Except at
Paragraph End), then Convert / Text to HTML and Save As the HTML
filename you want. Quick and painless.
About the Files:
R.34. What types of files are there, and how do I read them?
The vast majority of our files are plain text. You can read these with
any editor or text viewer or browser. Some are HTML. You can read
these with any browser.
For a full listing of other file types as of mid-2002, and how to read
them, please see the Formats FAQ [F.2].
R.35. What do the filenames of the texts mean?
PG files are named for the text, the edition, and the format type.
As of February, 2002, all PG files are named in "8.3" format--that is,
up to eight characters, a dot, and three more characters.
The first five characters in the filename are simply a unique name for
that text, for example, "Ulysses" by Joyce begins with "ulyss".
If the text has been posted as both a 7-bit and 8-bit text, then the
first character of the filename will be a 7 or an 8, to indicate that.
For example, we have both 7crmp10 and 8crmp10 for Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment.
The 6th and 7th characters of the name are the edition number--01
through 99. We normally start at edition 10 (1.0); numbers lower than
that indicate that we think the text needs some more work; numbers
higher than that mean that someone has corrected the original edition
10.
The 8th character of the filename, if it exists, indicates either the
version or the format of the file. When we get a different version of
the text based on a different source, we give it an a, b, c, as for
example if the text is from a different translation. Where we have
posted a text in a different format, we also add an eighth
character--"h" for HTML, "x" for XML, "r" for RTF, "t" for TeX, "u"
for Unicode are established formats. There have been some experimental
postings with "l" for LIT, and "p" for either PRC or PDB.
So, for example:
7crmp10 is our first edition of Crime and Punishment in plain ASCII
8sidd10 is our first edition of Siddhartha, as an 8-bit text
dyssy10b is our first edition of our third translation of Homer's
Odyssey, in plain ASCII
jsbys11 is our second edition of Jo's Boys, in plain ASCII
vbgle10h is our HTML format of our first edition of Darwin's
Voyage of the Beagle
7ldv110 is our 7-bit ASCII version of the first volume of the
Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
To make it worse, we don't always stick to these rules, for example:
1ddc810 is our first edition of the first book of Dante's
Divina Commedia in Italian, as an 8-bit text
80day10 is our first edition of Verne's Around the World in 80 days,
in plain 7-bit ASCII in English.
emma10 is our first edition of Jane Austen's "Emma"--with a
4-character basename instead of 5.
Some series have special, non-standard names. Shakespeare is named
with a digit representing the overall source (First Folio, etc), then
"ws", then a series number, so for example 0ws2610, 1ws2610 and
2ws2610 are all versions of "Hamlet". The Tom Swift series is named
with a two-digit prefix denoting the series number, then "tom", so for
example 01tom10 is "Tom Swift and his Motor-Cycle".
And what should we do with a text from a different source that is
formatted as HTML? For example, if dyssy10b is the name of the third
translation, what should the HTML version be named? dyssy10bh is
obvious, but it uses 9 characters.
The problem, of course, is that we are trying to fit a lot of
information into an 8-character filename, and as the collection grows,
and the number of formats and versions increases, we come across more
pressure on filenames, so while the filename is a good guide to the
contents, it's not definitive.
R.36. What is the difference within PG between an "edition" and a "version"?
We give the name "edition" to a corrected file made from an existing
PG text. For example, if someone points out some typos in our file of
"War and Peace", we will fix them, and, if enough are found to warrant
a "new edition", then instead of just replacing the file wrnpc10.txt,
we may make a new file wrnpc11.txt, and leave the original alone. A
new edition is always filed under the same year and etext number as
the original--it's just an update.
We give the name "version" to a completely independent e-text made
from the same original book, but a different source. For example,
Homer's Odyssey was translated by many different people, but they all
worked from the same book. The translations by Lang, Butler, Pope and
Chapman are very different, but they all come from the same root.
Thus, these are all "versions" of Homer's Odyssey. We give them all
the same basename--dyssy--and each gets a new number, but we keep the
original basename, and add a letter to the filename to indicate that
they are "versions" of the same original book:
dyssy10.txt Butler's Translation
dyssy10a.txt Butcher & Lang's Translation
dyssy10b.txt Pope's Translation
The differences don't have to be as extreme as this for us to create a
new version. "Clotelle"/"Clotel", for example, was a book published
multiple times in English by William Wells Brown, and each time, he
changed the text. We preserve three different texts of the same book
as different versions: clotl10 clotl10a and clotl10b.
R.37. What is the difference between an "etext" and an "eBook"?
If there is any, it seems to be in the eye of the Marketing
Department! Michael Hart started the whole thing, and coined the word
"Etext". The term "eBook" is gaining in popularity, even for texts
that are not full books, so we've started using that more now.
R.38. What are the "Etext/Ebook numbers" on the texts?
These are simply a series of numbers. We give one to each etext as it
is posted, so the earliest etexts have low numbers and later etexts
have higher numbers. Etext number 1 is the Declaration of
Independence, the first text that Michael Hart typed in to the
mainframe that he was using in 1971.
A few numbers are reserved for books that we hope to have in the PG
archive someday; for example, 1984 is reserved for Orwell's classic.
When we improve an text by making some corrections, we call it a new
EDITION, and it keeps the same etext number, but when we post a
different VERSION of the same text, from a different paper book--like
different translations of Homer's Odyssey--each new version gets a new
etext number.
R.39. What do the month and year on the text mean?
Project Gutenberg sets a production target for itself. The idea is
that we try to produce X texts in a month, and we date the texts
according to what month of our schedule they appear in. For example,
if our target for September 2000 was 50 texts, and we actually
produced 55, then the last five would be dated October 2000, and we'd
get a head-start on the month. At the time of writing, in July 2002,
that target is the publication of 200 books per month. However, our
actual production has far outpaced our targets, with the result that
the "head-start" has accumulated so much that we are currently
releasing books scheduled for March, 2004!
The fact that we're so far ahead of schedule makes this quite confusing
for newcomers. If it bothers you, just don't think about it! But at
least it's better than being _behind_ schedule. We didn't always produce
so many books. In the September 1994 newsletter, Michael Hart wrote:
As always, I am terrified of the prospect of
doubling our output to 16 Etexts per month for
next year, we really need your help!!!
That was when the Project's target was 8 Etexts per month. Today,
our target is heading towards 8 eBooks per _day_!
Copyright FAQ
C.1. What is copyright?
Copyright is a limited monopoly granted to the author of a work. It
gives the author the exclusive right, among other things, to make
copies of the work, hence the name.
C.2. Does copyright differ from country to country? From state to state?
Copyright laws are constantly changing all over the world. Each
country has its own copyright laws, some within the framework of
international treaties, some not. Within the U.S., copyright laws are
federal, and do not vary from state to state.
C.3. What are the copyright laws outside the U.S.?
Sorry, we can't advise on copyright law outside the U.S. We can point
you to resources like <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html>
which tries to summarize the various copyright regimes, but we can't
guarantee that these are accurate. Even when they are accurate, it is
very hard to express some of the subtleties of copyright law in a
summary--for example, the question of what constitutes "publication"
for copyright purposes is sometimes unclear.
C.4. Why does Project Gutenberg advise only on U.S. copyright issues?
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is registered in the
U.S. as a 501(c)(3) organization, and our two posting servers are
situated in the U.S., so we are subject to U.S. copyright law, and
only to U.S. copyright law.
Because copyright laws are so tangled and different between countries,
not only in the broad sweep but also in the detail, and because
Project Gutenberg is subject only to U.S. copyright law, we just don't
have the expertise, time or resources to research and advise on the
law in other countries.
C.5. I don't live in the U.S. Do these rules apply to me?
Your country's copyright laws are different from those in the U.S., and
understanding and dealing with them is up to you. If you have a book
that is in the public domain in your country, but not in the U.S., it
is perfectly legal for you to publish it personally there, but we
can't.
Similarly, it may be legal for us to publish it here, but not for you
to publish it, or perhaps even copy it, where you are.
There are organizations in other countries operating in more liberal
copyright regimes that may be able to publish texts that we cannot.
For example, Project Gutenberg of Australia at
<https://www.gutenberg.org.au> can accept many works not eligible in
the U.S.
C.6. What is the public domain?
The public domain is the set of cultural works that are free of
copyright, and belong to everyone equally.
C.7. What can I do with a text that is in the public domain?
Anything you want! You can copy it, publish it, change its format,
distribute it for free or for money. You can translate it to other
languages (and claim a copyright on your translation), write a play
based on it (if it's a novel), or a novelization (if it's a play). You
can take one of the characters from the novel and write a comic strip
about him or her, or write a screenplay and sell that to make a movie.
You don't need to ask permission from anyone to do any of this. When a
text is in the public domain, it belongs as much to you as to anyone.
(However, when some character or part of the work is also trademarked,
as in the case of Tarzan, it may not be possible to release new works
with that trademark, since trademark does not expire in the same way
as copyright. If you propose to base new works on public domain
material, you should investigate possible trademark issues first.)
C.8. How does a book enter the public domain?
A book, or other copyrightable work, enters the public domain when its
copyright lapses or when the copyright owner releases it to the public
domain.
U.S. Government documents can never be copyrighted in the first place;
they are "born" into the public domain.
There are certain other exceptional cases: for example, if a substantial
number of copies were printed and distributed in the U.S. before March,
1989 without a copyright notice, and the work is of entirely American
authorship, or was first published in the United States, the work is in
the public domain in the U.S.
C.9. How does a copyright lapse?
Copyrights are issued for limited periods. When that period is up,
the book enters the public domain.
Copyrights can lapse in other ways. Some books published without a
copyright notice, for example, have fallen into the public domain.
C.10. What books are in the public domain?
Any book published anywhere before 1923 is in the public domain in
the U.S. This is the rule we use most.
U.S. Government publications are in the public domain. This is the
rule under which we have published, for example, presidential
inauguration speeches.
Books can be released into the public domain by the owners of their
copyrights.
Some books published without a copyright notice in the U.S. prior to
March 1st, 1989 are in the public domain.
Some books published before 1964, and whose copyright was not renewed,
are in the public domain.
If you want to rely on anything except the 1923 rule, things can get
complicated, and the rules do change with time. Please refer to our
Public Domain and Copyright How-To at
<https://www.gutenberg.org/vol/pd.html> for more detailed information.
C.11. My book says that it's "Copyright 1894". Is it in the public domain?
Yes.
Its copyright date is 1894, which is before 1923, so its copyright has
lapsed.
C.12. How can a copyright owner release a work into the public domain?
A simple written statement, which may be placed into the work as
released, is sufficient. When a copyright holder places a book into
the public domain and wants PG to publish it, all we need is a
letter [V.70] saying that they are or were the holder of the copyright,
and that they have released it into the public domain.
C.13. When is an author not the owner of a copyright on his or her works?
An author may sell, assign, license, bequeath or otherwise transfer
his or her copyright to another party, such as a publisher or heir.
C.14. What does Project Gutenberg mean by "eligible"?
A book is eligible for inclusion in the archives if we can legally
publish it.
We can legally publish any material that is in the public domain in
the U.S. [C.10], or for which we have the permission of the copyright
holder.
C.15. I have a manuscript from 1900. Is it eligible?
Maybe not.
Works that were created but not "published" before 1978 will not enter
the public domain before the end of 2002. This gets complicated, and
it's not too common. If you have such a case, ask about it.
A borderline example is the classic "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by T. E.
Lawrence, which was actually printed and privately distributed, but
not "published", in 1922. We haven't been able to confirm any pre-1923
"publication" for this.
C.16. How come my paper book of Shakespeare says it's "Copyright 1988"?
Shakespeare was published long enough ago to be indisputably in the
public domain everywhere, so how can a Shakespeare text be
copyrighted?
There are two possibilities:
1. The author or publisher has changed or edited the text enough to
qualify as a "new edition", which gets a "new copyright".
2. The publisher has added extra material, such as an introduction,
critical essays, footnotes, or an index. This extra material is new,
and the publisher owns the copyright on it.
The problem with these practices is that a publisher, having added
this copyrighted material, or edited the text even in a minor way, may
simply put a copyright notice on the whole book, even though the main
part of it--the text itself--is in the public domain! And as time goes
on, the number of original surviving books that can be proved to be in
the public domain grows smaller and smaller; and meanwhile publishers
are cranking out more and more editions that have copyright notices.
Eventually it becomes harder and harder to prove that a particular
book _is_ in the public domain, since there are few pre-1923 copies
available as evidence.
Among the most important things PG does is preventing this creeping
perpetuation of copyright by proving, once and for all, that a
particular edition of a particular book _is_ in the public domain, so
that it can never be locked up again as the private property of some
publisher. We do this by filing a copy of the TP&V, the title page
where the copyright notice must be placed, so that if anyone ever
challenges the work's public domain status, we can point to a proven
public domain copy.
C.17. What makes a "new copyright"?
1. New edition
When a text is in the public domain, anyone--from you to the world's
biggest publisher--can edit it and republish the edited version. When
the edits are substantial enough, the edited work is deemed a "new
edition", and gets a new copyright, dating from the time the new
edition was created.
How substantial must the edits be to qualify as a "new edition"?
That is for a court to decide in any particular case. Changing some
punctuation or Americanizing British spelling would not qualify a work
for a new edition. Theorizing something about Shakespeare and
rewriting lots of lines in "Hamlet" to emphasize your point _would_
make a new edition. In between those extremes is a grey area, where
each new edition would have to be considered on a case-by-case basis.
A special case, that isn't quite a new edition, is when someone "marks
up" a public domain text in, for example, HTML. Where this happens,
the text is in the public domain, but the markup is copyrighted. We've
already seen that when an editor adds footnotes to a public domain
text, he owns copyright on the footnotes but not on the text:
similarly, when he adds markup to the text, he owns copyright on the
markup.
2. Translation
Translation is a common and justified special case of a new edition.
When someone translates a public domain work from one language to
another, they get a new copyright on the translation (but not on the
original, of course, which stays in the public domain so that lots
more people can use it.)
C.18. I have a 1990 book that I know was originally written in 1840,
but the publisher is claiming a new copyright. What should I do?
From a practical point of view, there's not much you can do about it.
It's a Catch-22 situation: in order to prove that the new printing
should be in the public domain, you need a provably public domain copy
to compare against the allegedly copyrighted edition, and if you have
that, you don't need the modern edition anyway.
C.19. I have a 1990 reprint of an 1831 original. Is it eligible?
Yes, as long as we can _show_ that it is a reprint, which usually
means that it has to _say_ that it's a reprint somewhere on the TP&V.
However, we need to be very careful in a case like this. Commonly, the
book itself is eligible, but introductions, indexes, footnotes,
glossaries, commentaries and other such extras may have been added
by the modern publisher, so you should not include them except where
you can prove that they are part of the reprinted material.
C.20. I have a text that I know was based on a pre-1923 book, but I
don't have the title page. Can I submit it to PG?
Unfortunately, no.
What you "know" isn't proof that we could take into court if we were
challenged about it in 20 years, and the whole problem of "new
copyright" [C.17] makes it effectively impossible to tell for sure
what is and isn't copyrighted anyway, without reliable evidence like
the title page.
You need to find a matching paper edition for proof. See the FAQ "I've
found an eligible text elsewhere on the Net, but it's not in the PG
archives. Can I just submit it to PG?" [V.62]
C.21. How does Project Gutenberg "clear" books for copyright?
Usually, we just look at the TP&V. If it was published before 1923, or
says it is a reprint of a pre-1923 edition, that's all we have to do.
In other cases, we may look up library publication data to prove, say,
that a book published in the U.S. without a copyright notice was
indeed published in the years when a copyright notice was required. Or
we may simply see that a particular text was published by the U.S.
Government.
The bottom line is the question: if someone comes to us claiming to
hold the copyright on a text, do we have proof to show that they're
wrong?
Whatever proof or search we have to do, we then file it, either on
paper or electronically, so that the proof will be available in 20 or
50 years' time, or whenever the challenge is made.
C.22. I want to produce a particular book. Will it be copyright cleared?
If it was published before 1923, you will have no problem with its
clearance. If you're relying on one of the other rules, it may just be
too much work to try and prove its public domain status.
C.23. I have some extra material (images, introduction, preface, missing
chapter) that should go into an existing PG text. Do I have to
copyright-clear my edition before submitting it?
Yes.
Otherwise we would have no proof that the extra material you're adding
isn't copyrighted by someone. It's quite common for modern publishers
to add introductions or illustrations to a public-domain novel, and we
need the same standard of proof for these additions that we do for the
main text.
This doesn't apply to an occasional word or two that was omitted by
mistake when the text was first typed. For example, you don't need
to clear another edition just to restore the words "thus perfected the"
and "eliminating all" to the sentence:
And while we Country, we were also sorts of tediums, disputable
possibilities, and deadlocks from the game.
while fixing typos.
C.24. I see some Project Gutenberg eBooks that are copyrighted. What's
up with that?
Authors or publishers may grant Project Gutenberg an unlimited license
to republish their works. In this kind of case, the copyright holders
still retain their rights, but grant permission for us to share these
eBooks with the world.
These copyrighted PG publications can still be copied, but the
permissions granted are spelled out in their headers, and usually
forbid anyone to republish them commercially.
C.25. What are "non-renewed" books?
Works published before 1964 needed to have their copyrights renewed in
their 28th year, or they'd enter into the public domain. Some books
originally published outside of the US by non-Americans are exempt
from this requirement, under GATT. Some works from before 1964 were
automatically renewed.
C.26. How can I get Project Gutenberg to clear a non-renewed book?
As of mid-2002, you probably can't. Because of all of the checks we
need to do to ensure that the book wasn't renewed, or wasn't one of
the exceptions that was automatically renewed, we just don't have the
time to do it. But we're working on it. Right now, we're processing
copyright renewal records with the aim of making them searchable.
Volunteers' FAQ
About the Basics:
V.1. How do I get started as a Project Gutenberg volunteer?
