Such a remarkable and useful project. I had to look this up in Wikipedia; it was started in 1971 (!) by Michael S. Hart. They've never done much for aesthetics or curation. I like https://manybooks.net/ as an alternative. It's mostly Gutenberg sources (with credit) but the site and epub downloads are nicely designed. Although they've gotten pretty spammy.
If Sci-Hub is more your speed then Z-Library has 10 million books available for download. However most of them are not licensed copies. The neat thing about Gutenberg is it turns public domain books into something easily accessible.
I met the founder Michael Hart at the 2006 HOPE conference, and with a couple of people we all caught lunch together.
I was very sad when I heard of his passing. I'm sure I made no impression on him, but he made a big one on me:
He was very enthusiastic about technology making information available (and of course books) to the developing world. I wasn't sure how that would happen, but he told me cellphones would do it. In my head, I wasn't convinced-- remember in 2006 computers were still prohibitively expensive for much of the world and so were just about any cellphones with > 1.5" screen, not to mention very slow data speeds. OLPC had been launched a year earlier and it seemed to me that cheap devices of that sort were a more likely inroad to less well-off countries.
The smartphones of the time were pretty clunky, didn't have good ecosystems, and required expensive/limited data plans.
Whereas OLPC was familiar and supposedly cheap and there were other cheap laptops coming in too.
Also, people raised on PCs with keyboards just couldn't imagine doing real work on a phone. I think many of us are still shocked at how a lot of kids are perfectly fine with and even prefer doing everything on their phone.
I don’t read much. I bought an e-reader in 2014 and it has sat in a bin basically the whole time. But recently I discovered library genesis, which is full of pirated books in the vein of sci-hub. I dug up the old e-reader and I’m starting to read again. It’s amazing being able to just download and read a high quality epub of whatever book I have wanted to read. A lot of the books I actually own physical copies because I bought them thinking I would read them, and then never got around to them and I now have many boxes of books in the garage. Normal libraries aren’t quite right for me because I don’t read promptly and feel bad holding something I am not reading when others might want to check it out. But finally with library genesis I can download whatever and it doesn’t cost me money or take up any space. It works really well for me. And at night, after work, I’m making a little time for reading again.
Of course, in our current society we can’t offer this to everyone or artists would starve. But I think the solution is not to stop offering giant free libraries to everyone. I actually think the solution is to build a society where food and shelter and clothing and internet are free. So the daily costs of life go away. And artists can create their art and offer it for free to everyone. And every person on earth can grow up with access to a library of every book ever digitized.
EDIT: I should add, that if we did not patent and copyright everything, then costs would go down because generics would rule the market. This would also allow MUCH FASTER growth in poorer nations, since they would not have to import expensive goods from wealthy nations but could make their own clones. Google the TRIPS agreement for more. But if we also make society free to live (which is now cheaper without patents and copyright keeping prices high), then creators and engineers do not have to fear for their livelihood. So it is a self reinforcing change to society, and one where I believe the rate of innovation would be much higher. For every business person who only innovates because of the monopoly profits our current society offers, there are 100 engineers and business owners who just want to offer the next greatest thing, and who see the potential profit in being first to market. The hardcore libertarians who give talks at the Mises Institute know that intellectual property is a state enforced distortion of the free market, and all the communists and anarchists know that if you can offer knowledge to help others, you should not lock it down. One of the rare places both these groups agree!
> "A lot of the books I actually own physical copies because I bought them thinking I would read them, and then never got around to them and I now have many boxes of books in the garage."
Me, too. A couple years ago, right here on HN, I learned that there is a word for that: Tsundoku.
> Who is going to do the jobs that need doing but are not so pleasant - like washing dishes?
Generally this work can either be done by machines, it can be done by the people who are eating the food, it can be done in rotation by all people who participate in the system, or it can be done by people who feel like washing dishes is their way to contribute back to society. I am definitely a big fan of the idea that to make this work, we need to intentionally automate more stuff. Right now minimum wage is so low that capitalist organizations are happy to just throw bodies at the problem, but you could easily use durable dishes that feed in to a little mechanized washer. Such a system would also benefit from centralization, so there are lower numbers of larger facilities. Or you could have a spoke and hub model where the main processing equipment is in the center and different restaurants share that infrastructure.
