Michael Hart Keynote: Ebooks to Break Down Illiteracy (HOPE 2006) | FULL TALK

[00:00:17]welcome everyone this is Hope number six it is Saturday I hope it's Saturday 14400 that means it's time for the keynote number 92 apparently redesignate Michael Hart will be talking in a minute I have one quick announcement to make John Erikson author of harking hacking the art of exploitation will be at the ham table at 2 pm which is now signing books and he'll be there for as long as there are books so don't be rushing to get there we are about to hand it over um that's all the announcements I had without further Ado number 92 as long as you only think it's that good after it's over okay everything I'm going to say after this is just bells and whistles this is the important part I'll say it again at the end I'm here to try to help you save the world you're hackers and I'm going to ask you to find every ebook in the world that you can get your hands on and send it to us and if you have trouble finding us then you're not real hackers but I'm Hart at pga.org and he's GB newbie at pgf do.org and a bunch of other things and pgf in case you needed a nemonic is Project Gutenberg literary archive Foundation that's usw okay now what we want to do is give away as many ebooks to as many people as possible that's that's the whole gig okay and I'm asking you to help because we have just grown so far out of proportion they'll drive you crazy oh maybe I do use left hand there we go then I can talk and point at the same time um this is the manger idea I'm hoping that you can think so so far Outside the Box in making this go that everything we ever did before will look really small so far we've given away about one and a3d trillion ebooks and I want to make that look tiny really really tiny so that's the goal now most of you know that there wasn't much in the way of literacy before Johan Gutenberg invented the printing press in fact the average book before Gutenberg cost as much as the average family farm and the literacy rate was probably less than 1% when somebody wanted information to get out they put a poster up someplace and the one person in the village who could read read it to everybody that was the General way that things went all right in the next 50 years after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press more books were printed than in all the previous history of the world I'm hoping that in the next 50 years more ebooks will be created than there were ever books in the whole previous history of the world these are our mission statements they're pretty simple pretty straightforward and the most important part is you I'm hoping you can help me find all the books that have been hidden away lost different sites that went down if you hunt through alexa.com and find some one of the old backups or anything like that anybody who has backups we don't mind we would rather get a dozen versions of the same book than not get one so don't worry about sending us stuff that you think we already have we've created so far about 20,000 eBooks on our own and we've had another 880,000 or so donated to us from over a hundred other ebook collections around the world at this very moment we're celebrating the 35th anniversary of the very first step in making electronic books which was this month in 1971 first time I ever heard there was such a thing as the internet and I said let's put something on it that won't go away I wanted to put something on it that would still be there 10 years 100 years later and I didn't know I was dyslexic at the time but I knew that programming was really hard and it's really hard if you can't tell the difference between a comma and a semicolon and I had nightmares in Fortran so I decided rather than try to write some program that would stick around for a while that I should put something up there that everybody a general interest idea that everybody would want and as luck would have it that Fourth of July on the way back to the computer lab I stopped for some munchies and they threw in one of those faux parchment decaration of Independence copies they handed out back around the bicentennial and when I dumped all my junk out on the floor that popped out and the light bulb went on over my head literally I was just totally lucky and anybody whoever says they did a project like this and wasn't really lucky I would be suspicious of them I could never have done this without a lot a lot of luck and a lot a lot of people helping me including our pgf CEO Greg newbie come on that's me he does so much of the stuff that I could never do I'm a I'm a seat of the pants kind of guy I just think up wild ideas and push and push and push and push and try to get the snowball over the edge to where it starts to pile up that's that's my strength okay now I'm supposed to mention that we're going to be giving away millions of ebooks right now so people are going to be walking around handing out DVDs and they're going to be some back at the table and if you collect both DVDs that we have you'll have about as many books as the average public library we also have some DVD images online that we're hoping that people like you will take a bonus round on we have filled them up 2third in a away to 20,000 books and left a