What you actually need to do to produce a PG text can be stated very
simply:
1. Borrow or buy an eligible book.
2. Send us a copy of the front and back of the title page.
3. Turn the book into electronic text.
4. Send it to us.
That's it! All the rest of the producing parts of the FAQ are about
the details of how different people approach these steps.
Different people find their own ways into PG work, and once in, find
their own niches. If you have your own ideas, don't let anything here
stop you from pursuing them.
Some people just read the FAQs, go up to their attic, pull an eligible
book off the shelf, send TP&V [V.25] in, and start typing or scanning.
Next time we hear from them is when they send in [V.46] the completed
eBook for posting. It can be as simple as that.
Some people just download existing PG texts, re-proof them very
carefully and send in corrections.
Some people find regular collaborators through gutvol-d or the
Volunteers' Board or the distributed proofing sites, earn a reputation
as reliable proofers, and continue working as proofers.
Most people start small, and after a little experience of distributed
proofreading or other proofing, begin their PG career as producers.
If you're a typist, cheer now, because you can ignore all the
complicated paraphernalia of computer interfaces, and scanners, and
the quality of OCR software and the mistakes it makes. You can just
sit down at the keyboard with your eligible [V.18] book.
If you're not a typist, start thinking about scanners. It may be a
while before you're ready to start scanning for yourself, but it's
never too early to find out about them.
As soon as you have a solid grasp of how to turn a book into an etext,
please start thinking about how you're going to become a producer.
While proofing work is valuable, PG can only add books when someone
makes the effort to actually make etexts from them, and the people who
run distributed and co-operative proofing projects have to do a lot of
work before and after the proofing step; we want to spread that around
as widely as possible. Project Gutenberg needs more producers!
Whatever you do, _don't_ just hang around expecting someone to offer
you a task to undertake. There is no "head office" where overworked
staff occasionally need interns to do filing and odd-jobs. There are
maybe 200 fairly regular contributors to PG, producers and significant
proofers. We almost never meet each other in person. We have jobs, and
families, and other interests. We work for PG when we can, and when we
want to. In many ways, you could look at us as 200 unrelated people,
each doing our own etext project, using Project Gutenberg as an
umbrella group that sets loose standards, files copyright proofs and
provides secure placement for the finished texts. Since we each have
our own self-assigned single-person tasks, there isn't too much room
to delegate some of that work to a beginner. By all means, volunteer
for some tasks--on the Volunteers' Board, or in gutvol-d--but you
should think in terms of defining your own tasks, and making your own
contribution.
Orientation.
Absolutely everyone--scanners, typists, proofers--should first spend
some time working on a distributed or co-operative proofing project.
This will allow you to get a feel for what happens in making an etext
from paper pages without committing you to more than a few hours'
work.
This is not in any way an institutional requirement, since we don't
have any institutional requirements, but it is very good advice. Many
volunteers start eagerly, wanting to do lots of PG work, and then drop
out because they took on too much, too fast, without understanding the
nature of the work. Don't let that happen to you. Take it in small
chunks.
Check out these distributed proofing sites:
Charles Franks: <https://www.pgdp.net/>
JC Byers: <http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/index.htm>
Dewayne Cushman: <http://www.metalbox.net/dcushman/pgroot.htm>
and spend a few hours over a couple of weeks just processing some
pages for real.
While you're doing that, you should also join a couple of PG mailing
lists [V.12]--gutvol-d and either the weekly or monthly Newsletter list.
Reading these will start to get you connected to what's going on.
Browse the Volunteers' Board--there may be some offers going, and
there's a lot of experience captured in some of those "back-issues",
so don't confine yourself to the front page.
Inform yourself on e-text issues generally, not just within Project
Gutenberg. Explore The On-Line Books Page and the IPL [R.5] and from
them find other eBooks available on-line.
Have a look at our In-Progress List and some lists of suggestions
from others [B.4].
Look at sites like Blackmask <http://www.blackmask.com> and
Pluckerbooks <http://www.pluckerbooks.com/> and Memoware
<http://www.memoware.com> and Bookshare <http://www.bookshare.org> to
learn how our work is being used as a basis and copied and converted
and amplified in many other projects.
Above all, READ a few Project Gutenberg eBooks! You don't have to read
them in full; you don't need to spend weeks poring over Dostoyevsky or
studying Shakespeare. Just download a few and skim them--you'll absorb
what a PG text should be quite painlessly, and maybe you'll get caught
up in the story! If you're looking for light reading, and can't think
of something that you specifically want, how about these all-time
favorites:
The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry.
The Lady, or the Tiger?, by Frank R. Stockton
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Marvelous Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum
A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Heidi, by Johanna Spyri
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain
Black Beauty, by Anna Sewell
Tarzan of the Apes, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tom Swift and his Motor-Cycle, by Victor Appleton
Rebecca Of Sunnybrook Farm, by Kate Douglas Wiggin
Little Lord Fauntleroy, by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Aesop's Fables
Grimms' Fairy Tales
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
Dracula, by Bram Stoker
Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss
The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells
If you have a taste for detectives and mysteries, there's
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
Monsieur Lecoq, by Emile Gaboriau
The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie
Arsene Lupin, by Edgar Jepson & Maurice Leblanc
Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold-Bug" and
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe V. 1
For the excessive buckling of various swashes, see:
The Prisoner of Zenda, by Anthony Hope
The Man in the Iron Mask, by Dumas, Pere
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Scarlet Pimpernel, by Baroness Orczy
Effen youse got a hankerin' for a Western, there's:
Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey
The Virginian, Horseman Of The Plains, by Owen Wister
Back to God's Country, By James Oliver Curwood
Selected Stories by Bret Harte
Jean of the Lazy A, by B. M. Bower
Or if you prefer your fiction more domesticated, there's:
Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The Warden, by Anthony Trollope
The Heir of Redclyffe, by Charlotte M Yonge
Mother, by Kathleen Norris
For something to raise a smile, you can rely on:
The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
The Wallet of Kai Lung, by Ernest Bramah
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde
Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome
Piccadilly Jim, by P. G. Wodehouse
If poetry is your thing, you have lots to choose from:
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Project Gutenberg's Book of English Verse
The Home Book of Verse, edited by Burton Stevenson
The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman
Now, that's just a handful from our over 5,000 eBooks, so don't tell
me you can't find anything to read! If you do have ideas of your own,
download GUTINDEX.ALL or PGWHOLE.TXT and browse through the whole
list, or Browse by Author on the website at
<http://promo.net/cgi-promo/pg/cat.cgi>.
Download a few. Read them on your PC, or reformat them and print them
out, or convert them for your PDA. Get used to working with and
formatting text. Look at the formatting decisions that earlier
volunteers have made--they're not entirely consistent; different
people make different choices, different books require different
methods, and PG conventions have shifted slightly over the last 10
years--but they're all perfectly readable and convertible today.
If you find typos [R.26] in any of them, tell us! That's also a part
of being a Gutenberg volunteer. Our eBooks _improve_ with time!
If you're thinking of making the best use of your time looking for
errors in posted texts, a good start would be to download 40 or 50
texts, and run a spelling checker and gutcheck [P.1] on them all,
spending only 5 or 10 minutes on each. Having had a quick look at all
of them, concentrate on the ones that seem to have most
problems--where automated checkers see 10 problems, a careful human
will usually be able to pick up 20.
Getting Productive
OK, so you've seen what etexts should look like, you know what we do,
and proofing hasn't scared you off. It's time to step up and become a
producer. If you're not a typist and you don't have a scanner, take a
detour down to the Scanning FAQ [S.1] now, and come back when your
scanner is set up. If you're a typist or you've already got a scanner,
read on . . .
Get a book. Just do it, OK?
Ya gotta start somewhere, right? And finding an eligible book is
definitely somewhere.
Finding an eligible book is a threshold for many beginning
volunteers--it's the first major step on the way to producing. For a
lot of people, it's also the toughest barrier they have to cross.
Fortunately, the barrier is only psychological, and can be crossed in
a few minutes.
It's an unfamiliar process, and one that a lot of beginners feel some
anxiety about. Don't. It's quite straightforward: it's just buying a
book--you've done that, haven't you? Don't over-think it, don't worry
about whether you're making the "right" choice, don't spend months
comparing lists and choosing. Just do it. Once you've got your first,
you'll wonder what all the fuss was about. Thanks to the wonders of
the internet, your book can be on its way to you in an hour if you
have $20 to spend.
Typists blessed with a good local library don't even have to buy their
books--they can just borrow one and type it up! (You may be able to
scan a library book, but get some experience with scanning first, and
avoid damage!)
Let's deal with the decisions and other issues of picking one.
_Copyright_
For your first book, don't try getting fancy with copyright issues.
Choose one that was published before 1923, and you're in the clear
for U.S. and PG copyright purposes. You can read the dates just as
well as we can--with books printed before 1923, there are no hidden
catches: "Pre-'23 is free". Just read the TP&V [V.25] of the book,
and see that it was printed before 1923, and you have no problems.
Of course, reprints [V.19] of books copyrighted pre-1923 (and various
other cases) are also clear, but if you have any concerns, just stick
to pre-'23 editions.
_Which book?_
The answer to this question is different for everyone, but see how
much you agree with the following statements:
"I have a favorite book, and I'd really like to produce that."
Well, hey, this is no problem! You already know what you want.
Go check out whether the book is already on-line [V.29].
"I'd like to work on an important book, but I don't know which."
Well, everybody's definition of "important" is different, but some
people have put their various ideas forward already; you can see
whether you agree with them! The InProg List contains some, with the
notation "Suggested book to transcribe" beside them. Steve Harris
keeps a list of unproduced possibles at Steveharris.net. John Mark
Ockerbloom's "Books Requested" page lists titles that people have
asked for. [B.4] Your problem if you fall into this category is that
other people probably wanted to produce "important" books too, and
lots are already done.
"I just want an easy, trouble-free book to start with."
Your first book doesn't have to be War and Peace (we've already got
that anyway!). Here's a tip: try looking for children's or what we
would nowadays call "Young Adult" books. These are typically short,
and may have large print, which makes life much easier if you're
scanning. They age well: children's stories from a century or more ago
are still readable and interesting to children today. We have many
children's and YA eBooks: not just the classics like Grimm and
Andersen and Heidi and Oz and Peter Pan and William Tell, but
lesser-known but still enchanting stories like The Counterpane Fairy,
or Lang's Fairy books. There are series, like the Motor Girls, or the
(Country) Twins series, or the Bobbsey Twins. There is lots and lots
of material here for you to start with, and these books are relatively
plentiful, since they were made to take the kind of treatment children
dish out, and many of them have been in school libraries or attics for
years.
Whatever your choice, pick a book that you'll like; you'll be living
with it up close and personal for a while. Light reading, adventure
fiction, and books aimed at younger readers are safe first choices for
most people. If you admire 19th Century scientists or scholars, and
want to immortalize their work, great! But don't feel that you have to
dive in at the deep end just because someone else wants you to.
_Getting your book: a practical exercise_
The Search
At this point, you've got a list of books--maybe just one, maybe
several by an author or two, maybe just a genre like "Children's
Books" with some specific ideas. Maybe your mind is still wide-open.
Before used booksellers had the Net, finding a particular old book was
a daunting job. Booksellers had informal networks among themselves and
exchanged catalogs so that each would know something about what was
available elsewhere, but, for a buyer, finding a particular book was
still hit-and-miss. Now, however, a number of large sites provide a
service to booksellers, where they can list their inventories for
people to search from anywhere.
So now we go hunt for them on the Net. No, you don't have to buy them
on the Net--you can rummage in booksales and garage sales and used
bookstores, and that's its own kind of fun, though on a physical hunt,
what you need is to bring a long list of "already done" books with
you. But even if you never buy over the Net, it's a vast source of
information about what books are available, which are plentiful, and
which are cheap. It gives you some experience of what to expect when
you do your in-person browsing.
Here's a story of a typical Net-hunt. And you can follow along with it
at home. :-) Your results, and the sites you end up at, will be
different from mine, but even if you don't end up buying a book on this
hunt, you'll get some experience of what's involved. C'mon, do it with
me--see if you can find a better bargain!
I'm starting with two lists, and I'll follow up whatever seems
promising. I'd like to spend about $20--might go to $30. Definitely
not interested in $50 and up. I'm keeping in mind that I'll have to
add a bit for delivery--usually up to $10 within the U.S., but can get
expensive if you're in Perth, and ordering from a bookstore in Munich.
I'm also avoiding anything that might be tricky to clear on this
search, and confining myself to books printed before 1923.
Of course, by the time you read this, some of these books may already
have been produced, so if you're actually thinking of buying any,
check carefully first!
My first shortlist consists of books that caught my eye from David
Price's In-Progress List, Steve Harris's site, and The On-Line Books
Requested page [B.4], and it reads:
Louisa May Alcott: The Inheritance
E. W. Hornung: Irralie's Bushranger
E. W. Hornung: Stingaree
A. A. Milne: The Dover Road
A. A. Milne: Once on a Time
Samuel Richardson: Pamela
Oscar Wilde: The Critic as Artist
As well as following along with my list, you should try finding two or
three books of your own, from those sites or from your own
preferences, and search for them in the same ways that I do.
Everyone has their own searching technique and their own favorite
sites to search. For this session, I'm opening up three copies of my
browser--one for Alibris <http://www.alibris.com>, one for Abebooks
<http://www.abebooks.com>, and one for the Catalog of the Library of
Congress <http://catalog.loc.gov>. I'll do my initial searches on
Alibris and Abebooks, and keep the LoC site handy for reference.
In Alibris, I head straight for the Advanced Search page, since they
allow searching by date, and I immediately put "before 1923" into
every search, which avoids having to scan through modern reprints. In
Abebooks, I choose "Hardcover" in their advanced search, which is not
quite as good a filter, but does at least screen out recent paperback
editions.
In each of the sites, I just enter the author's surname and one word
from the title of each book, and look at the search results.
Louisa May Alcott's "Inheritance" looks like it's going to be tough. I
don't find it in either of my two bookstores. On doing a little
checking with modern bookstores, I find it was her first novel,
written when she was 17, and as far as I can see, not published during
her life: apparently only recently published--the LoC site has
nothing prior to 1997. A disappointing start to my search. I
understand why it's very desirable to get it online, but this one's
going to be very tough to clear, and I'm staying away from it.
E. W. Horning's "Irralee's Bushranger" is also elusive: it doesn't
show up at either of my sites, so I check out the LoC to confirm I
have the title right, and yes, there it is: "Irralee's Bushranger, a
story of Australian adventure, 1896." So I widen my search by visiting
<http://www.trussel.com/f_books.htm> and searching many of the sites
there. Still no luck. If I were particularly eager to get this book,
there are several things I might do at this point: I might register a
"want" with one of the sites, asking to be notified when a copy is
listed, I might use the OCLC WorldCat search (which Abebooks calls
"Find it at a local library") where I can locate libraries that have
copies, or I might even contact some individual booksellers and make a
request that they look for it. Some booksellers actually specialize in
looking for hard-to-find books; but of course I expect I'd have to pay
a bit more for it when they do find it, and given my success with the
rest of my list, and my price bracket, there seems no need to go that
far today.
Horning's "Stingaree", by contrast, seems to be everywhere, in several
editions, and cheap. It must have been a bestseller in its day--not
surprising, from the author of "Raffles". 1902, 1905, 1909 editions
abound. The cheapest are 1910 and 1907 editions for $4.95 and $5.00
from booksellers listed at Abebooks.
Milne's "Dover Road" is available from both sites. There seems to have
been a Putnam's printing in 1922 of "Three Plays: The Dover Road. The
Truth About Blayds. The Great Broxopp." of which lots of copies
survive. There also seem to be later printings which would qualify as
reprints if I were desperate, but the 1922 edition is priced from
$12.00 to $50.00, so I'll take the 1922 $12.00 copy from Abebooks. As
a bonus, I don't see the other two plays listed as being online
anywhere, so I'll get three texts (and short ones, too!--279 pages for
all three) for the price and effort of one.
Milne's "Once on a Time" is a bit less common, but once again a
Putnam's printing of 1922 keeps it in the race. There are a couple of
booksellers in England selling for 15 pounds (which just about makes
my $20 threshold) and 20 pounds, and an ex-library copy going for $25.
There are lots of eligible copies of "Pamela" available, ranging from
a fourth edition at a mere $4,999 (no, thanks!) to a 1921 printing at
$6.60 at Alibris. I'll take that one, please.
Wilde's "Critic as Artist" is fairly widely available. A 1905 edition
of "Intentions: the Decay of Lying; Pen Pencil and Poison; the Critic
as Artist; the Truth of Masks" is available at Alibris for $8.80, (and
other copies of the same edition there and on Abebooks in the $20-$30
range) and Abebooks lists a London 1919 edition at $12.50. There are
several copies listed in both places as "undated" and "reprints"--I'm
avoiding these, since while it's quite likely that they might be
clearable, I'm not taking risks on this search.
My second list isn't a list--just a vague category: children's books
that are easy to do.
I go to Alibris' Advanced Search, and enter "Child's" in the title,
and pre-1923 in the date, and, excluding titles already on-line,
immediately get:
A Child's History of France $13.20
A Child's Story of the Bible $5.50
First Lessons in Botany or The Child's Book of Flowers $13.20
The Child's Book of American Biography $11.00
The Child's First Bible $8.80
The Child's Music World $8.80
and so on through quite a list.
OK. That's a good start. But my choice so far is unimaginative. I need
better search terms. So I go to main search engines with the terms
"children's antiquarian books" and find a half-dozen or so sites that
specialize in them. I can browse around there, though it's slower
going without searches to focus my results. I find
<http://www.bookrescue.com>, specializing in children's books. Wading
through the miles and miles of Alcotts and Barries and Burnetts, which
are mostly already online, I think, I find a couple of authors from
them who must have been popular, because they seem to have published
lots of books before 1923: Angela Brazil and Dorothy Canfield. (I only
got as far as the "C"s!)
I could of course stop here and buy some, but today I want to see what
else is out there.
Back at Alibris and Abebooks, armed with my authors to search by, I
turn up 4 pre-1923 books under $20 for Angela Brazil:
A Terrible Tomboy
The Youngest Girl in the Fifth
A Fourth Form Friendship
A Pair of Schoolgirls
and several between $20 and $30.