Finally I will say that there is already an existence proof of a culture that does this every day. The Sikhs in India operate facilities all over India that offer free food on a large scale (the largest facilities offer 50k-100k free meals a day). They have zero robots and it all works out for them. I'm sure if we work in robots and also change our attitudes, we can do it here. Take a look at this video, it is beautiful and deeply thought provoking:
> I also expect that making money is a prime motivator for artists, and also drives the quality of their work.
I think you would find few people in the art community who agree with this. I am not an artist but that is my speculation. Also if you look at historical art, I don't think money was a prime motivator. You could also look at basketball. Probably most basketball players play because they enjoy it. I suspect very few only do it because they plan to get rich. Oh, and I did not say we should eliminate money. Artists could make money if they want to. It would just not be required for survival.
> I think you would find few people in the art community who agree with this.
I happen to know some successful artists (you'd recognize their names), and they are very much in it for the big bucks.
You will find many who say they are in it for the purity, but their actions belie it.
BTW, your ideal society has a name, it's called a "commune". Communes have been tried over and over in history. Something like 10,000 have been set up in the US. The result? 100% failure.
One hundred percent.
You don't have to believe me. It's perfectly legal to set up a commune in the US. Set one up with your like-minded friends. Throw your hat in the ring. Prove me wrong.
AFAIK, 0% of them have produced any art anyone considered great.
>>>I also expect that making money is a prime motivator for artists, and also drives the quality of their work.
is a much less hostile claim than
>I happen to know some successful artists (you'd recognize their names), and they are very much in it for the big bucks.
which could have been made in the initial comment, but then parent wouldn't be able to Other the grandparent for the heretical belief that people can work together at scale. The parent simply knows better. Even when the grandparent cites what Sikh society verifiably does, which is simply a cultural reorganization of existing resources, not a remodel of the human heart, and certainly within the power of much richer European and North American societies as they now stand, let alone what at-scale automation could provide -- it's never addressed because that's ackshually a commune. Which, as the astute reader will learn by reading further, doesn't work, 100% of the time. In fact, they're "anti-ethical". [0]
I didn't argue that people cannot work together at scale. My argument, admittedly heavyhanded, is that organizing this work based on altruism does not work. It may work here and there, for a period of time, but it is not sustainable. Organizations that work are ones where people are paid for the work they do, not ones that pay people regardless of the work they do.
By the way, anti-ethical does not mean unethical. It means contrary to, in this case, contrary to human nature. I did not write that communes were anti-ethical. I wrote that they were anti-ethical to human nature, meaning they are contrary to human nature.
There's nothing unethical about voluntary communes, but there's plenty unethical about forcible ones.
> My argument, admittedly heavyhanded, is that organizing this work based on altruism does not work. It may work here and there, for a period of time
For the special case of intellectual creation, which has no marginal cost of reproduction and often benefits from the widest exposure and availability, there are many counterexamples where fully voluntary work has been successful. Even HN itself might fairly be described as one at least partially, since karma points are not a monetary incentive and only the site's moderators and sysops are paid.
Sikhs [0] are humans, and presumably have the same human nature everyone in this thread shares. If the parent contends that what the Sikhs [0] do is a "commune", then the facticity of their continued success shows that "communes" do not always fail. If what the Sikhs do is not a "commune", then the parent has set up and defeated a strawman unrelated to the example set by Sikhs [0]. Which is it?
As the facticity of Sikh [0] food distribution is not at issue[1], it's obvious that organizing this work based on altruism actually does work, and altruism at this scale is possible. The parent's emotional opposition to the concept has led them to make, and now defend, unrelated claims -- and ignore the reality on the ground.
No one, beyond the parent themselves, brought up communes, forcible or otherwise. Even if this were relevant, the Sikhs [0] do not force anyone to participate in or accept their voluntary food distribution, so I'm at a total loss as to why any of this was brought up at all -- unless the parent is actually trying to advance an ideological position, which seems to be that cooperation doesn't work at scale [1]. Oops, I mean a slightly larger scale [2]. Perhaps that's true in whatever culture the parent grew up in, but as Sikhs [0] prove, it's obviously not a human universal. Perhaps the parent doesn't consider Sikhs human?
What a repulsive argumentative style.
[0] via langars
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31150154 <- in which it's suggested that since Sikhs [0] do not currently feed the entirety of their home country, this demonstrates that their approach cannot be scaled up any further
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31151819 <- history shows that most countries that attempt to feed all their citizens are naturally regime change'd by the CIA, so this one checks out
I never said entirety. If you want to disagree with me, fine, but please don't add extra words that change the meaning.
