[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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