Dorothy Canfield immediately yields multiple copies of:
The Brimming Cup
Home Fires in France
Hillsboro People
Understood Betsy
Rough Hewn
The Real Motive
and others, and I haven't even got to $20 yet, nor to the letter "D".
A browse through the Ebay Collectible and Antiquarian Books section
also throws up a respectable list of eligibles. I won't even bother
counting that.
In 20 minutes, I have found five of the seven on my search list. In
less than hour after that, I found over 16 eligible children's books,
all under or around $20 and all available online.
Before committing to one, though, I would double-check that the book
hasn't been transcribed online, and isn't In Progress.
Double-checking your selection
If you're concerned that the book you have chosen duplicates another
that might be in progress, and want to double-check, you can e-mail
the Posting Team asking them to check whether any recent clearances
have come in for that title.
Duplications do happen--there's no way of avoiding them when different
people are making independent decisions--but they are rare.
Dealing with used booksellers
As a class, used booksellers are very pleasant people--remarkably
friendly, knowledgeable and helpful, even to people buying on a
typical Gutenberger's budget.
Some of them are not, however, models of ideal data organization when
it comes to Internet listings. There are lots of one- or two-person
operations dealing with an inventory of many thousands of books, and
having located your book online, you should check that it's still
available.
You can place an order through the site and wait for the confirmation,
or you can simply call the bookseller. Not all booksellers' contact
details are listed, so it's not always an option, but when you do
phone you're likely to be speaking immediately to someone who can tell
you for sure whether the book is still there, can pull the book off
the shelf and answer questions about it, and can take your credit card
details on the spot and dispatch the book immediately.
Copyright Clearance
As soon as your book arrives, send us the information needed for
Copyright Clearance first. Even if your book is a true-blue,
no-questions-asked pre-1923 edition, we should know about it as soon
as possible so that it can go onto the In-Progress list for others to
see that someone has started on it.
Wait for the confirmation e-mail before starting any serious work.
Some people have thought that "Copyright 1923" plus some wishful
thinking would be good enough, and, unfortunately, it isn't. Some
people have gone ahead and produced the whole book before sending
in the clearance, only to be disappointed, all their work wasted.
Books published in 1922 or earlier are clearable, but some people,
ever optimists, overlook that little "1927" in small print on the
verso. Sometimes there is no copyright date on the front, and other
optimists assume that these books are OK. They may be; they may not
be. Don't get caught in the copyright trap.
As soon as you have what you think might be an eligible book, do
not start on it. Do not ask another volunteer's opinion. Just send
in the TP&V and wait for the confirmation e-mail to find out for sure.
Even when your TP&V clearly says "Copyright 1901", send it in.
We need to get it into the clearance files so that we can register
it as being In-Progress.
Producing
If you're a typist, there's not much more you need to know from this
point: you can just get on with the job, with maybe a few tips from
the FAQ. In fact, if you're a typist, you might wonder why the rest of
us make such a fuss about scanners, and settings, and OCR. Take pity
on us! we just can't produce the way you can. Smile indulgently,
ignore all the scanner jargon, and submit your completed text while
we're still saying bad words about the guttering on a greyscale image
of page 372. :-)
If you are using a scanner to copy a book for the first time, be
patient with yourself. Some people start off with too high
expectations of what they can achieve. Believe it or not, scanning
does work effectively; it just doesn't work perfectly. And often, you
need a little practice before your scans work right with your OCR. The
Scanning FAQ [S.1] has lots of specific tips you can try. Start by
scanning a double-page about a third of the way through the book. Scan
in Black and White and in Greyscale, at 300dpi and 400dpi. Try 600 dpi
if it seems like a good idea. Put it through your OCR and see what
comes out. Move your scanner so that you can be comfortable while
placing the book and turning pages. Allow yourself an hour to
experiment with different settings, and different pages. Put the
sample images included with the Scanning FAQ through your OCR and
see how the output compares to the text produced by other packages.
That first hour finding out about how your setup works will be the
most valuable hour of scanning you will ever do.
Having figured out what settings you want to use for this book, make
sure you implement the best speed you can. Usually this means telling
the scanner to scan _only as much area as the book covers_. This is
quite important, since the scanner will by default scan its whole
area, and you don't need all that; it just wastes time and makes your
images bigger.
You may also be able to set your OCR or scanner software to auto-scan
pages with some preset delay, like 5 seconds. This also speeds things
up, because the scanner isn't waiting for you to hit the keyboard, and
you have both hands free at all times to turn the page and replace the
book. It takes a few pages to get into the rhythm; if you miss a
page-turn, don't worry--you can get it on the next scan.
Using a reasonably modern but quite ordinary home/office type flatbed
scanner, you should be able to scan 200 pages an hour [S.9] of a
typical book, at good quality. 400 pages an hour is not unheard-of.
Now, it may fairly be said that scanning offers all the fun of ironing,
without the sense of adventure :-), but if you have got your settings
right, you will probably be able to do the whole job in less than two
hours. And now you're really on the road!
V.2. What experience do I need to produce or proof a text?
None.
For producing, you will have to be able to type pretty well, or have
a scanner.
For proofing someone else's text, when you don't have a copy of the
book in front of you, you should be reasonably familiar with the
language used in the book, and the styles of the time--Chaucer's
English was quite different from ours, and even 19th Century novelists
write some phrases unfamiliar to us today.
That's it. You don't need experience in publishing, editing, or
computers.
V.3. How do I produce a text?
There are acres of words in this FAQ about that, but it all boils
down to 4 simple steps:
1. Get an eligible book--pre-1923, or one of the exceptions. Pull
it from your attic, borrow it from a library or a friend, buy it
in your local bookstore, in a flea-market or on-line. We don't
care which.
2. Send us a copy or the front and back of the title page so we
can file proof of copyright clearance.
3. Copy the text from the book into a computer text file. We don't
care whether you type it, scan it, voice-dictate it, or think of
some totally new way to do it. Just get it into a file.
4. Send us the computer text file.
That's all there is to it!
V.4. Do I need any special equipment?
You need the use of a computer of some kind, and Internet access is
usual, though we have had some volunteers contribute texts on floppy
disks.
If you intend to scan books, you will need a scanner, but if you're
just typing or proofing you won't.
V.5. Do I need to be able to program?
Absolutely not! Very little of Project Gutenberg's work involves
programming, and it is never necessary to any part of volunteering.
V.6. I am a programmer, and I would like to help by programming.
What can I do?
At the risk of sounding facetious, the very best thing you can do is
figure out ways that more programming can help Project Gutenberg!
A lot of programmers work on PG books, and anything easy has probably
already been done. The challenge for programmers who want to write
something that will help to produce etexts is not in writing the code;
it's in identifying ways that programs can help.
Please see the FAQ "What programs could I write to help with PG work?"
[P.2] for some ideas in this direction. Whatever you do, don't just
hang around waiting for someone to ask you to write something, because
that's not going to happen. Think up a project, ask volunteers if they
would use it, and dig in! Better still, produce a few etexts yourself,
using the existing tools, and get a feel for the kinds of problems
that new software could help with.
Apart from text production, we do develop some programs to help with
posting work, but as of mid-2002, we have nothing like an ongoing
programming project which people can join.
V.7. What does a Gutenberg volunteer actually do?
We buy or borrow eligible books, scan, type, and proofread. There are
a few other activities, but they consume only a very small fraction of
volunteer time.
V.8. Can I produce a book in my own language?
Yes! We want to encourage people to produce books in all languages,
and we cheer when we can add a new language to the list.
V.9. Does it have to be a book? Can I produce pieces from a magazine
or other periodical?
Magazines, newspapers, and other publications are just fine. For
copyright clearance, they work just the same way as a book.
You do need to check the length of your piece [V.17]; we don't want a
zillion separate one- or two-page files. If the piece you have in mind
isn't long enough, you can add other pieces to it, or even most or all
of the magazine. If the work was serialized over multiple issues, you
can join them together for your PG text, but you do have to copyright
clear every issue of the magazine from which you copy material.
If you have lots of old periodicals, you could even take one piece
from several, and make a new text which is a "theme" anthology of
those pieces. You can give it an appropriate title: "Civil War
Commentaries from X magazine 1892-1898."
V.10. Do I _have_ to produce in plain ASCII text?
Certainly not if it doesn't make sense. To take an extreme example, if
you're working in Japanese or Arabic, or creating audio files, there
is no point in trying to reproduce that in ASCII!
Where the text can largely be expressed in ASCII, we do want to post
an ASCII version, even if it is somewhat degraded compared to the
original. However, we will post your file in as many open formats as
you want to create, so that your original work is available for those
who have the software to read it.
V.11. Where do I sign up as a volunteer?
You don't. We have no formal sign-up process, no list of volunteers,
no roll-call. If you produce a PG eBook, or help to produce one, you
are a volunteer.
V.12. How do PG volunteers communicate, keep in touch, or co-ordinate work?
We are very scattered geographically: U.S., Australia, Brazil, Taiwan,
Germany, South Africa, Italy, India, England, and all over the world,
so we can't really meet for coffee on Thursdays. :-)
Most co-operation and co-ordination goes on by private e-mail. This is
efficient for volunteers who have worked with each other before, since
they know each other's interests and skills, but not so easy for
beginners to break in on, since they don't.
The Volunteers' Web Board at <http://promo.net/pg/vol/wwwboard/> is a
publicly accessible forum for volunteers or potential volunteers to
post any question or information about how to create a PG eBook.
There are a few Project Gutenberg mailing lists. Information about
joining them is available on the main site, at
<http://promo.net/pg/subs.html>.
The Project Gutenberg Weekly and Monthly Newsletters, gweekly and
gmonthly, are one-way announcements, which allow PG to communicate with
non-volunteers who are interested in the eBooks we produce, but they
also contain notes and requests for assistance from volunteers.
The Volunteers' Discussion Mailing list, gutvol-d, is a an e-mail
discussion forum for subscribers about any Gutenberg topic.
The Volunteers' List, gutvol-l, is for private announcements for
active volunteers.
The Programmers' List, gutvol-p, is for discussion of programming
topics.
There are some other, specialized, closed lists for people who
do specific work within PG:
The "Posted" List, posted, is for people who perform indexing on our
texts. An e-mail is sent to this list every time we post a text (see
the FAQ "How does a text get produced?" [V.16] section 5: Notification)
and the members of the list use it to update their catalogs.
The Whitewashers' List, pgww, is for Posting Team internal messages.
The Heroic Helpers List, hhelpers, is for people who can devote some
fairly regular time to doing odd jobs.
V.13. Where can I find a list of books that need proofing?
There is no central list of this kind. There are distributed proofing
projects, currently at
Charles Franks: <https://www.pgdp.net/>
JC Byers: <http://www.wollamshram.ca/1001/index.htm>
Dewayne Cushman: <http://www.metalbox.net/dcushman/pgroot.htm>
where you can proof parts of a book. This is advisable when you're
just starting out because it gives you some feel for what the work is
like.
You can also look up existing, posted texts from the archives and
proof them. Just as there always seems to be one more bug in any
given program, there always seems to be one more typo in any given
text! Download a few, and scan quickly for problems by doing a
spellcheck or other automated check; if you can find any problems
quickly, then there are likely others to be discovered by a careful
proofing.
V.14. Is there a list of books that Project Gutenberg wants?
No. Project Gutenberg, as such, does not "want" any specific books.
Individual volunteers choose what books to produce. Nobody gives
orders to volunteers about what they should work on. Nobody has an
official "hit-list" of books to add to the archives.
Of course, individual volunteers and non-volunteers have their
preferences, and may suggest books to transcribe, and such suggested
lists pop up every so often, and are often useful to people looking
for ideas.
There are usually some suggestions in David Price's InProgress list.
The On-Line Books Page has a section where people can list requests,
and Steve Harris has a site devoted to lists of books not yet in
Gutenberg or elsewhere. Treat all of these lists with some caution,
since someone may have started or even finished one of their
suggestions since they were last updated.
PG Books In Progress <http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html>
On-Line Requested List <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/in-progress.html#requests>
Steve Harris' "To-do"s <http://www.steveharris.net/PGList.htm>
V.15. I have one book I'd like to contribute. Can I do just that without
signing up?
Well, since there is no formal sign-up, of course you can! A lot of
texts have been contributed by people who just wanted to immortalize
one favorite book. Many of them had already created the eBook before
they even heard of Project Gutenberg, and we're always delighted to
add these to the archive!
About production:
V.16. How does a text get produced?
As stated back in the Basics section, all you need to do is:
Borrow or buy an eligible book.
Send us a copy of the front and back of the title page.
Turn the book into electronic text.
Send it to us.
That's all you actually need to know in order to be a producer. But if
you're interested in the details of how other people actually do this,
and want to know what else happens behind the scenes, here's a full,
blow-by-blow account.
1. Finding an eligible book
Volunteers find eligible books [V.18] in all sorts of ways. Some lucky
people have them in their bookshelves, or their attic. A lot of people
have a good library nearby, where they can find books, or request them
on interlibrary loan. Some people are big eBay fans; others like to
hunt for bargains on specialist booksites. And of course lots of
volunteers enjoy rummaging through actual used bookstores, or local
markets, or yard sales.
Even if you're not going to take on a book yourself right now, search
for some on the Net and find out about how to get a copy. Next time
you pass an antiquarian bookstore, or a book market, drop in and
browse. Ask your local library about interlibrary loans. Eligible
books aren't hard to find once you know where to look.
2. Copyright Clearance
New volunteers sometimes find it hard to understand why this is so
important, and why, in particular, Project Gutenberg is so careful
about it. At base, it's simple: by keeping a filed copy of the TP&V
[V.25] of every book we produce, we can at any time protect our
publications against claims from publishers that they "own" the work,
and thus we can keep them available to the public.
The copyright laws can be difficult to understand, and sometimes it
may take serious research to prove that a particular edition is
actually in the public domain. If you're not legally-inclined, just
keep repeating "Pre-'23 is free" if you're in the U.S.A. and stick
to books published before 1923. If you do want to delve deeper, read
our Copyright Rules page at <https://www.gutenberg.org/vol/pd.html>
and then go on to reading the Library of Congress Copyright Office
official papers at <http://www.copyright.gov/>. If you're in another
country, find out about your own copyright laws.
Volunteers send in the TP&V from the book for us to inspect. This not
only gives us the proof to file, it also lets us know that someone is
really working on the text so that we can list it as being In Progress
for the information of others who might be interested.
3. Scanning, typing, proofing and editing
This makes up the bulk of PG's effort, and is discussed at great
length elsewhere in this FAQ. There are many, many ways to create an
etext from a paper book, and different people use different methods,
but it all boils down to making a text file. For a typical book, it
will probably take 40 hours of a volunteer's time. All that happens
here is that somebody makes the effort to transcribe one paper book
into a file that can be shared around the world and for all time.
4. Posting
[Note: this information is quite specific to the process we go through
now. It is quite likely to change as we improve the automation of the
tasks.]
Posting is done by the Posting Team. The basic job is to receive the
text from the producer, check that it has been copyright cleared,
check that it conforms to Project Gutenberg standards, check it for
correctness (which can be anything from XML validity to simple
spelling), add the Project Gutenberg header and copy the text to the
two PG servers.
In a simple case, where everything goes right, this can take as little
as fifteen minutes. In a complicated case, where we have to convert
formats, or there are a lot of errors in the text, or there are
problems with the copyright clearance, it can take hours or even days
while we wait for responses, or do a lot of editing, or find
conversion tools.
Michael Hart used to do this work entirely alone, but in September
2001, he created the Posting Team to handle the load. (The Posting
Team are nicknamed the "Whitewashers" in honor of Tom Sawyer's
victims. :-)
Transferring the file
You send the text to us [V.46] either by Web, by FTP with a username
and password that any of the Posting Team can give you privately), or
by e-mail.
If you're FTPing, you should e-mail one or more of us as well, to
let us know what you've uploaded.
One problem is files that don't transfer correctly. Especially by
e-mail, some files get damaged on the way. It's better to ZIP the
file before sending, if possible, to prevent some common problems
with text files. The use of compression formats other than Zip can
also create problems. Members of the Posting Team work on multiple
platforms--DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris--and zipping and unzipping
programs are commonly available for all of these. Other compression
methods, like Stuffit or bzip2, are not so readily available, and
may give us trouble.
We login via ssh to beryl, which is the Unix system on which we work
when posting, the same one that you FTPed the file to, unzip the file
and glance at the top of it.
Checking Clearance.
We then check it for copyright clearance. The one and only absolute
rule that we NEVER bend, no matter what, is that we WILL NOT post a
file that doesn't have a clearance. If it ain't in the clearance
files, it don't get posted.
Most regulars know that they should include their clearance line in
the e-mail submitting the text, but not everybody does, and not
everybody remembers every time. This can be frustrating, when
clearance is not included and not obvious.
When Michael gives you your clearance on a book, he sends you back an
e-mail that has just one line, something like this:
The Works Of Homer [Iliad/Odyssey] Tr. George Chapman Jim Tinsley 06/14/01 ok
He saves these lines in files that we posters can access. We regard
this information as private, so we don't publish the details of who
has cleared what.
When we get the text, we check whether the submitter has cleared it.
If there is a clearance line in the e-mail notifying us about the
text, there's no problem. If we can find the title of the text under
the submitter's name in the clearance files, there's no problem.
Unfortunately, sometimes we can't find it. There are two usual
reasons: either the text submitted is _part_ of the work cleared (for
example, submitting one play from a collection), or the text hasn't
been cleared yet. If the clearance isn't straightforward, we can go
back and forth and round and round in e-mails for a while.
This is why it's a good idea to paste the clearance line into your
e-mail.
If the title of the text you're sending isn't the same as the title of
the text cleared, BE SURE to paste in the clearance line AND explain
that the text you're sending is PART of the cleared book. Please also
list the titles of the other parts; it really does cause confusion and
delay when this is not clear.
