E-text

“ My e-texts may prove convenient substitutes for hard-to-get works in a course where both instructor and students accept the possibility of some imperfections in the text, but if you are writing a scholarly article, dissertation, or book, you should use the standard hard-copy editions of any works you cite. ”

“ Perhaps the valuable thing about publishing a novel as an e-text is that it gives readers a taste for the story and for the author's style, so that the reader can then go out and purchase the published edition if they want to. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text. ”

“ Selection seems to be based on the ability to secure rights for electronic publication.
Simple keyword, first line or title, and author searches can be limited by publication date, publisher, gender, date during a poet’s lifetime, and nationality and to notes. Searchers can also browse author and title, keyword, or first-line lists of the contents of the database. Results appear in ascending alphabetical order and cannot be re-sorted. Citations (but not the full text of poems) can be marked for e-mailing, downloading, or printing; each citation includes a durable URL to the full text. ”

“ More and more publications have both an electronic version and a paper version and, in some cases, both can be ordered on-line. Numerous texts are available on-line in digital libraries. Many of these texts also have a paper version the cybernaut can buy if he prefers reading 500 pages lying on his sofa instead of reading them on the screen of his computer. Some texts or magazines are available on-line only. ”

“ In an article published in February 1996 by the Swiss magazine "Informatique-Informations", Pierre Perroud, founder of the digital library Athena, explained that "electronic texts represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial participation to culture dissemination", particularly for textual research and text study. These texts are "a good complement to the print book, which remains irreplaceable when for 'true' reading. (...) The book remains a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: we grip it in our hands, we hold it against us, we look at it with admiration ”

“ Although concerned with the technicalities of production, the Workshop never lost sight of the purposes and uses of electronic versions of textual materials. As noted above, those interested in imaging discussed the problematical matter of digital preservation, while the TEI proponents described how machine-readable texts can be used in research. This latter topic received thorough treatment in the paper read by Avra MICHELSON. She placed the phenomenon of electronic texts within the context of broader trends in information technology and scholarly communication. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ IF I could just upload a PDF file up I can get the text from that. In fact, I can get the text without comparison images as I did with the older books I placed on Wikisource with my Brother Officer account. What is wrong with that format? It's easier and faster. Alas! I have always been far more worthy at physical things throughout my youth that with technological things at my present age. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A word processor, in addition to entering the characters, also lets you change the font, the size of individual words, and whether they are italic or bold. It doesn't generally want individual line-ends put in on each line; it just rewraps the text as you change it. Its ultimate aim is to print your document on paper with full formatting facilities. WordPerfect for MS-DOS and Windows, MS-Word for Windows and Mac, AbiWord for Windows and Linux, and Nisus Writer for Mac are all word processors.
W.2. Should I use an editor or a word processor? ”

“ For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," [eBooks suck right now] and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true. ”

“ Internet Resources The proliferation of electronic journals and discussion groups, text archives, and informational World Wide Web sites; the accessibility of online library catalogs; the ability to communicate and exchange drafts of documents within seconds with colleagues around the world; the availability of online databases; and the possibilities offered by electronic publication—all mean that a literary scholar with only elementary knowledge of computers and the Internet is at a serious disadvantage. ”

“ Ebooks complement paper books. [Ebooks complement paper books] . Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. ”

“ Roberto Hernández Montoya, an editor of the electronic magazine Venezuela Analítica, wrote in September 1998: "The printed text can't be replaced, at least not for the foreseeable future. The paper book is a tremendous 'machine'. We can't leaf through an electronic book in the same way as a paper book. ”

“ For one thing, the Internet serves other print media. My recently published book, The Kids' How to Do (Almost) Everything Guide, would probably not have been done prior to the invention of e-mail because it would have cost too much in money/time to locate the experts. So the Internet is a powerful research tool for writers of books, articles, etc. ”

“ 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 .
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. ”

“ Some newsletters, zines and journals started online from scratch, skipping a print version.
Authors began creating websites to self-publish their work or post it while waiting to find a publisher. Communication with readers became easier through email, forums, chat and instant messaging. Some authors explored new ways of writing, called hypertext literature. ”

“ Finally, our renaissance's answer to the printing press is the computer and its ability to network. Just as the printing press gave everyone access to readership, the computer and internet give everyone access to authorship. The first Renaissance took us from the position of passive recipient to active interpreter. Our current renaissance brings us from the role of interpreter to the role of author. We are the creators. ”

“ Writing of etext readers, I am reminded that I recently joked to a volunteer that I wanted him to write software for reading etexts, whereby a hologram would appear on the inside of my eyelids so that I could read etexts with my eyes closed. Who knows, it might be possible. However, whatever advances in technology occur over the next ten years, one thing is certain: the work of all the volunteers to date will ensure that there is an amazing library of ebooks available covering creative works by some of the greatest minds who have ever lived. ”

“ Given on-line, interactive systems and a good communications capability, it becomes a minor step to provide a word processing capability which enables the author of a document to generate a document, have it reviewed by others, revise the document, and publish it without typing any portion of it more than once, and without standing over a copying machine and circulating review copies. ”

“ The internet became mandatory to find information, communicate, access documents, and broaden our knowledge. People no longer needed to run after information. Information was there, by the numbers, available on our screen, often at no cost, including for those who studied in a remote place, lived in the countryside, worked at home or were stuck in a bed.
The web became a gigantic encyclopedia, a extensive library, a huge bookstore and a full medium on its own.
Some people even read a book on the screen of a computer, a PDA or a (still very expensive) ebook reader. ”

“ He wants to change the world through freely-available e-books that can be used and copied endlessly. Reading and culture for everyone at minimal cost, on a computer or a secondhand PDA costing just a few dollars, or even on a solar-powered PDA, which are starting to appear. ”

“ The age of the electronic book brings other reading possibilities to the public. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand- held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know and activate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from the on-line dictionary. ”

“ The Internet, as World Wide Web, e-mail medium, data exchange, or chat forum effectively overrides constraints and limitations resulting from the participation of language in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more and more a world of efficiency and interconnected activities that take place at a speed and at a variety of levels for which literacy is not appropriate. ”

“ All my teaching makes the most of internet resources (web and email) : the two common places for a course are the classroom and the website of the course, where I put all course materials. I have published all my research data of the last 20 years on the web (re-edition of books, articles, texts of old dictionaries as interactive databases, treaties from the 16th century, etc.) . I publish proceedings of symposiums, I publish a journal, I collaborate with French colleagues by publishing online in Toronto what they can't publish online at home. ”

“ More and more newspapers and magazines have a website on which their readers can find the full text or abstracts of the latest issue, archives giving access to the previous issues, dossiers on various topics, etc. More and more library catalogs are available on-line. And most sites offer hyperlinks to other websites or documents on related subjects. In short, the Internet has become an essential tool for getting information, having access to documents and broadening our knowledge. ”

“ The Internet Dictionary Project began in 1995 in an effort to provide a noticeably lacking resource to the internet community and to computing in general — free translating dictionaries. Not only is it helpful to the online community to have access to dictionary searches at their fingertips via the World Wide Web, it also sponsors the growth of computer software which can benefit from such dictionaries — from translating programs to spelling- checkers to language-education guides and more. ”

“ 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 has already transcribed the book they're interested in. If it has been 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. ”