blank spot for 10,000 that you choose we want you to take these fill in stuff give them to your friends have them fill in stuff we want them to go everywhere go every place we'd like to get them from Tiara J Fuego and Australia and back from anywhere that you can find books that may or may not be of interest to anybody we want to get everything and so we're getting handing these out that are if you put them on a rewritable disc you can just keep adding on to them and when you get it filled up to where you think you're going to be pretty much done please just make me a copy and send it to me or put it someplace where I can download it let me uh let me tell you about the one that we're giving out so we have uh uh I think enough for everyone who's here if we don't have enough uh you go to gunberg dog CD project there's a form you fill out and we'll send a free DVD anywhere in the world postage paid we are able to afford this because people that get them sometimes give us back five or 10 bucks to help us give out a few more the one that you're getting we just made for this conference it's got 17,500 eBooks on it it is nearly full this one um it's got a lot of HTML it's got some audio stuff it may not be sold this one it has copyrighted uh materials on it that were donated to to us so unlike some of the ones you see resold on uh eBay because of uh public domain and stuff like that this one uh may not be sold we consider that to be a good thing so uh what it says though is give me away so make copies get the iso um uh email me if you can't find it I'm going to put the iso up online later on today uh it's about you know 4.3 gig and uh enjoy it copy it pass it on and uh share a file share the whole thing make your own sub collection and uh get it out there yeah don't worry about selling it I mean you can sell it for enough to pay for the postage or the blank or whatever don't worry about that stuff but it's just not not supposed to be retailed out there the whole idea behind all this is we figure the world is going to be a better place if we just jack up the literacy rate in the education rate this whole idea is to build things from the bottom up not from the top down we don't have any grants we don't have any major people talking for us what you see here is what you get we're at and uh there have been five information ages five technological revolutions that basically turned the whole idea of publishing on its head now I've got a lot I'm going to run through all these little slides here and then come back and talk to the ones you want to hear about the most I'm not stuck with giving a pre-prepared speech I I could talk about every one of these topics for the whole time so if I'm talking about something that's boring kind of just go like this you know and if I'm talking about something you like yeah right I want more that uh but uh we'll just fire through all these this is to my Wildest Dream here this is as far as I've dreamed if we do 10 million public domain books and then get machine translation to put those into a hundred different languages that'll be a billion volume Library if we give them to one out of six or one out of seven or one out of eight people in the planet that's a quintilian books okay so what if I'm off by a factor of a thousand then I only get to give away a quadrillion books okay that's the goal we're not waiting for somebody's approval we're not waiting for Bill Gates or any of those guys to say hey you guys are doing great work all of this has been done with no freaking money Project Gutenberg has never run through a million dollars in its entire 35 year existence all of it period not counting every dollar I've had and every dollar that's come in and out of Project Gutenberg all right all you all you have to do is do this stuff anybody can make an ebook anybody you can sit down and type it in scan it in you can snail mail it to us and we'll scan it for you and then you can proofread it or we'll proofread it we'll do all the copyright research we'll do everything we can possibly do to help you out this is what if we get a funny question this is me way back in the back there with the 20,000 books now some people say that ebooks have never made it they're never going to make it nobody's ever going to pay attention to them this is my counter example this is the bestselling book in the last four years and in the acknowledgement page right there is a list of over a dozen of the most famous libraries in the entire planet and you'll notice number three there kind of sticks out okay we got the bibliotech nasel we got the Lou we got all the famous libraries but number three on the list is Project Gutenberg because we have a very wide variety of Bibles and Apocrypha and all sorts of other stuff that you can't get any place else nobody wants them nobody has them and you can search them all he did a lot of research on this book The only that's the only reason I'm making the point is this kind of Library makes it really easy to research Shakespeare the Bible the Greek plays stuff like that that's what I'm hoping for that's if we took all those boxes and put them on top of each other somebody wanted a one-sided version all right this is a graph for people who always said every year that we couldn't