Checking and Editing
Sometimes, people send in a book in a non-text format like Word Perfect
or Microsoft Word, or send a text with unwrapped lines. In that case, we
try to get the submitter to fix them, but if they can't, we have to
convert the file to straight text before starting.
Some producers, particularly inexperienced ones, want to add
non-standard annotations and mark-up and symbols to the text. This can
get ticklish; we don't want to discourage them, but we need to keep
texts reasonably standard. Usually, we can work something out. Maybe
the book should be added in _both_ text and HTML, for example.
Assuming that it's a plain text file, we next run gutcheck and a quick
spellcheck on the file. This will tell immediately if it adheres to PG
standards and if there is any serious problem with it.
If the file looks clean, we may skim it, looking for potential
problems or formatting issues. For clean texts, the only things we
usually need to change are unindented quotations or inconsistent
chapter headings (a lot of people seem to mix "CHAPTER III" with
"Chapter 14" and have irregular numbers of blank lines) or spacing and
a few 8-bit characters. Occasionally, we have to rewrap a text. We
also look out for included publishers' trademarks, which we normally
prefer to remove (trademarks are NOT subject to copyright expiration:
Macmillan(TM), the publishing house, is still around and trading),
unnecessary or downright odd indentation or centering, stray page
numbers, and prefaces or introductions or appendices that may not be
in the public domain. If the file has lots of 8-bit characters, we
probably need to make a separate 7-bit version, and post both.
If the gutcheck and spellcheck don't look clean, or if conversion is
required, we may spend a lot more than 15 minutes on it. In a bad
case, we may have to get the file re-proofed.
If you are conscious that you're doing something non-standard, and
really mean it to stay, say so in your e-mail. (For example, I
recently posted a text containing a family-tree representation that
had lines over 80 characters. Now, I would have left that one alone
anyway, but it helped that the submitter drew my attention to it in
the e-mail.) If it's too non-standard, the poster may not allow it to
stay, but at least you can discuss it. When a text needs a lot of
non-standard formatting or markup, you really need to ask yourself
whether you shouldn't be submitting it in HTML, with all the bells and
whistles, and settle for something more normal in the text variant.
Mostly, errors are obvious, and there are at least some obvious errors
in most texts. When errors are completely obvious, we just fix them
without feedback to the producer unless you have specifically asked
for feedback in your e-mail.
We're getting more HTML formats now, which is great, but incoming
HTML often needs a lot of work, because people who are not experienced
with HTML often make mistakes. The W3C <http://validator.w3.org> is
the official standard for valid HTML, but, for the average volunteer,
it's awkward to use. However, if you're submitting a HTML format,
please use Tidy, which you can get from <http://tidy.sourceforge.net>,
to check your text before sending it.
Header and Footer
We add the PG header and footer. If there is a header and footer
already there, we strip them off first, since recent changes in the
header mean that a lot of people send files with headers that are out
of date. We have written programs to help with this.
We get the number for the text from a program on beryl called "ticket"
that Brett Fishburne wrote, that dispenses the next number. That way, if
two or three of us are posting at the same time, we won't all grab the
same number. We create a 5-letter base filename, checking that it hasn't
been used before, and finally zip up the file.
Posting
We now transfer the .ZIP and .TXT files to two servers:
ftp.ibiblio.org and ftp.archive.org. (This is usually the point at
which we realize that we forgot to make a change we noticed while
checking. Aaaargh!)
5. Notification
At this point, the book is posted, but nobody knows about it! We need
to do something about that. . . .
We compose an e-mail to the "posted" e-mail list, cc: the producer,
with the line that is to go into GUTINDEX.ALL, the master list of PG
files.
The "posted" list has only a few subscribers. These are the people who
index and create links to PG texts, and include both PG volunteers and
the maintainers of other sites that link to PG texts.
They also commonly download the texts to get more information for
their indexes, and tell us if there is anything wrong with the files.
This e-mail is simply the official notification to all these people
and the producer that the file has been posted. Here's a sample of
such an e-mail:
To: "Posted Etexts for Project Gutenberg" <posted@listserv.unc.edu>
Subject: [posted] Posted (#5301, Duncan) !
From: "Jim Tinsley" <jtinsley@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 25 Jun 2002 06:21:27 -0400 (EDT)
Cc: you@example.com
Mar 2004 The Imperialist, by Sara Jeannette Duncan [SJD#4][mprlsxxx.xxx]5301
There may also be some remarks, if the text is in any way
non-standard, or if files other than plain text were posted with it.
From this e-mail, you can, if you want to see any corrections made,
immediately download the posted file and compare it to your version.
Since the notification is made _after_ the file has been copied to the
servers, it should be there waiting for you.
To find out how to download a book that has just been posted, see the
FAQ "How can I download a PG text that hasn't been cataloged yet?" [R.3]
6. Indexing
From the "posted" list, the posting line is added to GUTINDEX.ALL
and our indexers begin the cataloging process, which is much more
thorough, for the website. This includes work like finding author's
dates of birth & death, getting the Library of Congress
classification, and the other information that makes up the website
searchable index. That process takes extra time, which is why the
website searchable catalog must always lag behind the actual titles
posted.
7. Corrections
It's remarkable how many people who went over and over the text to the
point of hating it suddenly see problems with it when they download it
a couple of days after it's posted! Something psychological there, I
expect. Anyhow, if you do download your text and see problems with it,
don't worry, just e-mail whoever posted it, or any other member of the
Posting Team. No, you're not stupid, or if you are, you're in good
company, because we've all done it! There's no big deal about
replacing the posted file with a corrected copy immediately.
Over time, other readers may submit corrections. If you find an error
in a PG etext, see the FAQ "I've found some obvious typos in a Project
Gutenberg text. How should I report them?" [R.26]
When the corrections are small, as most are, we will just make the
change to the existing text. If there are a lot of changes, we may
post a new edition [R.35] with a new edition number; e.g. if the
file abcde10 was corrected, we may post abcde11. We never make a
new edition when we get corrections immediately after posting.
V.17. How long must a text be to qualify for PG?
The rule of thumb is that we try not to post texts shorter than 25K,
or about 350 lines of 70 characters. This rules out, for example, a
lot of individual short poems. If you are interested in contributing
this type of material, consider making a collection of similar
texts--poems by the same author, or magazine articles on the same
subject. We have made a few exceptions, like Martin Luther King's
"I have a dream" speech, but very few.
V.18. What books are eligible?
A book is "eligible" for posting if we can legally publish it. This is
the case if:
1. it is in the public domain in the U.S.A.,
OR,
2. the copyright holder has granted unlimited
non-exclusive distribution rights to PG.
V.19. Are reprints or facsimiles eligible?
A reprint or facsimile of a book that would be eligible is itself
eligible.
For example, if a book published in 1995 is a reprint of a book
published in 1900, then it is eligible. However, the onus is on us
to prove that it _is_ a reprint, and if it doesn't _say_ on the TP&V
that it is a reprint, confirming its eligibility may be impractical.
V.20. What is the difference between a reprint and a facsimile?
A facsimile retains the page layout and formatting of the original. A
reprint keeps the same words, but may lay the pages out differently.
For our copyright purposes, there is no difference--we can use either.
V.21. What is the difference between a reprint and a "new edition"?
A reprint contains only the words and pictures that were printed in
the original. A new edition is in some way changed; it has different
text, or pictures. It may be abridged, or expanded. It may have
material added or changed, using other versions of the book.
A new edition gets a new copyright, and has to be cleared based on its
own copyright date and status, not the date of the original printing
of the title. See also the FAQ "How come my paper book of Shakespeare
says it's 'Copyright 1988'?" [C.16] for an example.
Please note that we are talking here about a new edition of the
printed book, not a new (corrected) edition number for Project
Gutenberg naming purposes.
V.22. What book should I work on?
Nobody in Gutenberg is going to set assignments for you. You decide
what book to process. Just pick one that no-one else has already done,
or is working on. It's also sensible to pick one that you'll
like--you'll be living with it for a while. On a practical note, it's
probably better to start with a short book or even a short story,
since a long book can take quite a while to produce.
Start by thinking of books written before 1923. Pick a book you like,
and check it out. If it's already done or still in copyright, try
other books by the same author.
Visit the Project Gutenberg site and download a full list of Gutenberg
books in GUTINDEX.ALL. Have a look at the List of Books In Progress and
Complete [B.1]. Look for authors you like, and see what books by them
aren't yet available.
Check out your old books. Maybe you have an eligible edition that
would be of great help to the project.
Try your library. They may have some eligible editions--books we can
prove to be in the public domain--and you will certainly come away
with ideas. Ask your librarian. Librarians are keen to help on
projects like this.
Browse second-hand bookshops in your area. There are lots of treasures
to be picked up very cheaply.
Search for literature pages and bookshops on the Internet.
If all else fails, you can always ask on the Volunteers' Board or try
the gutvol-d mailing [V.12] list for ideas. Others may know of books
that people are especially looking for, or projects already started
where you could help out.
V.23. I have a book in mind, but I don't have an eligible copy.
First, determine whether there are any eligible copies of the book, by
finding out the date it was published, possibly from the Catalog of the
Library of Congress [B.5] and checking the Public Domain and Copyright
Rules [B.1]. If there is a public domain edition, the next problem is to
find one to work with.
V.24. Where can I find an eligible book?
The most commonly used outlets are used bookstores, garage sales,
library sales, charity shops and any other place that sells old books.
The Internet is a wonderful medium for finding used and antiquarian
books--used bookstores all over the world have found ways of
co-operating and listing their inventories on the Net, so that whether
you live in Los Angeles, Moscow or Perth, you can still find that book
you're looking for in a shop in a laneway of Amsterdam. Most on-line
listings will quote the publication year of the book, so you can check
that it's pre-1923.
Two such sites that allow second-hand booksellers to list their
inventory are:
Advanced Book Exchange <http://www.abebooks.com>
Alibris <http://www.alibris.com>
The book search page at trussel.com [B.5] has a list of many such Net
bookshops, or you can simply visit any search engine and search for Used
or Antiquarian Bookshops. You can often buy eligible books through these
sites very cheaply.
If you still can't find the book you need, post a message on the
Volunteers' Board or to the gutvol-d mailing list; maybe someone else
can find it for you.
Sometimes, it may be possible for you to work from a later edition, so
long as somebody who has an eligible edition can check it to make sure
that no changes have been made. Sometimes, you may be able to find a
modern reprint; reprints may be eligible, as long as they say they are
reprints of an edition that would be eligible.
If you can type, or can scan without damaging the book, you can borrow
books long enough to produce them. Even if your local library doesn't
have the books you want, they may well be able to get them for you on
inter-library loan. Ask your librarian about it.
V.25. What is "TP&V"?
This is an abbreviation for "Title Page and Verso", and means a paper
or image copy of the front and back of the title page.
Even if the back is blank, we need to have an image of it for the
files, to show that it _is_ blank, so that if, in ten years' time,
somebody queries our right to publish, we can show that we haven't
just lost it.
Publishers print copyright information, like title, author, copyright
year and owner, and whether the book was a reprint, on the TP&V, and
by filing this, we can prove that the book we produced was in the
public domain.
Sending us the TP&V is the One True Way to getting PG copyright
clearance [V.37].
V.26. What is "Posting"?
Posting is the final stage in the production process, where the file
is given a number and official PG header, and copied onto our FTP
servers for distribution. See section 4 of the FAQ "How does a text
get produced?" [V.16] for a blow-by-blow account.
V.27. I think I've found an eligible book that I'd like to work on.
What do I do next?
Make sure nobody else is working on it, and that it's not already
online somewhere.
V.28. What books are currently being worked on?
Check out David Price's In Progress List (a.k.a. "the InProg List")
online at <http://www.dprice48.freeserve.co.uk/GutIP.html>. David
gets the information from Copyright Clearances that have been done,
and organizes it into a list. It can never be 100% up to date, since
clearances come in all the time, but it's the best online facility we
have, and it's much more clearly presented than the original clearance
files.
V.29. How do I find out if my book is already on-line somewhere?
There's no foolproof method; some student somewhere could have scanned
it and put it on her college web page without announcing it anywhere.
However, there are some regular places to check.
It may sound obvious, but you should always look in the PG archives
first. Download GUTINDEX.ALL and keep it handy. Search the InProg
List [B.1].
The two other main places to search for your book are the Internet
Public Library <http://www.ipl.org> and the On-Line Books Page
<http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>. These projects
specialize in indexing books that people make available on-line.
If you still don't see your book on-line anywhere, hit your favorite
search engine, and give it the title, author's last name, and
preferably a few uncommon words from the first page of the book.
Sometimes one of those solo efforts shows up in a general search.
V.30. My book is not on the In-Progress list, and I can't find it on-line.
Is it safe to go ahead and buy it?
Probably. It could have been cleared, but not included in the InProg
list yet. If the amount of money to buy it is a consideration, you can
e-mail any of the members of the Posting Team, and ask them to check
the latest clearances for you. Even this isn't foolproof; another
volunteer could be placing their order at the same time you're placing
yours. Such duplications do happen, but they are very rare.
V.31. My book is on-line, but not in Project Gutenberg. What should I do?
If the on-line file is from the same edition as the one you have (e.g.
not a different translation) then you may be able to submit that file,
perhaps slightly edited, to Gutenberg using the clearance from your
paper copy. See "I've found an eligible text elsewhere on the Net, but
it's not in the PG archives. Can I just submit it to PG?" [V.62] for
how to do that.
And of course, you can always still make your own version for PG. It's
surprising how often even very similar paper editions have small
differences that can be interesting or significant.
V.32. My book is already on-line in Project Gutenberg, but my printed book
is different from the version already archived. Can I add my version?
Yes! In fact, assuming that the version already there is in the public
domain, you can piggyback on the work already done by what is called
"comparative retyping". For example, let's say that you have a later
edition than the existing file; you can just take the existing file,
edit it to match your paper version, and submit it as a new file. Of
course, you must have Copyright Cleared [V.37] your paper version as
well.
V.33. I see a book that was being worked on three years ago. Is anyone
still working on it?
Maybe, maybe not. Some people abandon books, some people who are
regular producers clear them and put them at the bottom of the pile,
perhaps for years (though they will get round to them sometime), and
some people just simply take two or three years to produce a book.
Once, we put names and contact details on the public InProg list, but
for privacy and spam-prevention reasons, we've taken them off.
However, the Posting Team have access to the master list of cleared
files, and will send a message on your behalf to the person who
originally cleared the book, asking if the project is still active, or
if the producer wants help.
So if you really want to check this situation out, e-mail one of the
Posting Team.
V.34. I've decided which book to produce. How do I tell PG
I'm working on it?
As soon as you get Copyright Clearance [V.37], your book is entered
in the "cleared" files. David Price will take these, and add your
entry in his next release of the In Progress List.
V.35. I have a two- or three-volume set. Should I submit them as one
text, or one text for each volume?
Both.
Quite a lot of 18th and 19th Century books, even straightforward
novels, were published as multipart sets. When you have such a set,
you should usually submit one text for each volume, and a "complete"
text with the contents of all volumes together.
People who do this often complete and submit one volume at a time,
until they've finished, and then contribute the "complete" file.
V.36. I have one physical book, with multiple works in it (like a
collection of plays). Should I submit each text separately?
If the works are clearly separate, stand-alone texts, and are long
enough [V.17] to warrant inclusion on their own in the archives, then
yes, you should, and you _may_ also submit a "complete" version as well,
if it seems appropriate. This most commonly happens in a collection of
plays, though essays and other works may also fit the criteria.
Collections of poetry rarely do, since most poems are too short to
submit as stand-alone texts.
Sometimes the book includes a preface or introduction or glossary
covering all the works in it. In this case, you can decide whether to
include these with each of the parts, or save them for the "complete"
version.
V.37. How do I get copyright clearance?
Basically we need to see images of the front and back of the title
page of the book, which is where copyright information is usually
shown. This is called "TP&V", for "Title Page and Verso" [V.25].
To Submit Online:
As of late 2002, we have a new automated upload procedure using a web
page. This is by far the fastest and easiest way to get clearance.
You need scanned images (PNG, JPEG, TIFF, GIF), of the two pages,
of good enough resolution that the text can be read clearly, though
the files don't need to be huge.
Just go to <http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/copy.html> and follow the
instructions.
There are two other, older ways to submit a text for clearance.
To submit by paper mail, photocopy the front and back of the title
page, even if the back is blank, write your e-mail address on it, and
send the photocopies to:
MICHAEL STERN HART
405 WEST ELM STREET
URBANA, IL 61801-3231 USA
This is called Title Page & Verso, or TP&V for short, and is needed
for copyright research. A colored envelope is best, to make sure your
letter is easily recognized as TP&V.
E-mail Michael hart@pobox.com when you send them, so he knows they're
on the way. It's a good idea to check back with him by e-mail after a
week or so if you haven't heard from him.
About this, Michael says: "Please include always your e-mail name and
address, and mark the envelope with some distinctive mark and or
color. Colored envelopes fine. Just something so I can find it easily,
the mail here is slow and deep, like snow. Please send a note to:
<hart@pobox.com> for more info."
To submit by e-mail, scan the front and back of the title page, even if
the back is blank, and e-mail the images to Greg Newby
<gbnewby@ils.unc.edu> as TIFF, JPEG or GIF in medium resolution. Make
sure that the print is legible before you send.
Whichever method you use, you should expect to get an e-mail back
after about a week, with one line containing the Author, Title, your
name and date with the word "OK" at the end. This means that your text
has been cleared.
A Clearance Line looks something like:
The Works Of Homer [Iliad/Odyssey] Tr. George Chapman Jim Tinsley 06/14/01 ok
If you don't get any response, e-mail to check that your TP&V was
received OK. If the word at the end of the line is not "OK", then
your text is not eligible, and a comment will probably be appended
explaining why it is not eligible.
Don't start work on your book until you get that OK! It's very
sickening to do all that work, and then find out that your text
can't legally be put on-line!
V.38. I have a two- or three-volume set. Do I have to get a separate
clearance on each physical book?
Yes.
Some multi-volume works, notably reference books and translations,
were published in a series, and it may be that the first volume is
1922, but the others are 1923 or later, so we have to clear each
individually.