The Langar was proposed as a model for society. Shall we visit the numbers? 50,000 meals served per day, 1,380,000,000 people. 4,140,000,000 meals needed per day if it was a societal model. I estimate 2,000 volunteers are needed to do the 50,000 meals.
Langar has been around for 400 years. Out of 1,380,000,000 they can only muster 2,000 volunteers. Does that sound workable as a model for society? It doesn't to me.
The Langar relies on donations, too. I.e. whether it is a commune or not, it is not able to support itself.
As for some American examples, there's Woodstock, which subsisted on donated food, medical attention, etc. That lasted for three days, then the people left the field completely carpeted in trash, left it for others to clean up.
There was the summer of love in San Francisco, in 1969, which operated on give what you can, take what you need. It collapsed after 3 months, as too many people took and too few gave.
> Perhaps the parent doesn't consider Sikhs human? What a repulsive argumentative style.
The Langar was proposed as an example of a societal feature that could be amplified by automation. The parent is putting words into 'TaylorAlexander's mouth, but we all can just fucking read his comment. [0] The temerity of the parent, in blithely accusing me of "add[ing] extra words that change the meaning", given how they butcher the claim that started this fucking subthread, is absolutely repulsive. I can dismiss the rest of the parent's argumentation with the ease with which they dismissed mine, namely
>Sikhs [0] are humans, and presumably have the same human nature everyone in this thread shares. If the parent contends that what the Sikhs [0] do is a "commune", then the facticity of their continued success shows that "communes" do not always fail. If what the Sikhs do is not a "commune", then the parent has set up and defeated a strawman unrelated to the example set by Sikhs [0]. Which is it?
The refusal to actually address anything (is the langar a commune? Does whatever it is work, or not? Are Sikhs governed by human nature or not?) is breezily elided, in favour of 'Merican counterexamples. Who cares that the langar is a small-scale example of what the parent literally claimed was impossible and beyond the human spirit, and why should the parent address anything anyone actually says?
It's bananas that 'TaylorAlexander began by citing the tradition of the langars to facilitate the idea that this sort of arrangement was possible -- which was gainsaid by the parent -- and I am now reading what appears to be the grudging acceptance of the reality of that possibility now used to suggest that no greater implementation is possible. It's one thing to Just Want To Be Right, but quite another to dress it up in rationalization and shenanigans on display here.
>> Perhaps the parent doesn't consider Sikhs human? What a repulsive argumentative style.
>That's your strawman.
I note that the parent still doesn't bother to elaborate here. There's no acknowledgement that the parent made ridiculous counterfactual claims ignoring the actual realities of langyar generosity, or whether they were communes, or whether they were operated by humans, and is now wholehearted accepting it in the name of Being Right -- there's just the satisfaction of a good reversal. Well, enjoy the goalposts, wherever you may find them; I no longer wish to play Calvinball. You "win"; a better world is not possible, certainly not while having this sort of "discussion".
As I noted in another post here, while an admirable endeavor, it has not managed to serve free meals to a significant percentage of India's population. There are apparently limits to selfless volunteerism.
You seem to have ignored the point where I cited my sources of what I am talking about working successfully in India right now. It’s not a failure in fact it is a major success. Seriously, watch the video is it heart warming! It’s also very real!
I did watch the video. It was a little thin on details, but appears to be a charity, run by volunteers, funded by donations. Like a scaled up soup kitchen in America.
It's a nice setup, I wish them well with it.
I noticed the host did not chip in to wash dishes or make a donation, though he may have off camera.
They serve 50,000 meals a day in a country with 1,380,000,000 people. That's a long way to go to demonstrate it will work for society.
A commune in isolation can not protect itself. Another more aggressive group will overtake them given time. That's why I don't believe that end-goal communism or anarchism could ever work (where the former is contrary to many people's idea, is about small communes, not some Big Government). But with a necessarily strong government it is absolutely not impossible to scale a small commune to a whole country. Pair it with the best kind of democracy (as that is an entirely different axis) we have and I also on the opinion that many of today's problems could be solved.
But even in today's capitalist system UBI could be implemented relatively easily paid for by tax money.
The US ones did not fail because some more aggressive group overtook them. They failed because they did not work and eventually the members tired of it and left.
The state-sponsored kibbutzen in Israel also fail, because they can't exist without massive government subsidy.
Communism has been tried many times on a nation scale. 100% failure.
Your ideas are not new and they have been tried, again and again. They just don't work. They don't work on a small scale, they don't work on a large scale. They don't work when voluntary, they don't work by force.