do it for one more year every single year there's not been a year go by that I haven't got messages from people people says you can never do it for one more year he would say don't worry about Project Gutenberg they won't possibly stick around for another year this is how we got to 10,000 books and this is as accurate as Greg could make it I have another graph up here that we can get up when I'm playing with the computer at the end that is exactly accurate this one has proportional spacing it's very hard to make a graph with proportional spacing Greg did his best but it's not quite perfect but I do have a perfect one for you if you want want it this is the same thing up to 20,000 and with your help we'll stack another 40,000 on top of that okay what uh what people should see here is we've been doubling uh every 18 months or so so more or less a mors law type of uh Power curve doubling the number of ebooks every uh 18 months or so and that's achieved in a number of ways most of it is uh technological advancement combined with more volunteers and uh there's a lot of ways to volunteer distributed proof readers is uh the easiest place to get started PG dp. net distributed proof readers every year though we just barely make it I do have to warn you about that if you're on my mailing list you will get notes when we're just coming up to it and people send me back stop jumping up and down and yelling and screaming I know you're only 1% away from the goal but that's the kind of person I am I'm don't really want to get into an argument about what an ebook is right now but if you guys are more interested in it we'll come back to it I already mentioned about how anybody can make an ebook these are a couple little things that Greg and I have been talking about uh that relate to some of the conversations we heard here already we don't care who gets the credit for the ebooks you send us an ebook we'll put your name on it your email address your url whatever you like we'll give you two lines to put anything you want if you've got a doom site and you want to put the URL on there that's just fine with me everybody should get credit for what they do I certainly don't need the credit you guys should should have the credit by the way for some odd reason having Project Gutenberg on your resume seems to help Heaven only knows they would never hire me but they tend to hire the people at work for me and of course that was by Anonymous one of our favorite sources got a lot of books by him actually we do we have a lot of books by Anonymous this is something that uh Vince surf said when he came to the 10th anniversary of browsers and uh I should mention since uh we're talking about credit and stuff that uh Mark Andre got no credit he was never mentioned at the 10th anniversary of browsers Mosaic was never mentioned Netscape was never mentioned it was one of those big political to-dos where all the guys in fancy suits that were wearing my salary uh they all got up there and talked about browsers without ever giving credit to him and uh that's the way it goes people are always telling me I can't do this and I just got to say okay just leave me alone I'll succeed or fail and you can watch there's a much nicer way of saying the same thing but uh it works very well if you put one book in our collection Tomorrow there's a billion possible people who could download it it will never get deleted not one of our books has ever been deleted we did take out Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech without being asked I don't know how many of you kept up with the law but it got changed and reversed and appealed and all sorts of stuff and when it was all over it was declared copyrighted and we just took it out because we thought it was okay we left a slot for it we also have Arthur C Clark's permission we Reserve slot 2001 for 2001 but it's not in there right this this gets a little heavier light on the same picture we get a lot of conversations about light and darkness and uh there are people who look at what's going on right now and think this is the greatest Information Age that's ever been and there are people who look at it and say it's a new Dark Ages because a smaller percentage of the information is available than ever before for since the Gutenberg Press copyright has become virtually permanent now copyright is not my favorite thing to talk about but again this is your guys' show whatever you guys ask about we don't have to wait to the end for questions when we get to the end and roll back feel free to interrupt me anywhere and guide this anywhere you like all right I'm hoping that everybody will have a bunch of libraries in fact I brought a little example I bought this less than 100 miles from here for $5 at a garage sale I have these in my room in paper and my floor is one inch lower than it was when I put them in there okay if any of you have ever physically seen a Century's worth of National Geographics you know what I'm talking about they're massive and this book of course if I took them all out and put them a little folder there's only 30 C CS in here not even DVDs CDs and they would fit in a little kid's carrying case that they carry along with their Walkman or whatever okay's see all rights I do not I