V.39. I have one physical book, with multiple works in it (like a
collection of plays). Do I have to get a separate clearance
for each work?
No. Since they were all printed together, one TP&V will suffice for
all, but . . .
You should list each separate title included, if you intend to submit
each title separately (see the FAQ "I have one physical book, with
multiple works in it like a collection of plays. Should I submit
each work separately?" [V.36]). If, say, you clear a "Collected Plays
of Sheridan", and later submit an eBook of "The School for Scandal",
we will have trouble finding your clearance unless we have made a note
that "School for Scandal" is part of the contents of "Collected
Plays".
In a case like this, you should include, on your paper or e-mail,
something like:
George Bernard Shaw. Plays Unpleasant. 1905.
Contents:
Preface to Unpleasant Plays
Widower's Houses
The Philanderer
Mrs. Warren's Profession
You only need to do this when you are going to submit each part
separately, which is commonly the case with plays, and sometimes
essays, stories and novellas. Taking a different example, the
"Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson", we would not need to list the
contents, since we wouldn't publish each poem separately.
There is one exceptional case: if your book was printed after 1923,
but contains stories or plays some of which are stated to be reprints
of pre-1923 editions, you should give as much detail as possible about
what you intend to submit.
V.40. Who will check up on my progress? When?
Nobody. There are no schedules or timetables. You're welcome to
contact other volunteers [V.12] with comments or questions, though.
V.41. How long should it take me to complete a book?
Most books get done in between one and three months, but this varies
wildly. It depends on the amount of time you can afford to give it,
the length of the book and, if you're not typing, the quality of the
scan--if the book scans badly, you need to put more time into
proofing.
Some very productive volunteers manage to turn out an e-text a week;
some books can take a year or more.
Scanning itself doesn't take too long. Even if it takes you as much as
two minutes per page to scan, you will still complete a 300 page book
in 10 hours, and you will probably be scanning much faster than that [S.9].
The problem is that the text generated by the scanner and your OCR
package is usually faulty. There are many cute scanner errors,
mistaking b for h, or e for c, so that "heard" is scanned as "beard"
or "ear" as "car". Makes the story more interesting sometimes!
So now you need to do a first proof of the e-text. Read it carefully,
correct scanning mistakes, and make sure that you haven't left out
pages or got them in the wrong order. Unless your scan was
exceptionally good, this is the time-burner in the process.
When you've done the first proof, you can either do a second proof
yourself, or send it to another volunteer for second proofing.
If you're a typist, of course, you can skip right over the messy
scanning and scan-correction process. Yay typists!!
V.42. I want/don't want my name published on my e-text
No problem. When you send the e-text for posting, mention exactly
what, if anything, you want the Credits Line [V.47] to say.
V.43. I'd like to put a copy of my finished e-text, or another
Gutenberg text, on my own web page.
Great! PG encourages the widest possible distribution of e-texts. We
like to publish everything in plain text, which is the most accessible
format, since everybody can read plain text. But once it's available
in plain text, it's open to you or anyone else to convert it to other
formats like HTML for further distribution.
If you are reposting a text, though, please be careful to check that
your posting complies with the conditions spelled out in the header,
especially for copyrighted works.
V.44. I've scanned, edited and proofed my text. How do I find someone
to second-proof it?
You can post a request on the Volunteers' Board, or on the gutvol-d
Mailing List. You will probably get some offers there. In a difficult
case, you might ask Michael Hart to add it to the "Requests for
Assistance" section of the next Newsletter.
In general, the best way to handle it is to make a co-operative
proofing project out of it. This is like a miniature version of the
distributed proofreading sites, without the page images.
There are always people looking for proofing work, but many beginners
take on more than they can handle, and don't finish the job, and this
can be very disappointing if you give the whole thing to one volunteer
who then vanishes without trace. You can minimize the risk of this by
splitting the book into chunks of about 20-30 pages, or one chapter if
that's around the right size, each. Write explicit instructions about
what you want them to do when they spot a suspected error, like fix it
or mark it with an asterisk. (Marking is probably safer with beginners
who don't have the book or an image of the page to refer to.) Give the
first chapter to the first person who responds, the second to the
second, and so on. As you hand out the chapters, let the proofers know
that if they're not returned within three or five days, you'll assume
they've quit. Three days is more than plenty of time for 20 pages. If
someone returns a chapter, you can give them another. If someone
doesn't get back to you within the time set, assume they're not going
to, and recycle that chapter to someone else. No hard feelings, no
problem. This process of "co-operative proofing" ensures that
beginning proofers don't choke on the work, and that one vanishing
volunteer doesn't hold up the whole project.
V.45. I've gone over and over my text. I can't find any more errors,
and I'm sick of looking at it. What should I do now?
We all know that feeling! Particularly with your first book, you've
probably gone through a patch when you thought you'd never finish--and
when you do, you can't stand the idea of looking at it again. Heh.
Cheer up--the first twenty texts are the worst! :-) And you'll feel a
lot better when you see your text available for everyone to read.
You have three choices:
You can send it for posting as it is. [V.46]
You can put it aside for week or so, and come back to it with fresh
eyes.
You can ask in any of the standard ways [V.12] for someone else to
second-proof it for you. This has a lot to recommend it; it gets
other sets of eyes looking at the text, it relieves the pressure that
you may feel, it may rekindle your enthusiasm for the text, it allows
you to "meet" other volunteers, and possibly form partnerships for
future PG collaboration. Above all, it gives new proofers a chance to
get their feet wet, and this is good for them, and good for PG. You
are not only contributing a text, you're helping to train and
encourage the next generation of producers.
V.46. Where and how can I send my text for posting?
As of late 2002, we have a new automated upload procedure using a web
page. This has a lot of good things going for it, because we keep a
record of what's uploaded, you get an e-mailed copy of the notification,
you don't have to fiddle with FTP, and we can make up the header
automatically from the information you enter, which saves time and
prevents keying errors.
As always, it's better to ZIP your file first, because it'll take
less time to transfer.
Just go to <http://beryl.ils.unc.edu/cgi-bin/upload>, fill in the
form, specify the file to upload, and hit "Send" at the bottom.
And you're done!
If, for some reason, you can't use this page, there are two backup
options: you can e-mail it, or you can upload it by FTP. Whichever
you use, it is always best to ZIP the file first if you can.
If you are comfortable with sending files by FTP, this is better than
e-mail, First, you will need a username and password, which you can get
by e-mailing any of the Posting Team.
If you already know how to use command-line FTP, here's how to do it:
Log in to beryl.ils.unc.edu using the username and password supplied
and change to the work directory by typing "cd work". Change to binary
mode with the "bin" command and "put" your file.
Summary instructions:
ftp beryl.ils.unc.edu
login: yourlogin
password: yourpassword
cd work
bin
put yourfile.ext
quit
Here is a sample session:
>ftp beryl.ils.unc.edu
Connected to beryl.ils.unc.edu.
220-Access from unknown@127.0.0.1 logged.
220 FTP Server
User (beryl.ils.unc.edu:(none)): xxxxxxxx
331 Password required for xxxxxxxx.
Password: xxxxxxxx
230 User xxxxxxxx logged in.
ftp> cd work
250 CWD command successful.
ftp> bin
200 Type set to I.
ftp> put MYFILE.ZIP
200 PORT command successful.
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for MYFILE.ZIP.
226 Transfer complete.
ftp: 172313 bytes sent in 17.34Seconds 9.94Kbytes/sec.
ftp> quit
When you are in the work directory, you will not be able to list
files, but they _do_ exist and they _are_ there.
When you have uploaded your file, e-mail a note to any or all of the
Posting Team, including your
1. filename
2. credits line as you want it on your text
3. clearance line you received [V.37]
An ideal note might be:
Subject: Beryl upload for posting: Hamlet
I have uploaded to beryl:
Hamlet, by William Shakespeare
File is: hamlet.zip
Credits line is:
Produced by John Doe <jdoe@example.com>
Clearance was given as:
Hamlet William Shakespeare John Doe 05/03/02 ok
If you'd rather send it by e-mail, send the e-mail, including the
Credits Line and Clearance Line as in the sample above, to any or all
of the Posting Team, with your text as an attachment. Again, ZIPped
is better, since it avoids certain damage that can happen to a plain
text e-mail along the way.
Do not add the Project Gutenberg header or footer to your file,
unless we specifically asked you to. If you do add it, we'll just
have to strip it off again, since we add headers automatically
when posting. There are times, perhaps when you're working in
an unusual non-editable format, when we may give you a header
and ask you to add it, but this is rare.
Please read section "4: Posting" of the FAQ "How does a text get
produced?" [V.16] for more detail about what happens in posting.
Especially, if you want to draw some peculiarities of this text
to the Posting Team's attention, or want feedback on any minor
edits done during posting, you should say so in the e-mail you send.
_Don't assume that we know anything_ when you send the e-mail. We
don't know what you want us to put on the Credits Line. We don't know
that this is an unusual text, and needs some kind of special
reformatting. We don't know that the text should be split into two
volumes before posting. We don't know that you would really like us to
check it closely before posting. You have to tell us, exactly and
precisely, what you want on the Credits Line. If the text needs some
specific work, you have to tell us exactly what that is. And please do
that in your e-mail, not in the text itself. Remember that we could be
dealing with five or ten other texts at the same time, and even if the
poster you discussed it with two weeks ago is the same one who posts
the book, he may not remember.
V.47. What is the "Credits Line"?
The Credits line is a line that the Posting Team can insert into
each PG text naming the producer or producers of a particular text.
You should decide what you want on the credits line of your text;
it's really not up to us.
Most credits lines are something like:
Produced by John Doe <jdoe@example.com>.
If you don't want to be mentioned by name at all, just say, in your
e-mail:
Please omit the Credits Line for this text. I want to contribute
it anonymously.
If you do want to be mentioned, please give the exact wording you want
us to use. Some people want their name only; they don't want us to
include their e-mail addresses. Others want to make their e-mail
addresses public so that readers can contact them with comments.
That is entirely up to you, but you do need to tell us. If you do
want to include your e-mail, remember that having it permanently
on the net is a spam-magnet, and we can't effectively remove or change
it later.
Occasionally, a Credits Line can spill onto more than one line,
for example:
This text was converted to HTML by Jane Roe <jroe@example.com>
from an original ASCII text scanned by Jack Went
and proofed by Jill Hill
V.48. How soon after I send it will my text be posted?
First read the "Posting" section of the FAQ "How does a book get
produced?" [V.16] to understand the process.
You should expect some response within three or four days. We try to
get to all submissions within that time. In most cases, that response
will be simply the official notification that it has been posted. If
there is a query on your text, for example if we can't find the
copyright clearance or if we have trouble converting or correcting
your text, we will probably e-mail you back directly with questions.
If you don't hear from us within four days, send a follow-up e-mail;
it could be that your original note never got to us, or just fell
through the cracks.
If your file happens to arrive while one of us is logged in and
working, it could get posted within the hour. Some frequent
contributors who know our habits know just how to time their uploads!
V.49. I found a problem with my posted text. What do I do?
Most postings go smoothly, but problems can happen. Sometimes, one of
the servers is down. Sometimes a file gets corrupted for some unknown
reason. Sometimes, let's face it, we screw up.
Usually, one of the indexers will tell us about it, but if you catch
it first, e-mail whoever sent out your notification e-mail and explain
the problem. Don't worry; your original file will be quite safe, since
we keep these long after posting them.
V.50. Someone has e-mailed me about my posted text, pointing out errors.
Great!
Since you're the original producer, you're in the best position to
decide whether these are real errors. If they're right about it, tell
the Posting Team and we'll correct the text.
V.51. Someone has e-mailed me about my posted text, thanking me.
Nice feeling, isn't it? :-)
About Proofing
V.52. What role does proofing play in Project Gutenberg?
A very big one!
Typists' work doesn't usually need many corrections, but
unfortunately, scanners and OCR packages are far from perfect, and
scanned text varies from "almost-right" down to "maybe I should
consider typing instead of scanning". Proofing is the process that
turns a scan into a readable e-text.
Proofing a typist's work is straightforward; you just read it, and
keep an eye out for mistakes. Typists typically have few mistakes in
their texts, but the errors that they do make tend to be hard to spot.
Proofing OCRed text has its quirks, and you can expect many, many
errors to correct.
The only thing that all proofers agree on is to differ in their
methods. Some people scan and almost complete the proofing process
within their OCR package, others do no editing at all within their
OCR. Some spell-check first, others spell-check last. Some work
through in one pass, doggedly line by line, others make several light
passes. Some start at the end and work backwards! Some proofers mark
all queries with special characters like asterisks (*) in the text,
most just make all the obvious changes and mark only the dubious ones.
Some people always send their texts out for proofing, others prefer to
do it all themselves.
So this guide is not prescriptive; this is not the "only way" to do
it. The only rule is that, at the end of the process, your e-text
should be as error-free as you can make it, and should conform to
Gutenberg's editing standards, which are mostly just common sense
guidelines to make readable text.
The aim of this FAQ is to give you an understanding of what text looks
like when it comes fresh off the scanner, and an overview of the whole
process by which it becomes a publishable e-text.
V.53. What is Distributed Proofing?
It has always been common for volunteers to share proofing work among
themselves--you take the first five chapters, I'll take the next, and
so on.
When you're just starting as a PG volunteer, you should go to one of
the Distributed Proofing sites [B.4] and do some work there to get a
grounding in the basics and a feel for whether you would like to
continue working in PG. In distributed proofing, you get a very short
section, as little as a page of text at a time, and usually an image
file of the page as it scanned. You then make the text match the
image. This is a great start, since all you have to do is read,
compare and correct. However, other work also needs to be done, and
will normally be done by the project managers of these sites. The
samples below give you an idea of the whole process, and also some
ideas of what proofing a whole book from start to finish is like.
V.54. What do I need to proof an e-text?
You actually need only two things: the e-text itself and a text
editor or word-processor that can handle book-sized files and save
them as text.
Nearly all word processors and text editors in current use will work.
Volunteers use many common programs, including WordPerfect, Microsoft
Word, WordPad, DOS EDIT, vi, Brief, Crisp, EditPad, MetaPad, emacs,
AbiWord, and the word processors from Open Office abd AppleWorks. And
all of these are in actual use by volunteers today. Since all of them
contain the necessary basic functions, the best program is the one
you're most comfortable with.
Be cautious with recent, powerful word-processors that "auto-correct"
text, or use "smart quotes" or any other such automatic retyping or
formatting feature, since they can Do Bad Things to your e-text
without your consent! When using any such package, it is best to
switch off any feature that makes changes without asking you.
Two utilities which may come in useful are a spell-checker and a
version difference checker. These may be built into your word
processor, or you may have them as separate packages.
A spell-checker is like a chain-saw: a powerful tool, but one to be
used very carefully. It is very easy to say "Yes" to the wrong change,
and make a really bad mess of the text. Spell-checkers have problems
with proper names, foreign words, archaic usages, and dialects.
Incautious use can leave you with a text such as that immortalized
in the
Owed two a Spell in Chequer.
Eye half a spell in chequer,
It cane with my Pea Sea.
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye can knot sea.
Every e-text should pass through a spell-checker at some point, but
the human half of the partnership needs a very light hand on the
confirmations of change!
A difference checker, such as FC or COMP for MS-DOS, diff for Unix or
ExamDiff <http://www.prestosoft.com/examdiff/examdiff.htm> for
Windows, may also come in handy. A difference checker compares two
versions of the text, and points out the changes. This is important
when you've sent a text out for proofing, and you get it back with
changes. Rather than re-reading the whole text, you can use a
difference checker to highlight the changes so that you can verify
them against the printed text. As a proofer, you can use it to compare
the original text with what you're sending back to ensure that you've
only changed what you meant to change.
V.55. Do I need to have a paper copy of the book I'm proofing?
No.
Your job as proofer is to ensure that the e-text you're working on is
readable in itself, and contains no obvious errors. Where you think
there might be an error, but you're not sure, you mark the spot in the
e-text, and let the volunteer who has the paper book look it up.
V.56. What's the difference between "first proof" and "second proof"?
These are fuzzy terms used to indicate how accurate the e-text is, and
what type of work is needed to improve it. Quite commonly, the same
volunteer who scans the book proofs the whole thing in one or two
passes. Sometimes, given a good scan, the text can be sent out for
"first proof" with little or no preparatory fixing-up. Often, the
scanner makes quite a lot of corrections, then sends the text out for
"second proof".
A text is ready for first proofing when it's obvious that there are
plenty of errors, but it's possible to figure out, in almost every
case, what the correct text should be without needing to refer to the
book.
The objective of first proofing is to eliminate all the obvious
errors, so that if you speed-read quickly through the text, you
probably won't notice any.
Second proofing involves taking a text that has been first-proofed and
correcting all the remaining, more subtle errors. Often, some simple
errors such as incorrect spacing and quotes may be left for second
proofing. Texts that have been typed instead of scanned will always
be of at least second-proof quality.
V.57. What do I do with an e-text sent to me for proofing?
First, establish reasonable expectations. A typical book takes 10-15
hours of concentrated effort, and when you first start, you're
climbing a learning curve. For your first session, decide to mark out
a chapter or two--something like 500 to 1,000 lines--and work only on
that. If you get through 1,000 lines in your first sitting, you have
done extremely well! It's a good idea to send this first 1,000 lines
or so back immediately. The volunteer who sent you the e-text will
comment on it, and let you know about any style guidelines you may
have breached or common errors you may have missed. Most beginning
proofers do make mistakes, so don't worry about it--it's easier to
correct these in 1,000 lines than to go back over them in 15,000
lines!
You will usually receive the e-text as an attachment to your e-mail.
It's better to send e-texts as attachments than to paste them as text
into the body of the e-mail to make sure that the text isn't changed
by different e-mail clients. It's better to send e-mailed attachments
as ZIP files [R.20], since e-mails sent as text can be damaged along the
way. But whether you receive a TXT file or a ZIP file that you have to
open, you should save the .TXT file to your hard disk and open it with
your editor.