There is just something about communism that is fundamentally anti-ethical to human nature.
Did you even get my point that communism is different from socialism? I very much stated exactly that communism (in my opinion can’t work either). But socialism as a spectrum of ideas has plenty of working aspects included in basically every Western democracy.
Socialism produces mediocre works, and can't compete with free market operations. This is why socialist operations tend to be heavily subsidized or they simply make free market competitors illegal.
It's most obvious when agriculture is socialized, because it's impossible for people to believe the lie that they aren't starving.
Yes, I know that communism is supposed to be without a government.
Free market is not inherently incompatible with socialism. Hell, free market only works properly (according to its very creator, Adam Smith) when it is confined to a well-regulated market.
The only entity capable of creating such a market is the government itself. Also, don’t forget that plenty of areas simply don’t operate on a supply-demand basis — e.g. healthcare.
Socialism isn't defined in terms of a "well-regulated market". Socialism is when the government provides goods and services.
> don’t forget that plenty of areas simply don’t operate on a supply-demand basis — e.g. healthcare
Supply-demand is in play even under socialism.
But here's a simple example. Take your corner drugstore. It has a couple aisles of all sorts of healthcare products, from aspirin to toothbrushes to athlete's foot cream to cold remedies. There are multiple brands with multiple formulations at various price points. How does supply & demand not apply there?
More generally, pick any health care issue. For each, there are a multiple of options available, with varying costs, efficacies, risks, and pain. Including doing nothing (by far most diseases disappear on their own). How is that not supply & demand?
Project Gutenberg, which long predates the web, is probably less well-known than it deserves to be. While there are various reasons you might want digital or physical copies of out of copyright texts--such as commentary and annotations--Gutenberg means that you can get the original text of most books of any note before about the 1920s for free. And with tablets/ebook readers, they're easy to read.
I parsed through the Library of Congress digital records to find an out-of-copyright subset, and developed a search engine that is unique in that it is technologically impossible for me to track searches, as the index loads in the page. It has about a million entries.
Neat trick! I took a look and the page is about 4MB or maybe 8MB, less than 1MB compressed. Smaller than the typical animated ad.
Is there an actual index data structure? What I see on the page is just a bunch of simple <a> links that are linearly scanned. Nothing wrong with that mind you, it seems to work well.
It’s just simple keyword matching in the order of appearance on the list. I did something similar with the DMOZ directory: https://www.locserendipity.com/DMOZ.html
Also, as an experiment, I developed an auto-summarizer, scraped and summarized all of the edu domains on DMOZ, pared the non-active ones, and the ordered them by the amount of content (more content ranks higher). The result is this search engine: https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html
Funny enough, I never heard of it until yesterday when I was looking to buy a book called "Calculus Made Easy" from Amazon and read a review that mentioned not to buy the book because it was a printed version of the it on Project Gutenberg.
I was debating if I should post up the link or not because I did find other posts that mentioned Project Gutenberg on HN when I did a quick search; however, I didn't see any post that mentioned Project Gutenberg exclusively in my search. I figured if HN didn't think it was useful then they'll just bury my post down or leave it alone. Also, I'm sure there were other people on HN out there like me who were completely oblivious that this project existed.
I'm glad I did mention because some of the comments on this post are really good.
I think you'll find that even on HN, there are a lot of people who don't read a lot of books that aren't reference books--and even fewer who have much interest in mostly 100+ year-old novels.
I am partway through the calculus text, and it really is good. 25 years after finishing my engineering degree, I finally understand why the derivative of 5x^2 -6x +2 is 10x -6. Amazing!
Wikisource (at least the English one) has a slightly different take on it in that they (now) generally expect proofreading to proceed according to a PDF or DjVu scan of a specific original edition (and you can have multiple editions). There's a page-by-page proofreading interface. Project Gutenberg world are usually non-specific editions and might be a mish-mash or contain editorial fix-ups.
Projects like Distributed Proofreaders also operate on a top-down basis where there's a project manager for each book. On Wikisource, you can just get stuck in where you like. No one technically "owns" anything.
The Monthly Challenge [1] is quite a fun new innovation where there's a bit more community activity, as a lot of people like to plug away on their own projects, which some people think is a bit boring.
The "ownership" model on DP means that they're left with a huge backlog of fully-proofread drafts stuck in the "post-processing" stage that never see the light of day on PG. On WS the equivalent to post-processing is a community-driven process, there's no fixed ownership but only the do-ocracy of those who put in the work.