don't question is are there are there ads the photographs of the pages so the ads that had if there was a page that was only an ad which there were plenty of I can't tell you whether all of those were in there or not I thought the ads were kind of enlightening myself they're very cute tell a lot about our culture and a lot about the pre-World War I stuff uh we I'll be glad to talk to you about it afterwards now we have slight degeneration Gap I'm getting getting a little old but most of you could go into your attic or your basement and find a paperback that said 25 cents on it whether it was an Agatha chrisy or a pre James Bond or a or a Perry Mason or stuff like that my addict my parents were bookaholics and uh my adct was full of those things and rare were the ones that were 50 cents or 35 cents they were almost all 25 cents those same books at Borders and Barnes & Noble and stuff today are closing in on $10 again I don't want to dwell too much on negative stuff but I I can tell you all the changes I've gone through with paper Publications and prices and price fixing and stuff like that but uh if you imagined that a gallon of gas today cost as much as a paperback today want you to think about the media frenzy that would be going on they're they're going nuts with $3 a gallon what the heck would they be doing if we were pushing $10 a gallon but I've never in my life heard one story about the price of books which has gone up way faster than the price of gas w maybe we'll come back and talk about that okay here's the five information agents you notice one of them was very very short the United States issued a patent in 1830 for the first high-speed steam powered printing press and a copyright law came out to stifle the thing in 1831 now this was no accident the United States copyright started in 1790 and basically got going pretty well by the turn of the century so those books had a maximum copyright span of about 28 and a half years okay so they just started expiring so this guy gets an idea hey we could build all these reprint houses and fill up box cars on the Railroad and ship off all these books became an awfully lot easier to print books pretty much just the same order of magnitude as how much easier it got when Gutenberg came along now the original copyright was created specifically to stifle the Gutenberg Press I don't want to go into all the politics unless you guys are seriously interested in English history but I have a whole list of all the monarchs of England that they went through trying to get the law passed and nobody would go for Itor Where is the intruction theab and fire and agriculture in the wheel I do have no no I'm not joking no I have articles to start with those you're absolutely right the first thing I said when they told me we were on the internet was I said did they send a message like what hath God brought and they said no and I said we have to send something thing and I haven't got to that part yet but that's where I typed in the Declaration of Independence and tried to email it to everybody and if I have succeeded you would have never heard of the Morris Worm but that's another part of the story too I actually tried to email the Declaration of Independence to all hundred people that were on the internet which would have killed it but luckily somebody stopped me and said let's put a note on what later became comp genen and we'll just tell them it's there and they can download it okay yes there's a this is we got 90 minutes here and you're right I'm skipping over like a stone over the water and I apologize but any if you there are details that everybody's interested in I'm more than happy to go for them uh get up to the microphone and just interrupt when you have something to say be happy to be inter I'll I'll repeat the questions too if you don't want to jump up yeah um so when when I grew up it was the 1909 copyright and everything could be copyrighted for a maximum of 56 years 28 with a 28-year renewal stuff like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz and all that stuff Peter Pan all the things I grew up with it was basic idea was if you saw it in print and you live to be over 50 years old you were going to be able to republish it yourself however while I was working on a particular edition of Shakespeare for the Gutenberg project uh they extended the copyright law back in 1976 because of the xox machine they also extended in 1909 due to the high-speed electric presses um there's a great story there and I I feel like I really should tell why all this stuff happened the Sears catalog was a 768 page book lavishly Illustrated that was the first book owned by millions and millions and millions of people because the combination of a bunch of different kinds of Technology including the Transcontinental Railroad the high-speed printing presses rural Federal delivery which everybody forgets about but before then you couldn't mail stuff to people out in the boonies and everybody lived out in the boonies so Sears got the really wise idea of mass producing millions and millions and millions of these things and mailing them to every single person they could find this upset the publishing industry all to to hell because all of a sudden everybody was aware that