It may be that the text you see appears double-spaced--every second
line is blank--or that all the text is on one incredibly long line.
This is a familiar effect when moving between a DOS/Windows computer
and a Mac or Unix system, but it can happen between any two editors.
It is caused by the use of different characters to mark the end of a
line. If you have this problem, ask whoever sent you the text to
re-send it, telling them what kind of computer and editor you have.
Now you make any changes that obviously need to be made, and mark any
places where the text looks wrong, but you're not sure what the right
text should be. You can usually use asterisks (*) to mark these
dubious spots, but you might use other characters if the text already
contains asterisks. When in doubt, mark them all, and let the
volunteer with the text sort them out!
It is usually best not to make global changes to line lengths by
reformatting lots of paragraphs, since the person who sent you the
e-text may want to use a difference checker when you return it, and
changed line-lengths throughout mean that every line will be
different.
When working on a long text, or when making a lot of changes, it may
be wise to save several versions of the text with different filenames
at different stages so that if something goes badly wrong, you can
revert to the last good version. This applies especially to saving the
text just before performing a spell-check.
When you're finished with the e-text, make sure you save it as a plain
text file (.TXT) and send it back by zipping it if you can, and
attaching it to an e-mail.
V.58. What kinds of errors will I have to correct?
Each text has its own peculiarities, but there are a number of
well-known scanning errors you will be dealing with all the time.
Punctuation is always a problem. Periods, commas and semi-colons are
often confused, as are colons and semi-colons. There are also usually
a number of extra or missing spaces in the e-text.
The problem of quotes can assume nightmarish proportions in a text
which contains a lot of dialog, particularly when single and double
quotes are nested.
The numeral 1, the lower-case letter l, the exclamation mark ! and the
capital I are routinely confused, and often, single or double quotes
may be mistaken for one of these.
Lower-case m is often mistaken for rn or ni.
The letters h and b and e and c are commonly mis-read, and these are
probably the hardest of all to catch, since ear/car, eat/cat, he/be,
hear/bear, heard/beard are all common words which no spell-checker
will flag as problems.
For example:
" Hello1' caIled jirnmy breczily. 11Anyone home ? "
There seemed to he no-oneabout. Only tbe eat beard him."
should read:
"Hello!" called Jimmy breezily, "Anyone home?"
There seemed to be no-one about. Only the cat heard him.
As well as scanner errors, which affect one letter at a time, you have
to keep an eye out for editing mistakes by the volunteer who scanned
the text or by previous proofers. These are typically cases where a
whole line, paragraph or page has been omitted or misplaced. They show
up as sentences that don't make sense, or paragraphs that don't follow
from the previous one.
This means that you have to keep reading the flow of the text, so that
you can spot context errors as well as typos.
V.59. How long does it take to proof an e-text?
This depends on how long the e-text is, how clean the text is when you
start, and how thorough you're being, as well as how much time per day
you can give it and how fast you can proof.
On a first proof, it can take a very long time to get the e-text to a
readable condition if it scanned badly. As a beginner, you would be
unlikely to be given such a difficult text to work with. First proofs
are usually done by the same person who did the scanning, and are only
given out in the context of established scanning/proofing teams.
You might expect to proof anywhere between 500 and 2,000 lines per
hour during a second proof. A short novel or novella might have as few
as 6,000 or 7,000 lines; War and Peace weighs in at about 54,000
lines. Most novels run to 10,000 to 15,000 lines. So you might spend
anything between 5 and 30 hours second-proofing a standard book, with
10 to 15 hours being typical.
For an average novel, a week or two for second proofing is good going.
A month is reasonable.
Proofing an e-text is a significant amount of work, and you may find
it psychologically more comfortable to take on a chunk at a time--say
1,000 lines per session--and send that proofed section back, rather
than wait until the whole job is done before sending anything back.
This helps to avoid the fairly common case where you keep falling
behind where you expect to be until you dread the thought of getting
back to the text, and finally just abandon it.
If you find after a while that you just don't want to continue, please
tell the person who sent you the text that you're not going ahead with
it. It's very frustrating for the volunteer who scanned the book, and
who wants to get it posted, to wait for two or three months, only to
have to start all over again with another proofer.
V.60. Are there any special techniques for proofing?
The classic way to proof is to open the text in your editor or word
processor, and just start reading carefully.
This method has received a major boost since editors and word
processors have added a feature of showing squiggly red underlines
under words not in their dictionary. While this is very useful, you
still need to read carefully, since not all errors produce misspelled
words. The classic, and very common, example of this is scanning "he"
for "be". These visual spellchecks also commonly do not check words
beginning with capitals. Capitalized words are commonly names not in
the dictionary, and when checking of capitalized words is switched
off, they will not query "Tbe". Other errors that a spellchecker
doesn't look for include missing spaces, mismatched quotes and
misplaced punctuation. For these, you can try gutcheck [P.1]. And of
course, no automatic check will find omitted lines or words. Worse,
spellcheckers will query words not in their dictionary that might be
quite correct, and this can be quite troublesome when dealing with
older texts or dialect.
Still, if your concentration is up to the job, scrolling through a
text with non-dictionary words underlined in red is a fast and
effective way of giving a text the final once-over.
Volunteers have also used other techniques for proofing. Some people
can't sit at their screen and read for hours; many people don't want
to.
Some people just use the good old-fashioned method of printing out the
text to be proofed, and blue-pencilling the mistakes.
It is becoming fairly common now for people to load the text onto
their PDA, and read it from that. Mistakes found can be bookmarked or
jotted down and fixed when they go back to their PC.
Getting your computer to read the text aloud is a very effective way of
achieving high accuracy. Modern PCs have audio capabilities built in,
and it is possible to find free or cheap shareware "read-aloud"
text-to-speech packages for just about everything. Some PDAs are also
capable of doing text-to-speech.
The first time you try text-to-speech, it will probably sound and feel
a little strange, but you will quickly learn to _hear_ errors in
words. This can be very effective, but you should have given the text
at least a light proofing before you begin; it is hard to deal with a
high number of errors using a text-to-speech method.
When proofing by a speech program, you either set your text-to-speech
program to pronounce all punctuation, or, if that is not possible, you
make a special version of your text to feed it, first doing a global
replace of "," with " comma ", ";" with " semi-colon ", and so on.
Mark a block of 500 to 1,000 lines for reading aloud, and set the
reading speed to whatever is comfortable for you. Then you sit down
with the original book in front of you, and listen. When you hear an
error, mark the place in the text with a light pencil. Stopping the
reading at every error, editing the text and restarting is possible,
but it breaks the flow, and ends up taking longer. When the reading is
done, go to your keyboard and correct the errors found.
V.61. What actually happens during a proof?
Stage One--The original Scan
We start with a scanned e-text, in this case a paragraph from The
Odyssey. The paragraph used as an example here has been "enhanced"
with more errors than in the real scanned text, so that you can see
samples of many problems all in one place.
We begin by looking at the original OCRed text, of which our sample
section reads:
1There Periniedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but l
drew my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were
a cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a drink-
offering to all the dead, first with mead and thereafter with
sweet wine, and for the third time with water, And 1 sprink-
BOOK XL
ODYSSEY X, 24-56.
173
ODYSS.EY XI, %4-56. 173
lef white incal thereon, and entreated with many prayers
strengthless beads of the dead, and prornised that on my
return to Ithaea 1 would offer in my halls a barren heifer,
the best 1 had, and fil the pyre with treasure, and apart unto
Teiresias alone sacrifice a black rarn without spot, the fairest
of my flock. But when 1 bad hesought the tribes of the
d with vows and prayers, 1 took the sheep and cut their
s over the trench. and the dark blood flowed forth,
he spirits of the dead that he departed gathered
from out of Erebus.
It's clear that we should tidy up the page headings and numbers that
have been scanned in with the main text, and that we should separate
the paragraphs and remove the spaces inserted by the scan at the start
of some lines. We also need to restore some of the text that got lost
in the scan. Since there isn't much of it, we just type it in. Having
done this, we get to . . .
Stage Two--First pass through the scanned text
At this point, we have a complete text. All of the words are actually
there, and we have eliminated page breaks and other extraneous
artifacts of proofing. Again, mileage varies: some people like to
preserve page breaks and numbering until much later, to make it easy
to refer back from the e-text to the book.
Our job in this phase is to fix all of the obvious scanning errors and
double-check that we really do have all the text. Our aim here is to
create an e-text that is ready for First Proof. In fact, since it's
fairly clear what all the words are, this text could be considered
ready for first proof.
1There Periniedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but l
drew my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were
a cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a drink-
offering to all the dead, first with mead and there after with
sweet wine, and for the third time with water. And 1 sprink-
led white incal thereon, and entreated with many prayers the
strengthless beads of the dead, and prornised that on my
return to Ithaea 1 would offer in my halls a barren heifer,
the best 1 had, and fill the pyre with treasure, and apart unto
Teiresias alone sacrifice a black rarn without spot, the fairest
of my flock. But when 1 bad besought the tribes of the
dead with vows and prayers, 1 took the sheep and cut their
throats over the trench. and the dark blood flowed forth,
and lo, the spirits of the dead that he departed gathered
them from out of Erebus.
Now we convert those numeral 1s to capital Is and to quotes, where
appropriate, we straighten up the quotes and we deal with other
obvious scanning errors, which brings us to . . .
Stage Three--The First Proof
At this point, we could hand over the text to an experienced proofer
who doesn't have a copy of the book. This would be called a "first
proof". An e-text is at first proof stage when there are still plenty
of errors, but in each case it's pretty obvious what the correct word
is. The excerpt now looks like normal text.
Unfortunately, in stage two above, we accidentally deleted a line.
'There Periniedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but l
drew my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were
a cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a drink-
offering to all the dead, first with mead and there after with
sweet wine, and for the third time with water. And I sprink-
led white incal thereon, and entreated with many prayers the
strengthless beads of the dead, and prornised that on my
return to Ithaea I would offer in my halls a barren heifer,
Teiresias alone sacrifice a black rarn without spot, the fairest
of my flock. But when I bad besought the tribes of the
dead with vows and prayers, I took the sheep and cut their
throats over the trench, and the dark blood flowed forth,
and lo, the spirits of the dead that he departed gathered
them from out of Erebus.
Stage Four--Corrections from First Proof
We receive the first proof back from the proofer, and find that it
has been mostly corrected.
The corrections made were "l/I", "there after/thereafter",
"prornised/promised", "bad/had", and "rarn/ram".
We have also wrapped the lines--at 60 characters in this case, but it
is commonly as much as 70 characters per line. Sentences which look
wrong, but where it isn't clear what the right text should be, have
been marked with asterisks (*).
'There Periniedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but I drew
my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it were a
cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a
drink-offering to all the dead, first with mead and
thereafter with sweet wine, and for the third time with
water. And I sprinkled white incal * thereon, and entreated
with many prayers the strengthless beads of the dead, and
promised that on my return to Ithaea I would offer in my
halls a barren heifer, * Teiresias alone sacrifice a black
ram without spot, the fairest of my flock. But when I had
besought the tribes of the dead with vows and prayers, I
took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench, and
the dark blood flowed forth, and lo, the spirits of the
dead that he departed gathered them from out of Erebus.
We look up the text where the first proofer has asterisked it, and
make the corrections.
The text is now ready for second proofing. An e-text is ready for
second proofing when you can skim through the text without noticing
that there are errors.
We can either do a second proof ourselves, or send it out for second
proofing.
Second proofing involves a very careful reading of the text, looking
for small errors. In some ways, it's much harder than first proofing,
since it's very easy to let your eyes run on auto-pilot and in doing
so, miss subtle errors.
Having performed the second proof, which caught errors like
"beads/heads", "Ithaea/Ithaca", "Periniedes/Perimedes" and "he/be",
we now have our final e-text.
'There Perimedes and Eurylochus held the victims, but I
drew my sharp sword from my thigh, and dug a pit, as it
were a cubit in length and breadth, and about it poured a
drink-offering to all the dead, first with mead and
thereafter with sweet wine, and for the third time with
water. And I sprinkled white meal thereon, and entreated
with many prayers the strengthless heads of the dead, and
promised that on my return to Ithaca I would offer in my
halls a barren heifer, the best I had, and fill the pyre
with treasure, and apart unto Teiresias alone sacrifice a
black ram without spot, the fairest of my flock. But when I
had besought the tribes of the dead with vows and prayers,
I took the sheep and cut their throats over the trench, and
the dark blood flowed forth, and lo, the spirits of the
dead that be departed gathered them from out of Erebus.
Hooray! At long last we have an e-text to post, which can be
downloaded, read and enjoyed by anyone in the world from now on.
About Net searching:
V.62. I've found an eligible text elsewhere on the Net, but it's not
in the PG archives. Can I just submit it to PG?
You can submit it, but you can't "just" submit it.
We wish we could give a permanent home to all the etexts that people
have produced and placed on the Net, but without proof of their
public domain [C.10] status, we can't.
We need to be able to prove that the eBooks we publish are in the
public domain, so, in order to use one of the many texts that are
just floating around the Net, you need to find a matching paper
edition that we can prove is eligible [V.18].
(By the way, please be sure that it isn't already in the PG archive. A
lot of texts circulating on the Net originated at PG, and people quite
often submit them back to us.)
Before you get into this, you should check whether the text you have
found is likely to be in the public domain in the U.S. A quick way to
verify this is to hit the Library of Congress Catalog site at
<http://catalog.loc.gov> and search for the title or author. If you
find no publications before 1923, then you should probably move on;
the Library of Congress doesn't list every book, and in particular
doesn't list all books published outside the U.S., but, if there isn't
a pre-1923 copy there, it may be difficult to follow up on. If you're
not dissuaded, do a search on the Net for used book shops that might
have pre-1923 copies.
Sometimes, with a text on the Net, you know who typed it; it's on
someone's website, or the transcriber is named in the text. Sometimes,
the text has just been floating around Usenet or old gopher sites for
years, with no attribution.
The first thing to remember is that we would like to give credit to
the original transcriber if they want it, and if we can identify them.
The next thing to consider is that the original transcriber may well
have an eligible copy of the book, and may be able to provide TP&V
[V.25] for it.
So, if you can locate the original transcriber, it makes sense to
e-mail them, explain what you propose to do, and ask them whether they
can help with copyright clearance and whether they would like to be
credited in the PG edition. Often, you will get no response, or a
response but no prospect of material that will help with clearance,
but sometimes you will get lucky.
If the transcriber can't help with TP&V, it's up to you to find a
matching paper edition of the same book. This may not be as hard
as it sounds. Libraries can help, and may get editions for you on
interlibrary loan.
This is an ideal way for students, academics and librarians to
contribute texts to PG, since you probably have access to a good
library with stocks of old books to find matching paper editions.
If you find a matching paper edition, you then need to compare the
etext you found with the book. Legally, what we're trying to prove
here is that we have done "due diligence"--that we have done our best
to prove that the etext is indeed a copy of a public domain work.
The minimum "due diligence" we can perform is to compare the first and
last pages of each chapter, (or every 20 pages where the book is not
neatly divided into chapters of about that size). You should list all
of the differences between the book and the etext that you find on
those pages. It is to be expected that there will be some minor
differences of punctuation, spacing and spelling, and even perhaps of
wording. Minor differences are OK, but we do need to list them, to
prove that we did the comparison. When you have your lists, you can
send in the TP&V as normal, accompanied by your lists, for clearance.
Many texts floating round without attribution, and indeed many with
attribution, could do with a thorough checking, and another option you
have is "comparative retyping", where you go through the whole etext,
proofing it carefully against the cleared paper book, and changing
everything that is different in the etext to match the paper edition.
If you do this, you don't need to produce a list of differences, since
there won't be any by the time you've finished; you can just submit it
as a normal text--_and_ it may well be a lot cleaner! However, if you
do take this path, please do a very thorough job on the proofing and
comparison.
If the etext you find has been marked up, in HTML for example, you
should remove all HTML for the PG edition, because, even though the
text itself has been proved to be in the public domain, the original
transcribers may hold copyright on the HTML markup, even if you can't
find them. If you do want to make a HTML edition of it for PG, strip out
all of the original markup and then re-add your own markup.
If you do find the producer and he or she wants to be identified, you
may submit a double credits line like:
Transcribed by Sally Wright <theoriginaltranscriber@example.com>
Produced for PG by You <you@example.com>
V.63. I've found an eligible text elsewhere on the Net, but it's not
in the PG archives. Why should I submit it to PG?
The first reason is file safety.
Yes, we accept that the file is already available to everyone today,
but it may not be safe in the long term. We've seen college students
who put books on their personal site, and then lose that site when
they graduate. We've seen individuals who transcribe several books,
and later lose interest, or move, or die, and the work they've done is
lost. We've seen small projects with a few volunteers who produce and
post books for a few years, but then break up or run out of funds to
maintain their site. We've seen large institutions drop their
collections as part of a cost-cutting exercise. We've even seen
organizations lock public domain works up behind licenses, requiring
users to commit to registration and a "no copying" agreement before
downloading them.
Whenever a set of etexts is published and distributed by only one
person or organization, there is a danger that their etexts will
disappear from the Net sometime. We want _all_ etexts to be spread as
widely as possible, copied as much as possible, so that no one event
or loss, or whim of a sponsor, can obliterate them.
We think that the PG collection is, for that reason, the safest place
to put a text for its long-term survival. There are copies of the PG
archives all over the world, on public servers and private CDs. PG
publications are widely converted, collected and read on PDAs. Other
text projects copy works from PG.
The PG archive is so valuable, yet free and easily portable, that even
if every current PG volunteer vanished overnight, people around the
world would copy and preserve it. Even if PG itself decided to
withdraw all our texts, we couldn't do it, because so many people have
made copies.
The second reason is legal safety.
Unlike some other projects and individual efforts, PG retains
documentary proof of the public domain status of its texts. This is
more valuable than it might appear at first glance.
