|
|
|
July 27th, 2007
01:53 am - A donation to the commons
My introduction to the public domain, as best I can remember, came courtesy of Project Gutenberg, the fabulous e-book project. I don't know how I first heard of PG, but I do have some memories. I remember, in high school, leaving my copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in my locker at school; I simply downloaded a copy from PG. It was a beautiful thing.
Moreover, in high school I started my first project to contribute to the commons (though I had no idea what "the commons" was, at that time) -- a student club to contribute texts to PG. I never recruited anyone beyond my friends to join the club, and they helped little; the club fizzled out after one book. I chose the name "Literary Preservation Society" because I hoped it meant the administration would leave us alone: it sounded highfalutin, not rebellious like I felt when thinking about (gasp!) posting books online for free. (I figured, with the public domain, we were legally in the clear, but I didn't want any trouble.) I remember my grandiose vision of a network of student clubs around the world, each donating a little of their time to help prepare books for everyone's benefit. These were terribly exciting thoughts for a high school student (Asheesh, feel free to add appropriate Everything2 allusions here) -- which was all the more disappointing when, as previously mentioned, it failed to gain any traction. Little did I know that what was not quite possible ~6 years ago would not only blossom as a field of endeavor since then, but would coincidentally be a movement in which I myself was deeply involved. (Think back ~6 years: Distributed Proofreaders hadn't opened its doors at PG; Wikipedia had just launched; Creative Commons hadn't released any licenses yet.)
As I mentioned, we did produce one ebook, #5825, The Courage of the Commonplace by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. A rather unremarkable book, I think we chose it to be first because it was the shortest of the public domain books at our disposal (that had not already been added to PG). We had a little handful of eligible books, some from my mother's collection and some from a stack provided by our biology teacher from his. (I believe Courage was from the latter source.) Most of his such books ended up sitting in a bag somewhere while our club ignored them for a number of months; I remember doing some research to see which would be eligible for PG, but I can't recall what happened beyond that. I think we eventually gave him the books back, and the only one that ever got scanned was Courage. (In fairness, though, even Courage was never scanned: we typed the text in manually. As I said, this was before DP had opened officially for PG.)
Out of my mother's collection, there were at least a few eligible books that hadn't been added to PG. Eventually -- judging from the timestamp on the files, the summer after my freshman year of college -- I scanned one, a Spanish textbook, and added it to the site.
Tonight, through a series of events (which I'll blog about later), I ended up back at DP after a long absence. When I managed to get back into the site, I eventually found the Spanish textbook I scanned over two years ago. It's still in the formatting stages, but it's made progress and is en route to release. It was a pleasant surprise to find out what'd happened with the book, and that it's going somewhere. The project comments and the forum thread are both online (though login may be required to view them). I feel very gratified by this small "donation" to the commons: I found the book, submitted the copyright clearance request, scanned the pages, and found someone to whom I could hand the project off; without me, it's continued forward and will eventually bear fruit. Looking at the forum thread, people from around the world have worked on this book, which otherwise would sit completely unused on my bedroom shelf.
One other contribution I've made to PG (besides a few pages proofread here and there on DP) was the hardcopy of Zane Gray's The Day of the Beast. I don't remember where this book came from (maybe my mother, maybe that biology teacher, maybe some book store or garage sale where I picked it up on the cheap), but it wasn't in good condition when I got it. Rather than scan it on my time-consuming flatbed, I shipped it off to another DPer with a pagefeed scanner; the binding was cut off and the copy destroyed, but it lives on online, free to the world.
|
|
|