Project Imperialism?

[tcpip]

Readers will know that I'm a big fan of Project Gutenberg. I completely agree with the sentiment of founder Michael Hart that "it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world".

But in the course of my research (in particular Internet and language content). I'm seriously beginning to have second thoughts about the Project.

Here's the current distribution of books according to language:

Bulgarian 6 Chinese 64 (whatever that's supposed to mean) Dutch 8 Flemish 5 French 102 German 183 Greek 1 Italian 13 Japanese 2 Latin 15(!) Portuguese 3 Spanish 15 Swedish 1 Welsh 4

and ...

English about 9500

To make matters less impressive they have this rule of ASCII first (not a universal standard) and then no standards at all. For example, the Epicheski pesni (Epical Songs), Slaveikov, Pencho, uses the Cyrillic Windows 1251 character set. Legge's Confucian Analects requires the Big 5 character set. The 1 Greek text (a translation of Sangharakshita, Vision and by Spiros Doikas) doesn't even mention what character encoding it uses!

Have these people heard of unicode?

Comments

[mr-eleganza.livejournal.com]

Relative links are not your friend :)

[greylock.livejournal.com]

Have you contacted the PG people?
I have to admit, ASCII has served me well as a standard over the years, and I have but vague notions of what Unicode does, nut perhaps Gutenberg (and indeed the net) are at the point where cultural diversity are important.

After all, was it not last year that they finally got around to allowing non-English URLs?

[damned-colonial.livejournal.com]

I dunno... there are lots of languages that are representable in ASCII, and yet they are not represented in PG... so it's not just the encoding issue that's going on here.

[darkstardeity.livejournal.com]

I don't know that we need to necessarily look for conspiracy theories here. As I understand it PG relies entirely on volunteers to scan in the books, correct the inevitable errors in the OCR, and proof-read the thing at the end of the process. It might not be that lack of diversity is being imposed on the project by any deliberate actions of the PG coordinators, but it may simply be that far fewer people are volunteering to convert and proof-read books from other language groups. The "ASCII by preference" thing no doubt discourages people whose language uses a character set outside of this standard, but again, I don't think that that is a deliberate ploy on the part of the PG people - PG started well before Unicode was an accepted or even well-known standard, and they may still have their doubts about it, or, as you have suggested, may not even be aware of it. The last time I looked into it, they were even baulking at the idea of using standard HTML as their preferred format because of issues of incompatibility between browsers that had already surfaced.

In these situations I like to apply a variant of Occam's Razor - never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance.

[caseopaya.livejournal.com]

I definately have to agree that when you print off copies of the books on Project Guttenberg they are not well formatted.

They are another group that should use a spell check before publishing them on the net :)

I do however love the fact that they exist in the first place