Publishers often claim a new copyright [C.17] on works that they
republish, and as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to prove
that a particular book is in the public domain. Walk into your local
bookstore and check out how many works by Shakespeare, Poe, Dickens,
and Twain have copyright notices on them! People who want to translate
these, or create derivative works like screenplays or lyrics or films
must first prove that they are basing their work on a public domain
edition, but the creeping copyright practices of commercial publishers
make that difficult.
Here's a practical example: we were approached by a film student who
wanted to make a short piece based on characters from James Joyce's
"Ulysses". But before he could do that, he needed to confirm that the
material on which he was basing his movie was in the public domain,
and all the editions he could find were copyrighted. However, because
PG had already established the public domain status of Ulysses, we
could point him to our established PD version, and even tell him where
to find a paper copy published in 1922. Without that evidence, he
could not have made his project.
V.64. I have already scanned or typed a book; it's on my web site.
How can I get it included in the Gutenberg archives?
Great! We get these a lot, but it's always nice to see another!
You need to send us the TP&V [V.25] so that we can prove that your
edition is in the public domain. If you don't have the TP&V, you will
need to find a matching paper book with eligible TP&V for us to be able
to use it.
V.65. I have already scanned or typed a book; it's on my web site.
The world can already access it. Why should I add it to the
Gutenberg archives?
The Project Gutenberg archives are widely copied and searched, and
much safer and more permanent that any individual website can possibly
be. We aim to keep this collection together over not just years, but
centuries. You took the trouble to transcribe this book. We can
relate; that's what _we_ do, as well. We know you want this work to
survive you and your ISP, and we believe we can do that. And it's not
as if you have to take it off your website when we make a copy; you're
just using your candle to light another!
If you want to let readers know that your site has other related
material, you can put that information in the Credits Line [V.47].
Taking a real-world example, you could ask us to add this to the
Credits line for a C. M. Yonge text:
A web page for Charlotte M. Yonge will be found at www.menorot.com/cmyonge.htm
V.66. I have already scanned or typed a book, but it's not in plain text
format. Can I submit it to PG?
Yes, of course. We'll be happy to discuss format options with you, and
we're quite experienced in converting between multiple formats and
deciding which formats work best and will have the longest life. All
you need is to get us a copy of your TP&V [V.25].
About author-submitted eBooks:
V.67. I've written a book. Will PG publish it?
Maybe.
PG gets submissions from young people, for example, who just want to
get a story they wrote published in PG. We wish them well with their
writing, but that's not really why we're here.
If you are a published author, or perhaps an academic who wants to put
a textbook into the archives, it's quite likely that we will publish
it.
V.68. I have translated a classic book from one language to another.
Will PG publish my translation?
Yes, if we can.
The book that you translated needs to be in the public domain, and we
will need the same proof of eligibility that we would use if you were
contributing the book in its original language.
For example, if you were translating Hesse's Siddhartha (published
pre-1923 in German, but no pre-1923 English translation available), we
would need to copyright clear [V.25] the original German edition from
which you worked--it needs to be a pre-1923 or otherwise public domain
edition. (We actually did this one, thanks to the hard work and
scholarship of some volunteers.)
V.69. OK, this is one of the cases where PG will publish it.
What do I do next?
You need to decide about copyright issues. Do you want to release your
work to the public domain, or do you want to retain copyright? If you
want to retain copyright, what terms do you want to release it under?
The next few questions deal with those issues.
Having decided that you want PG to publish it, and decided what
restrictions (if any) you want to place on further distribution, you
just need to write the appropriate letter and send the text to us.
[V.46]
V.70. I hold the copyright on a book. Can I release it to the public domain?
You can. All you need to do is put a statement into the released
version of the text saying that you have.
If you want to release it into the public domain and distribute it
through Project Gutenberg, you should send us a letter to that effect.
To: Michael S. Hart
Founder, Project Gutenberg
405 West Elm Street
Urbana IL, 61801-3231, USA
Dear Project Gutenberg:
I am the sole copyright holder for the book, "Wallaby Happiness." It
gives me pleasure to release this work into the public domain, and I
invite Project Gutenberg to publish this public domain edition.
Sincerely,
Gregory B. Newby
Once you have released it into the public domain, neither we nor
anyone else needs your permission to publish it, but for us to be sure
that it _is_ a public domain version, we do need a signed letter.
V.71. I hold the copyright on a book. Do I have to release the book
into the public domain for Project Gutenberg to publish it?
Absolutely not! For example, many contributors of copyrighted material
want to share it with the world, but do not want it commercially
republished by other companies.
You can grant Project Gutenberg perpetual, non-exclusive, world-wide
rights to distribute your book on a royalty-free basis by sending a
letter to Michael Hart. Your letter may be brief, but must be signed,
and must include the name of the book and the assertion that you are
the copyright holder or the agent for the copyright holder.
If you want some related information, like a link to your website,
included in the text, we will be happy to oblige.
Once we have posted a text, many people will copy it. We have no
effective mechanism for "recalling" texts that we have posted, so
please be sure, before you commit to this, that you intend to follow
through with it, because there is no way to change your mind later.
Here is a sample letter, including the address to send it to:
To: Michael S. Hart
Founder, Project Gutenberg
405 West Elm Street
Urbana IL, 61801-3231, USA
Dear Project Gutenberg:
I am the sole copyright holder for the book, "Wallaby Happiness." It
gives me pleasure to grant Project Gutenberg perpetual, worldwide,
non-exclusive rights to distribute this book in electronic form
through Project Gutenberg Web sites, CDs or other current and future
formats. No royalties are due for these rights.
Sincerely,
Gregory B. Newby
V.72. I hold the copyright on a book, and would like Project Gutenberg
to publish it. Can I choose what rights to assign?
For PG to be in a position to copy it, we do need perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free rights to distribute the book
in electronic form. What rights you choose to assign to readers after
that is a decision for you to make.
The Creative Commons site <http://www.creativecommons.org> may give
you some ideas of what practical use you can make of your copyright to
see that the work is used in the ways you intended.
About what goes into the texts:
V.73. Why does PG format texts the way it does?
PG texts are formatted as plain ASCII, with 60-70 characters per line,
with a hard return [CR/LF] at end of line, and some people ask "Why do
it _this_ way? You could omit the hard returns and let the reader's word
processor or Reader software wrap the lines. You could use "8-bit"
accented characters for non-English characters." "You could use ' - '
instead of '--' for an em-dash." And so on, through a different choice
we could make for every formatting feature. And the answer, of course,
is that we _could_ do it differently, and sometimes we do, but mostly we
keep to one consistent style.
We'll be discussing each of the formatting decisions below, not only
giving the summary PG answer, but also discussing the plusses and
minuses of each, and the possible options.
Like any question beginning "Why does/doesn't PG . . . ?", the answer
is "Because that's what the volunteers and readers want!". These
conventions have been worked out over the years, largely by Michael
Hart, our founder and chief volunteer, in conjunction with all of us
volunteers, as the result of feedback from readers.
We are guided throughout by the principle that we want to produce
texts in the simplest format that will adequately express the content.
Quoting Michael Hart (1994):
Etext as developed and distributed by Project Gutenberg since 1971 was
never intended to be a copy of a paper or a parchment [remember, first
Project Gutenberg Etext was typed in from parchment replicas of the US
Declaration of Independence].
The major purposes of Project Gutenberg have always been:
1. to encourage the creation and distribution of electronic texts for
the general audience.
2. to provide these Etexts in a manner available to everyone in terms
of price and accessibility [i.e. no special hardware or software],
and no price tag attached to the Etexts themselves.
3. to make the Etexts as readily usable as possible, with no forms or
other paperwork required, and as easily readable to the human eyes
as to computer programs, and in fact, more readable than paper.
There is sometimes a conflict between "simplest format" and
"adequately express the content"; further, different people have
different views on what is "simple" or "adequate". You, the producer
of the text, have spent the time and effort to make the eBook
available to the world, you have thought more about it than anyone
else, and we respect your informed judgment. However, please make
sure that your judgment _has_ been informed, by studying the
precedents and reasons behind our guidelines.
Where a simple, standard PG-ASCII layout does not, in your view,
"adequately express the content", you should think of making your text
in another open format, perhaps HTML or XML or TeX, that allows you to
use more characters, more formatting options, and images. We are
always happy to accept these kinds of files. In these cases, you
should also provide a standard PG-ASCII version, even if you feel it
is unacceptably degraded, for those who cannot use your preferred
format.
Just ten years ago, presentation as plain ASCII was not only a
universal standard, it was effectively the only way that most people
could view the books. The first version of the HTML specification had
been drafted, but was unknown among the general public. XML did not
exist. SGML was (as it still is) the province of specialists.
Specialized eBook readers and PDAs had not yet appeared.
In 2002, plain vanilla ASCII is still readable everywhere, but people
also want to convert our texts into other formats for more convenient
loading on readers and web sites. We therefore have to keep in mind that
our works will be processed by automatic conversion programs, none of
which is perfect, and we have evolved some "defensive formatting"
practices, which, while retaining the universality of plain text, also
supply clues to automatic converters about how they should treat the
layout. These do help to keep converters from making at least the worst
mistakes. The most significant "defensive formatting" practices are
indenting unwrappable text like quotations, and using _underscores_
rather than CAPITALS for italics. Different volunteers have different
priorities: at one extreme, some people want to make the best plain text
they can, giving no weight to conversion issues; at the other, some
people emphasize the cues that will allow automatic reformatters to
convert the texts well, even if that causes some ugliness in the plain
text. Most of us operate somewhere between, making the choices we feel
are best depending on the context. Getting a text on-line is the
important thing; which choices you make in doing so is a matter of
detail.
About the characters you use:
V.74. What characters can I use?
a) You should use plain ASCII for straight English texts.
b) When producing a text partly or completely in a language that
requires accents, you should use the appropriate ISO-8859 character
set for the language, and specify which you are using, and also
provide a 7-bit plain ASCII version with the accents stripped.
c) When producing a text in a language that doesn't use one of the
ISO-8859 character sets, you should use the encoding most commonly
used for that language. [e.g. Chinese--Big 5]
d) When producing a text containing more characters than can be found
in any one of the ISO-8859 character sets, you should use Unicode.
You should use plain ASCII wherever possible--that is, the letters and
numbers and punctuation available on a standard U.S. keyboard, without
accented letters. The immediate and major exception to this is when you
are typing a text written in a language like French or German that
requires accents.
There is a problem with using non-ASCII characters. They do not
display consistently on all computers; in fact, they do not even
display consistently on the same computer! On my computer, for
example, what looks like an e-acute in this editor just shows as a
black box in another editor, or even using a different font in the
same editor. And this is by no means confined to some theoretical
minority; we have to deal with it all the time when posting texts.
Further, standards are changing: ten years ago, the character set
Codepage 850 [MS-DOS] was very common; now it's rare except in some
texts that have survived those ten years.
We want to preserve these texts over _centuries_, not just decades,
and at the moment there is no single clear standard that we can use
across all texts. Unicode may perhaps be a future standard, but, right
now, it's not something that people use every day, and it's not
supported by a lot of common software.
ASCII, while limited, is supported by almost all computers everywhere,
so we make a point of always supplying an ASCII version where
possible, even if the ASCII version is degraded when compared to the
8-bit original. When we get a text in, say, German, we post two
versions of it--one with accents and one without.
V.75. What is ASCII?
Don't get scared by the computer jargon; ASCII (pronounced ASS-key) is
just a name for the set of unaccented letters, numbers and other
symbols on a standard U.S. keyboard.
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a set of
common characters, including just about everything that you can type
in on an English-language keyboard. It includes the letters A-Z, a-z,
space, numbers, punctuation and some basic symbols. Every character in
this document is an ASCII character, and each character is identified
with a number from 0 through 127 internally in the computer.
Just about every computer in the world can show ASCII characters
correctly, which makes it ideal for PG's purpose of providing texts
that can be read by anyone, anywhere, but ASCII does not include
accented characters, Greek letters, Arabic script and other
non-English characters, which causes some problems when we produce
texts that need non-ASCII characters.
V.76. So what is ISO-8859? What is Codepage 437? What is Codepage 1252?
What is MacRoman?
Today's computers mostly work on the basis of dealing with one "byte" at
a time. A byte is a unit of storage than can contain any number from 0
through 255--256 values in all. It's very convenient for computers to
associate one character with each of these numbers, so that we can have
up to 256 "letters" viewable from the values stored in one byte. The
first 128 values, zero through 127, are defined by ASCII--so, for
example, in ASCII, the number 65 represents a capital "A", 97 represents
a lowercase "a", 49 stands for the digit "1", 45 for the hyphen "-",
and so on.
ASCII doesn't define characters for the values 128 through 255, and in
early days computer manufacturers used these values to hold non-ASCII
characters like accented letters and box-drawing lines. Of course, 128
wasn't nearly enough values to hold all of the characters that people
needed to use for different languages, so they made the character sets
switchable, so that a PC in France could use a different set of
accented letters from a PC in Poland. Microsoft's version of this was
called Codepages. Each Codepage held a different set of non-ASCII
characters. Codepage 437, and later Codepage 850, were commonly used
for English and some major Western European languages on MS-DOS.
MacRoman was Apple's first codepage, containing most of the accented
letters in Latin-derived languages, and MacRoman is still in common
use on Apple Macs today.
Later, the International Standards Organization ISO got around to
looking at the problem, and defined ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-2 and so on,
as the standards for different language groups. These sets all define
the characters 160 through 255 as accented letters and other symbols,
and define the 32 characters from 128 through 159 as control characters.
Since Microsoft Windows has no use for the control characters 128
through 159, Windows fonts commonly use Codepage 1252, which has ASCII
in the first 128 characters, ISO-8859-1 in characters 160 through 255,
and other symbols in the characters 128 through 159. Just to make an
already chaotic system worse, all characters can be defined differently
in different fonts!
Of course, most of these codepages are incompatible with each other.
For example, the byte value 232 shows as a lower-case "e" with a grave
accent in ISO-8859-1 and CP1252, a capital letter "E" with diaeresis
in MacRoman, a Latin capital letter "Thorn" in CP850, a Cyrillic
lower-case "Sha" in ISO-8859-5, a Greek capital letter "Phi" in CP437,
and so on. So if you view a text intended for one of these character
sets with a program that assumes a different character set, you see
gibberish.
The good news, for mostly-English texts at least, is that ISO-8859-1,
Codepage 1252 and Unicode agree on the numerical values of the accented
characters and symbols to be represented by the values 160 through 255.
And everybody accepts ASCII--a pure ASCII file is valid ISO-8859-anything,
valid Codepage-anything, and valid Unicode UTF-8.
For more detail about the mappings between Unicode and other formats,
you can view Unicode<-->ISO-8859 mappings at
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/ISO8859/
Unicode<-->Windows mappings at
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/
and Unicode<-->Apple mappings at
ftp://ftp.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/
If you're not confused enough by now, please read the excellent guide
to the whole "alphabet soup" problem at <http://czyborra.com>.
V.77. What is Unicode?
Recognizing that no single set of 256 characters can hold all of the
symbols necessary for true multi-lingual texts, ISO 10646 was created.
This defined the Universal Character Set (UCS) using 31 bits, which
has the potential for a staggering _2 billion_ characters.
The Unicode Consortium is a group of computer industry companies
who agree the Unicode standard. Unicode accepts the ISO 10646
standards, and adds some restrictions and implementation processes.
It plans for a modest million or so characters; however, this is
enough for all living and extinct languages, and imaginable future
ones too.
Using 4 bytes for each character is wasteful, though, when most
characters need only one or two, and there are programming problems
with implementing 4-byte characters, so Unicode provides Transformation
Formats (UTF) which allow the characters to be encoded using fewer
bytes where possible. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are common.
UTF-8, which is the most practical of these from the PG point of view,
allows ASCII to be encoded normally, and usually uses two or three bytes
for other non-ASCII characters.
Because of the extra work needed to support this extra space, and the
fact that most people work mostly in one or maybe two languages, Unicode
is being adopted only slowly, and most computer programs in 2002 do not
fully support it. But when you need to mix Arabic, Greek, Ogham and
Sanskrit in one text, it's the only possible answer!
For more about this, go straight to the source at <http://www.unicode.org>.
V.78. What is Big-5?
Big 5 is an encoding of a set of 13,000+ traditional Chinese
characters.
V.79. What are "8-bit" and "7-bit" texts?
For practical purposes, 7-bit texts are plain ASCII; 8-bit texts
have accented letters.
This comes from computer jargon. You can represent the 128 characters
of ASCII using 7 bits--binary digits--but to represent the 256
characters needed for the various codepages and ISO-8859 standards,
like accented letters, you need 8 bits. Hence, we call a text that
uses non-ASCII characters in a character set like Codepage 850 or
ISO-8859-1 an "8-bit" text.
When we post a text as both 8-bit and 7-bit, as we do when ASCII is
not enough to render the text acceptably, we name the file with an
"8" or a "7" at the start. So, for example, Crime and Punishment by
Dostoevsky is named 8crmp10 for the 8-bit version with accents, and
7crmp10 for the 7-bit version without accents.
See also FAQ [R.35]: "What do the filenames of the texts mean?"
V.80. I have an English text with some quotations from a language that
needs accents--what should I do about the accents?
If stripping the accents would unacceptably degrade the book, then
submit two versions, one "8-bit" with the accents included and one
"7-bit" plain ASCII, and we will post both.
This is a hard choice. What constitutes "unacceptable degradation"?
Clearly this is a decision that all of us in PG have to make. It's a
very common problem, and different people have different views. For
that matter, different print publishers have different views; you will
see the words "debris", "facade" and "cafe" printed with and without
accents in different books, and even in different editions of the same
book.
We don't want to post two versions when we don't have to. It doubles
the posting work, doubles the disk space needed, potentially confuses
downloaders, doubles the maintenance when we need to correct the text.
On the other hand, we don't want to degrade the text.
There is no clear line, no definitive answer to what level of
degradation is acceptable. Most producers feel that there is no point
in making a separate version when dealing only with a few foreign
words thrown in among the English, but when, for example, some
significant dialog between the characters is in French or Spanish,
it's harder to say that stripping the accents is acceptable. You, the
producer, need to decide this on a case-by-case basis. If you're not
sure, discuss it with one of the Directors of Production or one of the
Posting Team.