you could make a huge book and send it to somebody at less cost than could be recovered if they bought a couple things out of the catalog this drove everybody absolutely nuts and copyright was yet extended again to stop the what they called reprint houses if you go into your used bookstores and you look and stuff that's 100 years old you'll see a lot of things by Publishers that don't exist anymore but a few that do are Grett and Dunlap and Colliers and stuff like that who specialized in reprinting stuff you got to realize that in 1900 you could print almost anything published more than 25 years before then 90% of all copyrights had never been renewed now if you want to fight with any of these statistics you fight with him still because he is a PhD of library and information science knows this stuff better than I do and it's still the case 90 90% are uh are not renewed this means by the way that we have an opportunity for about a million books that you might think are still under copyright between 1923 and 1963 and yet are actually in the public domain we started that with our uh rule six for those of you that have seen the website for copyright clearance and uh this is an awesome opportunity for harvesting listen are these DVDs going around they are okay uh if you got a library you know maybe maybe uh maybe you have a child maybe you know someone young at a school library 177,000 eBooks is more than you find in the average school library if you know someone that tce as much if you know someone that would like to get one of these take take a couple we have a whole box of them back here at the end of the talk we'll take a few boxes with us to the uh uh to the pentop North Area I also very fond of throwing them at people just just want to clarify real quick you did say that there are two of these yeah there's there there was one we were handing out yesterday that has a different stamp on it because I'm seeing we're seeing a red one and a white one go around we just want to clarify are different the 2006 one is one that should be going around uh they should be I hope they're all stamped they came from the same uh volunteer that produces them it's h should say 2006 on it what you probably got when you checked in depending on when you uh uh registered for the when you showed up for the conference is the uh 2003 Edition those have a lot of overlap uh although a number of the things from 2003 have been updated since then so uh we do have a whole bunch of both of these if you take them both you'll have sort of an older version newer version and and the older one is primarily plain text this one has uh a lot of plain text that are zipped as well as a lot of HTML some of our neat multimedia stuff I put on the uh the atom bomb explosion we have Janice Ian doing society's child one of your favorites she did it live for us just for us it's a totally Project Gutenberg version yeah very cool um so uh yeah so so if you if you want both go ahead and take both we have we definitely have enough to uh to give away both but if they're different colors just because we we tend to buy these in bulk and uh get the cheapest deal so they might not match but it should be stamped with 2006 for the uh the one I was mentioning the most recent one as I said the iso for that uh is online someplace but not really advertised if you're desperate to get it right away uh drop me an email or ask me and I'll tell you where to get it but I'll have it I'll have it uploaded to the gutenberg.org site uh over the next couple days and we have several other ones too does does the project have AER format for the books that it's in I mean as far as readability I like reading PDFs but it's a closed format the preferred format we're we're really uh committed to formats which are editable that you can fix that you can use for derivative works you can put in your book report stuff like that basically that means we have a a bias towards including plain text but that doesn't mean we uh are limited to plain text these days probably 80 or 90 85% of our our new books are in HTML plus text um um usually the text is derivative from the HTML so the HTML is the master we're we have just a few and we're going to be doing this in the future with distributed proof readers is uh XML so they'll be born as XML using te exite DTD for those you who care and uh convert from XML to just about any viable format we're going to do text HTML maybe a couple others and store those on our servers and and uh you know get those out to all our mirrors around the world and then what we want to do and we're not we don't have this fully activated yet and we could use some skilled people for this is do almost any other reasonable format on the fly so a PDF on the fly from an XML is cake right all you need is little CPU uh Power to throw the problem and all of a sudden instead of having one PDF file like you get from these uh you know for Fe sites with ebooks you say hey I want this font I want this size paper I want to do left and right margins versus you know same margins and you get your ebook your way which is something we feel really uh strongly about so we uh have I think literally about one PDF only ebook and that was this ebook that had 72 languages in it um and it turn it