[Web4lib] Google Allows Downloads of out-of-copyright Books

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Wed Sep 6 06:43:07 EDT 2006


Binkley, Peter wrote:

> Projekt Runeberg in Sweden has been taking this approach for 
> years now, with an impressively simple setup.

Thanks for the kind words.  For some years now, people have been 
asking me to release the software, so others could set up similar 
projects.  Unfortunately, this collection of scripts is too much 
of a prototype and very far from maintainable.  Instead I proposed 
to introduce some modifications in the MediaWiki software, the one 
that was built to run Wikipedia, which already has all of the wiki 
components (page history, diff, recent changes, user registration, 
user blocking, edit reversals, advanced markup, etc.).  All it 
really needs is a better upload of entire books, a better way to 
administrate books as a sequence of pages, and perhaps a way to 
separate page sequence from page numbering.  To some extent these 
gaps can be filled by MediaWiki's template macros and separate 
upload robot scripts.  As a proof of concept I scanned two books 
(non-Scandinavian, so they wouldn't fit in Project Runeberg) and 
made them available on Wikisource, a sister project to Wikipedia, 
that provides digitized source texts.  The first was a small 
encyclopedic dictionary in German, the second was the 1914 edition 
in 5 volumes of "The New Student's Reference Work", published by 
F.E. Compton.  You can find this at 
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_New_Student%27s_Reference_Work

This was a year ago.  Since then, the German branch of Wikisource 
has picked up the idea, improved it, and digitized several books 
in a similar fashion.  You can start at http://de.wikisource.org/ 
and look under "Kürzlich hinzugefügte Quellen" (recently added 
sources) in the right hand column.

For example, the one chapter of a book can be found at
http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Entstehung_der_Kontinente_und_Ozeane/Viertes_Kapitel 

The entire chapter text is here presented in one wiki page, with 
scanned page images to the right.

The Germans have improved my idea to the point where one user 
recently pointed to my initial work and asked if this old garbage 
should be removed.  :-)


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/


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