If you have made the text with accents, you can choose to make your own
7-bit version and send it to us, or just send the 8-bit version and
we'll make the 7-bit version from it. Some people prefer to make their
own 7-bit editions; some don't. Whether you use a Microsoft Codepage,
one of the ISO standards or MacRoman doesn't matter--we can convert any
of them for you.
V.81. I have some Greek quotations in my book. How can I handle them?
There is no way to show Greek letters in ASCII. You have three
options:
You can just replace the Greek words with [Greek] to indicate to the
reader that you have omitted it.
You can "transliterate" the Greek to ASCII. Greek letters do have a
correspondence to plain "Latin" letters--for example, the Greek letter
"delta" can be represented by the letter "d". There is a simple PG
guide to transliteration at <http://www.promo.net/pg/vol/greek.html>.
This practice has had a long and honorable history: words like
"amphora" and "hubris", for example, are straight transliteration from
the Greek. This is usually the best option.
If there is enough Greek to warrant it, and no other accented
characters, you may be able to use the ISO-8859-7 character set, and
submit both 7-bit and 8-bit versions [V.79]. ISO-8859-7 is for modern
rather than classical Greek, but, if necessary, you will surely be able
to express the Greek fully in Unicode. However accurate your Greek,
that still leaves the issue of what to do with the 7-bit ASCII
version, where transliteration is probably still your best bet.
V.82. I want to produce a book in a language like Spanish or French
with accented characters. What should I do?
Use the appropriate ISO-8859 Character set [V.76] for your
8-bit version.
About the formatting of a text file:
This section of the FAQ goes into great detail about all kinds of
formatting questions. However, looked at from a higher level, the only
real issue is that we want to render texts clearly, with formatting
that reflects the original, so that readers of the plain text format
can read them easily, and people converting them to other formats can
do so reliably. When you come across a case that is not covered by the
detailed guidelines below, keep this ultimate aim in mind, and make
the best decision you can. Don't get hung up for hours or days over a
question of formatting--if you want advice, look at how other people
have handled the same situation in previous texts, or ask other
volunteers for their ideas.
V.83. How long should I make my lines of text?
For normal prose, such as you find in a novel, your lines should
mostly be 60 to 70 characters long, not shorter than 55, not longer
than 75 except where it can't be helped. Never, ever longer than 80,
except where you're trying to render a non-text structure, like a
family tree.
For poetry, make the text look as much like the book as possible. This
also applies to some plays where the lines are clearly intended to be
broken at specific points, whether blank verse or not.
V.84. Why should I break lines at all? Why not make the text as one
line per paragraph, and let the reader wrap it?
We could either use 70-character lines and let readers unwrap them if
they want to, or use infinite-length lines and let readers wrap them
if they want to. We choose to wrap the lines so that they are readable
on even the simplest of text editors and viewers.
V.85. Why use a CR/LF at end of line?
CR/LF can lead to double-spacing, notably on Mac and Unix, but at
least there _is_ a CR in there for Mac users, and there _is_ an LF
for *nix users.
If you don't know or care what this is about, please skip blithely on.
There are three differing standards for how to represent the end of a
line of text. In brief, Apple Macs use the CR character. Unix and its
variants use the LF character. Microsoft systems, from MS-DOS through
Windows, use both together.
If you want the history behind these:
CR stands for Carriage Return, and comes from the old typewriter /
teletype idea of a command to move the print head from the right of
the page back to the left when it reaches the end;
LF stands for Line Feed, and comes from the old typewriter / teletype
idea of a command to move the print head down a line;
CR/LF together indicate moving down a line and back to the left of the
page.
The history is not relevant to today's computers in principle, but in
practice they all use one of these legacy conventions, and there's
nothing we can do about it but pick one.
V.86. One space or two at the end of a sentence?
Whichever you prefer, but if using two spaces, please use them only at
the end of a sentence, not after abbreviations like "Dr." and "per
cent.", and not after non-sentence-ending punctuation like the
question-mark in the sentence: "Must you go? when the night is yet so
black!"
Many people have strong views on either side of the "one space or
two?" question, and we're not about to try and argue with them. Use
whichever is most natural for you.
However, if using two, you take responsibility for deciding where the
sentence ends. You can't just place two spaces after every period,
question-mark and exclamation mark, since periods are also used for
abbreviations end ellipses, and question-marks and exclamation-marks
don't always end sentences.
V.87. How do I indicate paragraphs?
Just leave a blank line before each paragraph.
V.88. Should I indent the start of every paragraph?
No.
Printers do this when publishing paper books because they do not leave
blank lines in the text, but there is no need for indenting in our
eBooks.
V.89. Are there any places where I should indent text?
Yes. You should always make poetry look like the original, and that
may mean indenting some lines, for example:
I was a child and she was a child,
In a kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee;
Even when poetry doesn't have indented lines, it is a good idea to
indent quotations embedded in prose. Remember, others will be
converting your text later--to HTML, to PDA reader formats, to formats
that don't even exist yet--and much of this conversion will be done
automatically, by computer programs. It is very hard for a program to
know when it can and can't re-wrap lines to fit a screen size unless
it has a clear signal that _this_ line should not be wrapped. This is
one of the biggest problems with auto-converting PG texts.
Just about all formatting programs "know" that lines that are indented
shouldn't be wrapped, so by indenting lines just a space or two, you
can prevent
I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
from turning into
I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree.
in some future reader's eBook.
You don't really need to do this in texts where the whole book is
poetry or blank verse, since these will probably be recognized as
whole books that shouldn't be rewrapped, but when there are a few
lines of quotation amid an acre of straight prose, a few spaces will
be a life-saver. Even in the original plain text version, the extra
spaces serve to set the quotation off from the main text.
You shouldn't get carried away and indent things 20 spaces for this
reason, though. Anything up to four spaces is reasonable; more is
excessive. If you're indenting many short verses in this way, keep
your number of spaces for indentation consistent throughout the book.
There are some other times when you may judge it best to indent, where
text is indented in the paper book, like newspaper headlines or
pictures of handwritten notes.
V.90. Can I use tabs (the TAB key) to indent?
No.
The problem with tab characters is that they act differently in
different applications. Typically a tab will move the text to the next
tab stop, which might be four spaces on your PC, but 20, or none, on
someone else's. The effects are unpredictable.
V.91. How should I treat dashes (hyphens) between words?
In typography, there are four standard types of dashes: the hyphen, the
en-dash, the em-dash, and the three-em-dash.
Originally, printers called these the "em-dash" because it was the
same width as the capital letter M in whichever font they were using,
the "en-dash" because it was the same width as the capital letter N,
and the "three-em-dash" because it was as long as three capital Ms.
The hyphen is used for hyphenated words, like "en-dash" itself, or
"to-day" or "drawing-room". For this, you just press the single dash
or hyphen key on your keyboard.
In typography, the en-dash is a little longer than the hyphen, and is
typically used for duration, where you could substitute the word "to".
For example, if you were printing "1830-1874", or "9:00-5:30", you would
use an en-dash instead of a hyphen. The en-dash is also sometimes used
as hyphenation between words that are already hyphenated, for example,
"bed-room-sitting-room" might use an en-dash as its central dash to
emphasize that it is a different type of separator from the plain hyphens
before "room". However, there is no ASCII character for an en-dash, and
we use the hyphen in these cases. (HTML and some character sets do provide
separate entities for en-dash and em-dash.)
The em-dash is shown in print as a longer dash, and for PG purposes, you
should render it as two hyphens with no spaces around them.
You use the em-dash as a kind of parenthesis--as I am doing here--or
to indicate a break in thought or subject within a sentence. There is
no ASCII equivalent of the em-dash; there is no key on your keyboard
that you can press to get one. For PG texts, we represent the em-dash
as two dashes with no space between or around them--like this.
The em-dash can also be used at the end of a sentence or speech to
indicate that the speaker stopped or trailed off. For example:
"When I saw you with Emily, I thought you were-- I thought she was--"
In a case like this, there may be a space following the em-dash, and
the context may demand that there _should_ be a space following the
em-dash, not because of the em-dash as such, but to make the break
between the statements or sentences clear.
These two hyphens represent _one_ character, so you should never break
them at line end, with one hyphen at the end of the first line and the
other at the start of the second. If you have an em-dash near line
end, you can break the line either before or after the em-dash, but
never in the middle.
The fourth type of dash, the three-em-dash, is used to represent a
missing word, or an undetermined number of missing letters. You
will often see it in a sentence like:
Dr. P------ was known for his honesty.
or
Dr. ------ was known for his honesty.
where there is a convention that the character's name has been
redacted. Logically, we should represent the three-em-dash as six
dashes, but you may reduce that to four. Whichever you choose, do use
it consistently in the text you're producing.
Unlike the em-dash, you should leave a space in such cases wherever a
space would have been before the letters were replaced by dashes.
Here's a summary table of the dashes:
Name ASCII Used for
Hyphen - Hyphenated Words
En-dash - Durations, like "3:00-5:30"
Em-dash -- Break in sentence or parenthetical comment
Three-em-dash ------ Indicating a word that was edited out.
V.92. How should I treat dashes replacing letters?
If the dashes obviously represent individual letters, use the same
number of hyphens. Otherwise, you can use a three-em-dash (see above:
6 or 4 hyphens) in such places.
A common convention when a character in a novel is using bad language,
or when reference is given to a character whose full name is not being
used, is to replace the letters with dashes. For example,
"That D---l, Mr. C------s will regret his hasty actions!"
In this case, it is clear that "D---l" is meant to represent "Devil"
and that there is a character whose name begins with "C" and ends in
"s" whose name is not spelled out in full. Where the book makes it
clear how many letters are represented by hyphens, just use that number
of hyphens.
Where the number of letters omitted is not clear, you can decide how
long you want to make your extended dash. Typographers often use the
"three-em-dash" for this, so called because it is as wide as three
capital Ms. Logically, since we represent an em-dash by two hyphens, we
might represent a three-em-dash as six, but if you feel that six
hyphens is too long, you can choose a shorter length, like four, but if
you do, keep it consistent within your text:
It was in the town of S----, walking on M---- Street, that
Sowerby came upon Dr. T---- taking the morning air.
V.93. What about hyphens at end of line?
Remove the hyphens from single words that were wrapped by the printer
at line-end on the paper copy. Where two words are joined with a
hyphen, you can leave the hyphen at end of the text line.
Books are usually printed with words broken at end of line to make the
right side of the text perfectly even. You should remove all such
hyphens. For example, in the sentence:
Mary's mouth tightened as she saw the marks on the car-
pet, and her hands balled into fists.
you should remove the hyphen from "carpet".
Words which are strung together and hyphenated by the author pose a
different question. It is perfectly OK from the point of view of a
reader of the plain text version for such a hyphen to occur at end of
line, for example:
Now that the guns were silent, convoys brought badly-
needed medical supplies and food.
However, be aware that if somebody later rewraps the text for use in a
different format like HTML, it is possible that they will introduce a
space where it should not be:
Now that the guns were silent, convoys brought badly- needed
medical supplies and food.
so there is still a small disadvantage to having a hyphen at line-end.
Sometimes it's not entirely clear whether the hyphen is there because
it has to be, or just because it happens to fall at the end of the
line:
Daisy rushed to the door, but there were no letters for her to-
day, and she retreated sadly.
Sometimes "today" is written as "to-day", especially in older works.
So which is this? Should we remove the hyphen or not? In this case,
the best thing to do is search the rest of the text for the same word,
and see whether it is consistently hyphenated or not in other places.
V.94. What should I do with italics?
There are three different ways volunteers currently render italics:
like THIS, like _this_ and like /this/. Pick one, and use it
consistently in your text.
There are really two questions here: "How should I render italics?"
and "When should I render italics?"
The original PG standard for italics was to render emphasis italics as
CAPITALS, using underscores for an italicized _I_, and do nothing for
non-emphasis italics like foreign words and names of ships, and this
is still the most common usage. For reading a plain-text file in a
plain text editor, it is still arguably the most reader-friendly usage
as well.
It has two drawbacks:
1. if you do want to preserve italics for non-emphasis words, you may
end up with a very ugly text where there are too many capitals.
2. it is impossible to convert CAPITALS reliably back into italics,
since the original text might have had a capital letter, or even been
all capitals in the first place. This is especially true of automatic
conversion for people who want to read PG texts on eBook readers.
To overcome these problems, many volunteers now use _underscores_ or
/slants/ to render italics. These allow you to preserve all italics
without creating an ugly plain-text, and to remove the ambiguity of
CAPITALS. Underscores are more popular than slants, but some people
feel that underscores should properly be reserved for underlined text.
Since printers tend to avoid underlines, however, there aren't many
books where this causes a real conflict.
V.95. Yes, but I have a long passage of my book in italics! I can't
really CAPITALIZE or _otherwise_ /mark/ all that text, can I?
No, you really can't. On the other hand, if the author intended that
section to stand out, you don't want to ignore that information and
withhold it from future readers.
What you _can_ do is format it differently from the rest of the text.
For example, if you're averaging a 68-character line throughout normal
paragraphs, you could reasonably use shorter lines, like 58
characters, for the italicized section. Going a step further, you
could shorten the lines and indent them a space or two as well. This
will give a clear signal to future readers and converters that this
section is to be treated specially.
V.96. Should I capitalize the first word in each chapter?
No.
Capitalization of the first word is often used in printed material to
emphasize the break at the start of a section or chapter on the paper,
but it is not necessary in an eBook, and leads to the same kind of
ambiguity as does the capitalization of italics, and for far less
reason.
If you feel you really _must_ capitalize the first word, we probably
won't stop you, but if so, please do it consistently throughout the
book, not just in one or two places, so that a future reader can be
certain that these capitalized words were a chapter-head convention,
and not otherwise intended for emphasis.
V.97. What is a Transcriber's Note? When should I add one?
A Transcriber's Note is a small section you can add to a text you
produce to give the reader some information about changes you made to
the book when rendering it into text.
A Transcriber's Note is not the same as a footnote--a footnote is part
of the text you have transcribed; a Transcriber's Note is a note that
_you_ add to the text, explaining something _you_ have done or
omitted. If there is a Transcriber's Note, it may be at the top or the
end of the text, and it should be clearly marked so that a reader
cannot confuse it with the main text or an introduction.
The main thing is to ensure that a reader cannot confuse text that you
have added with text that was in the original book.
Transcriber's Notes are rarely needed, but if, for example, you found
misprints in the text, or things that might look like misprints even
though they're not, you may note them here, if it seems relevant. If
there is an image in the book that is important to the content, you
may describe it in a note. If there was unusual typography that you
had to represent in some uncommon way, you might well explain that
here.
You don't need to add a Transcriber's Note just for common conversions
like italics, and you should not use such a note to add your own
comments or views about the text or the author. It's just there to let
the reader know what decision you have made about rendering the text.
Here are some examples of Transcribers' Notes:
Transcriber's Note:
The irregular inclusion or omission of commas between repeated words
("well, well"; "there there", etc.) in this etext is reproduced
faithfully from the 1914 edition . . .
Transcriber's Note:
Inserted music notation is represented like [MUSIC--2 bars, melody] or
[MUSIC--4-part, 8 bars]
[Transcriber's Note: This letter was handwritten in the original.]
Transcriber's Note:
The spelling "Freindship" is thus in the original book.
Transcriber's Note: Some words which appear to be typos are printed
thus in the original book. A list of these possible misprints follows:
If there is an image that is important to the content you may describe
it at the point in the text where it appears, for example:
[Transcriber's Note: Here there is a map of three islands just West of
and parallel to a coastline running SW to NE, with a big X marked on
the North of the middle island. A spur of land extends from the
mainland, sheltering the islands from the north-east.]
Transcriber's Notes that apply to the whole text should be placed at
the start or end of the text--your choice. Notes that pertain to a
specific point in the text, like the map example above, should be
placed at the point where in the text where they are relevant, but not
interrupting a paragraph except where it cannot be avoided.
V.98. Should I keep page numbers in the e-text?
No. But there are exceptional cases . . .
In general, the page numbers of the original book are irrelevant when
making a reader's edition for PG; they are annoying and intrusive for
anyone trying to read it, and if you did keep them, they would
probably be removed by anyone converting it. Get rid of them!
But there are a few books where page numbers are appropriate.
Non-fiction books that use page numbers as internal cross-references
are the prime example; if, on page 204, the text reads
"Our studies of plants (see pp. 141-145) show that this is true."
and this kind of cross-reference is frequent throughout the text,
then it is probably best to keep the page numbers, since it is
otherwise very difficult to honor the author's intent.
In the more common case where cross-references exist, but are not
frequent, and not essential to the text, you have several choices:
leave the cross-references in, meaningless though the page numbers
are, remove the cross-references, change the cross-references to
something relevant (like "Start of Chapter 12" instead of "pages
141-145"), or, if you can make it work in context, insert references
in the text for the cross-references to point to, like [Reference:
Plants] and then reformat the cross-reference like "Our studies of
plants (see [Reference: Plants]) show that this is true."
There are a few other cases, where the text you create is likely to be
the subject of study or reference, in which it may also be desirable
to retain page numbering.
When there are pages at the end of the book with notes referring to page
numbers, the simplest answer is to change the page number references to
chapter numbers, and add a quote from the page referred to if it's not
already in the book's end-notes. That way, a reader can search for the
phrase.
V.99. In the exceptional cases where I keep page numbers, how should
I format them?
Within brackets of your choice, with one space either side, simply
added to the text at the exact point of the page break. Unless there
is some [142] special reason, you shouldn't insert a line break or new
paragraph when indicating a page number; just insert it in the text,
as I did with "142" above.
You should use whichever of round brackets, (143) square brackets,
[144] or curly brackets {145} is not used (or least used) within the
main text itself, and then use it consistently. Try to make sure that
your page numbers cannot be confused with anything else.
Don't run your[146]page[147]numbers right up against words with spaces
omitted; this just makes the text hard to read. Use spaces before and
after.
Where the page break is at the start of a chapter or headed section,
you can put it on a line of its own, for example:
[148]