This suggests a misunderstanding of the Standard Ebooks process, which allows continual incremental corrections to the authoritative source of individual books (in XHTML, on GitHub). So, a truly unique identifier would only be valid to the production output(s) from a particular state of the Git-repo sources.
https://standardebooks.org/contribute/report-errors
Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/geronimo/geronimos-story-o...
Asynchronous to the correction process, Standard Ebooks updates its own production tools. So if an individual book's content requires correction, should the "respin" be done with TOT tools, or with the versions available at time of first publication? Disclaimer: I don't actually know which is current practice -- but using the TOT tool suite is obviously vastly easier.
For most practical purposes, I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.
Well, one of us has a misunderstanding. Just because the printer strikes off the printing number from the colophon for each subsequent printing, they don't actually issue a new ISBN. That stays the same. If they wanted to also include a version number too, I wouldn't mind that as well, but it's not nearly as necessary as this. I use the year as a rough version number in the file names as well.
>Recall also that final user content is made available in multiple formats, currently at least six. Example:
I don't need them to issue a number per file format, but if they want to... that doesn't bother me. That's sort of self-evident which of the formats it is, after all.
>I'd suggest the git-commit date, along with short substrings of author name and title, would suffice.
It doesn't. A number of authors have at one time or another have released books with similar or identical titles that are not the same book. This is the trouble... someone who uses or would use the books is asking for something that is missing but easy to supply, and instead of a "well gee, we never considered that, let us think about it" I have a dozen assholes crawling out of the woodwork to say "no, you're doing it wrong".
I need unique identifiers that are human readable. I just do. The world discovered this need for books before you were born. They invented a global standard, even. There is an entire field of science out there about this, that you seem to be ignorant of even existing. I've been doing this for years, and I keep bumping up against it. But you think it can be solved because you used git and know about hashes or whatever, and it's just like what you deal with in your software development job!
I think it’s possible to express this in a less caustic way. Because Standard E-books is high quality and free of charge right?
Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user.
Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&...
• The trustee and the A. L. A.
• The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A
• The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A-
• A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton.
• The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated
• A book of shanties
• A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken
• A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian
This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw.
This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter.
Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do.
This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.
I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value.
Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa.
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¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.
Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.
I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.
I will watch that inbox personally - please do be in touch as soon as possible.
Please also accept my condolences and best wishes - I've known Greg since the earliest HOPE conventions.
There are new tests coming that will catch cancer early so hopefully it’s not late stage, increasing one’s survival rates.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/grail-stock-price-cancer-st...
I’m about Greg’s age and I had colon cancer last year. Now I can’t unsee cancer in the media.
It's an at-home collection stool test. It seems like a super easy and cheap first step before getting a colonoscopy.
It’s no replacement for a colonoscopy. They’ll snip those polyps before they grow to become cancerous.
Yes, the colonoscopy is a breeze, especially compared to the surgery and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy was definitely harsh. Fortunately, I was a candidate for only 3 months of treatment.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11047044/
“In conclusion, the statement that cancer screenings do not save lives cannot be properly drawn from the Bretthauer's et al. meta-analysis because lifetime gains are likely underestimated and based on uncertain all-cause mortality estimates.
…
Lifetime gains estimated for the screened group from all-cause mortality reduction is a misleading measure and should be avoided because it implies a benefit for all persons in the screening group, including those not affected by the target cancer.”
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/...
“Although gaps persist between the full potential benefit and benefits considering adherence, existing cancer screening technologies have offered significant value to the US population. Technologies and policy interventions that can improve adherence and/or expand the number of cancer types tested will provide significantly more value and save significantly more patient lives.”
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2011/Sep/michael-hart-has-passe...
Patient and kind indeed.
He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting friendships and tech partnerships. Very saddened by this news.
So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.
That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to interact with.
I know that these threads are always full of "this recently deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I interacted with.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
> Newby got involved with Project Gutenberg in 1991 or 1992, became friends with founder Michael S. Hart, and was "undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer", according to a scholar writing about the history of the project.[10][21] In 2000 or 2001, Newby formed the associated nonprofit organization, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, and became its director and CEO.[10][22][2] He also worked to integrate Distributed Proofreaders into the project.[21] He was a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation at its formation in July 2006.[23][24] He led improvements to the technology platform underlying Project Gutenberg[25] and navigated challenges related to the copyright status of books in different countries.[26]
I've edited my comment above to make it clearer what its central argument is, since you seem to have misunderstood either the argument or the quote.
RIP
I never met the guy but I love Gutenberg. Back before I had any money it was always this constant force that would be guaranteed to provide something entertaining.
Edit: the post title has been fixed now.
It’s surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for humanity. If it’s coming from any benign motivation, then it’s totally misguided.
You'd be amazed at how seriously people can take things like date formats sometimes.
We should count from the beginning of time.
