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Project Imperialism?
Jul. 25th, 2003 04:31 pmReaders 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?
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?