was just impossible we couldn't even do it with RTF uh so uh otherwise we really are committed to editable formats we also go back and fix ebooks to the tune of at least a couple dozen a week and that's obviously important to have an editable file you can't really fix a PDF file too easily I was wondering if you collect uh like technical documents and stuff like that documentation old manuals yeah we'll take we'll take all of those yeah Tech talks we we'd like to Archive them I think um one thing that we've we haven't done a lot in the main Gutenberg collection the gutenberg.org collection which is this this close to 20,000 that that we're doing on the DVD is we um we we've avoided doing a lot of the technical books because they're uh they can be transient and also there are usually a lot of other people that are doing those these days what we're doing this gets back to the slide you had earlier about um the average uh person before gudenberg having only one e library right so we're doing collections of Collections and what I'd really like to do is set up a uh a technical ebook collection so that all the people that are doing like uh uh you know free documentation licenses Creative Commons types of licenses if they'd like to contribute their stuff uh we'd like to provide a place for where that can uh go and be archived we uh you know we we actually are uh um uh pretty close collaborators with the internet archive and some of these other uh projects and uh just like them you know we believe that that if it's spinning if it's online it's mirrored it's on disk is downloadable we feel like that's that's a a pretty good place to be um we are concerned about things that are on paper someplace and aren't digital and uh maybe will just be inaccessible in 10 years 20 years 30 years we feel really strongly that uh and this gets back to the previous question about text that the work we do today had better still be usable able valuable relevant we don't know how many people are going to use it or for what but we want to at least make it sure it's still usable and accessible in certainly 20 years 30 years 50 years not just five years 10 years and if we were going with the format of the day 20 years ago we'd have formats that we couldn't read today and in fact we do have one we have one of the Shakespeare's in the folio format the nfo from format yeah we're a little embarrassed about uh people at email and say I can't open this we say well neither can we but we're not going to Del it you know maybe someone to write a reader in the future just people ask us why we don't go only with PDF and stuff like that and the reason is that people own it's a proprietary format and we want to make sure that all this stuff is going to be he's dreaming shorter than I am 50 years is nothing in my dreams I'm talk I'm thinking about how this is all going to look a thousand years from now you know maybe a 100 thousand years from now I just uh like I said though if I get to a quadrillion books I'm I'm happy yeah I've downloaded a lot of your um human red audio books and love them and I just want you and to talk it all about what you're doing in the way of audio books human red audio books yeah we're recruiting actors and people like that uh We've hit up the Screen Actors Guild there's a lot of a of work actors out there and uh we're we're hitting them up and we're also working on more and more different programs where the words have actually been read into the programs by humans much like the old midi I don't know if you remember the midi synthesizers that actually some of them used synthetic tones and some of them actually had people play the notes into them and then it reproduced the note for you we're working on every one of those aspects and it's a little slower than I would like but uh it's coming we have uh two uh really good partner sites on that it's LibriVox and literal systems I say LibriVox is probably out ahead a little bit but um uh if you go to gutenberg.org audio they'll link to to those sites and the human red audiobooks I just put one on this because it's 250 uh megabytes I put on the uh Sherlock Holmes uh one of the Sherlock Holmes readings it's wonderful um so so mostly we're trying to work with uh projects that are more geared towards doing the things that are required for human red audio books which involves some different things than doing the uh the plain textbooks and then we're starting to collect them we hav been collecting them we're continuing to collect them into the Gutenberg collection we got uh 50 or 75 human red we got about 300 computer uh uh Tex of speech um I wanted to ask if there's any scope within Project Gutenberg for uh not just expired copyrights and old things but people who want to write something today and maybe contribute to Creative Commons or public domain we have several different ways to do that and if you the people that email us we try to figure out what their goals are as so which one would work out best for them we have a pre-print site we have approximately 2% of our stuff is still done copyrighted by permission of current authors some people keep the copyright and give us permission some people give us the copyrights some people put them in the public domain every there's a