Wikisource does also have a lot of unfinished works, but it has that advantage that literally anyone[1] with an interest can come along and push them into a proofread state.
In fact, the Monthly Challenge is also deliberately trying to promote this, as well as converting very old copy-paste drive-bys (often from PG, actually, from before Wikisource had the page-by-page proofreading) into modern editions verifiable against a specific original.
[1]: You don't even need do to register an account to enter the text, but you do to mark a page as proofread, since there's a two-pass validation system and it works by accounts. It doesn't require an email.
Gutenberg was a pioneer and sits at the centre of an ecosystem. Distributed Proofreaders and others like Standard ebooks build on Gutenberg texts and upstream fixes and corrections to them.
DP proofread from book scans and upload the proofed and processed text to Gutenberg. Standard ebooks takes the Gutenberg texts and further enhances them. So they're operating on opposite stages of the pipeline.
Yeah, but DP feed the text (including corrections) downstream and standardebooks (while adding their own extras) may spot things that slipped through and get them reported and fixed upstream. They don't need to, but they do.
It also finally seems to be available in Germany again after years of legal disputes. It always seemed a little bit ironic given the name of the project that here of all places you ran into a big red "Your IP is blocked" page.
There is an Australian version of this link: http://gutenberg.net.au . There are quite a few books there that are not in gutenberg.org because the Aus. version observes Australian copyright law. You won't find much R.A. Freeman, for example, in the parent but almost his entire œuvre can be found on the Aussie site.
I’ve been getting into old (1600s-1900s) science books lately. Many are out of print and either difficult or extremely expensive to get a physical copy of.
Gutenberg and LibGen have been absolutely indispensable.
Gutenbergs copy of The Skeptical Chymist is fantastic.
Bonus points that both platforms make it extremely easy to push a pdf directly to my remarkable tablet.
I have the same dream, but I'd like it to plug into the Internet Archive.
Then again, the cost to the world's trees would be substantial because I'd remember about the Serials in Microfilm project[1]. Seriously, check out these images of the collection[2].
Then again, again, think of all the carbon you could sequestrate by printing that many books (and keeping them).
I've even considered DIY book binding so I can print fun things, but it's (obviously) quite a mission. Occasionally I see a novelty reprint of an old volume of a periodical in a museum shop and I start searching for book presses and glue and then sanity prevails.
Standard Ebooks are great, typeset to a much higher standard than Project Gutenberg, though with a much smaller selection, which on the other side facilitates discoverability.
"Standard" Ebooks also make their own non-standard editorial changes to modernize the language of the books. These edits are labeled as such in their git repository, but they're mixed with the technical edits so in practice it would take a lot of work to revert them.
> "Standard" Ebooks also make their own non-standard editorial changes
I take the name to mean that their books all follow a “standard” (i.e., single, consistent) style guide.
> to modernize the language of the books.
SE will update archaic spellings, if they’re homonyms (e.g., ‘akehorn’ → ‘acorn,’ ‘centrys’ → ‘sentries’). I used to make similar substitutions in my own ebooks in the past, so clearly I’m in SE’s target market.
SE won’t update language in other ways as far as I know (they won’t censor or replace “problematic” words), or modernize punctuation in any way that changes meaning.
But if that’s not your cup of tea, Standard Ebooks does provide links both to scans of the original printed book and to the Project Gutenberg transcription, and marks editorial changes in the commit message so anyone who wants to can revert just the spelling changes.
> in practice it would take a lot of work to revert them.
I’m not sure what more you’d suggest them to do, other than stop using a style guide at all—which is the whole raison d’être of the project.
There's probably a lot of public domain reprinted material in those "shadow libraries", that could be legally posted on PG. Unfortunately, the complexity involved means that few people bother to do this.
LibriVox (https://librivox.org/) has free audiobooks for many of these public domain books. They're recorded by volunteers, so the quality is a grab bag. Some of them are quite good though. Most recently I listened to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court read by John Greenman (https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-co...) Goofy book, but very entertaining.
Also, the whole LibriVox collection is uploaded to the Internet Archive (easy to find: it’s one of the top links under the audio tab). IA’s interface is nicer in certain ways than librivox.org due to its options for searching, sorting (e.g., by views), and listening in the browser. https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio
If Sci-Hub is more your speed then Z-Library has 10 million books available for download. However most of them are not licensed copies. The neat thing about Gutenberg is it turns public domain books into something easily accessible.