lot of different ways to solve that problem uh but yeah we we're working on Modern Day stuff as well yeah the uh the the main uh impediment for some folks is what we mentioned before about PDF and stuff like that so many people have formats that were uh concerned about their longevity and so what we usually do with those as you mentioned we don't put them into the main Gutenberg collection but we have this preprint site I'll try to get a web browser up and you can see it it's uh preprints reading. Ms which is reading rooms right and uh and we love to get stuff yeah back to the audio books for a sec um do does the copyright only the copyright that you deal with does it apply only to the work that's being read or the reading itself if you want to copyright your own reading of it you can do that it'll become your audio Edition okay and if you if you want to create your own paper Edition you can do that too now United States law requires more intellectual input to get a copyright than other country's laws uh some of them have what they call the sweat of the brow kind of stuff and we don't have much of that so you would have to do something rather unique but a reading is very unique so that would be very easy for you to copyright okay that's why I was wondering because I have um like old taped or old uh vinyl recordings of audio Productions that I I know some of are out of well you want to check with a good copyright lawyer because the law on all of that changed in 1972 if you have any recordings from 1972 And before there's a very good chance that they don't get a copyright in it okay okay but you do want to check that I'm I know a thousand times more about copyright than I ever wanted to know and I can't answer all of the questions anyway and and and if uh um if they're clear I'm sure you'd accept them in like MP3 right well if you do your research oh yeah any of the formats okay if you do your research on this stuff and you come up with the reasonable decision that it's public domain you're what they call an innocent infringer they can sue you for a 100 bucks or 200 bucks or something uh you know but they can't take your house or anything uh because you did some research and some you know you did enough to say I think this is in the public domain but it helps to do some research and we'll help you do it yeah that's that's why people got to understand we um as Michael said we're unwilling experts in uh in copyright and uh we have if you go to goldberg. org there's a how-to section we have a copyright how to this is distillation of uh uh four or five uh very big um lawyers uh uh very um uh expert lawyers in uh copyright issues and we we keep patents and trademarks we that's a separate thing but for copyright we have a whole procedure to go through and when we go through that procedure when when you go to the the Gutenberg site and you you let us do your copyright well you do the you provide the information then we make a determination of public domain status uh we we haven't been wrong yet basically we've we've uh made a few things that are gray area there are some things that are that are that are um up in the air uh some of you might have heard about the orphaned Works decisions there's some stuff in title 17 section 108h that we're looking at so there are some things that are gray and we're actually trying to push those boundaries where we think that basically you know there there it should basically fall to the people rather than falling to uh some long dead author's estate or I'm I'm also going to warn everybody I am going to try to get in some more of what I want to talk about uh no no no I I just don't want to get totally off we're getting so far into copyright and we could stay there forever and that's good but I want to get to the end and bounce back so you know what the options are as soon as we know what the options are then I'm willing to go for any of the options that are available um yeah so let's go I'll get you back I just show theint go ahead while he's playing with it okay you have a subset of books from um books for free uh a subset of their audio books audiobooks for free.org that's a place that gave us some of our ebooks they're they're uh not not a uh they're not what we call a close affiliate they're just some people that we work with to get those particular items but do you only have a subset of their books that's right a subset of their books yeah so audiobooks for free is uh uh a site that's based in the UK they do uh pretty pretty professional readings as opposed to LibriVox which sound very good but they're they're really amateurs and they do have uh not only further books but they also have some higher uh like I don't know if they do stereo but they have some uh higher quality uh higher sound quality recordings now I just I wanted just like like five or 10 minutes right now to just try to cover all the junk at least for one second the piece of that I that I want to at least throw out there and then you guys can pick what you want to hear about but each one of these inventions that I've been talking about changed the whole idea of civilization changed what it was to be a member of a civilization what a member of society changed the idea of how much you could know how much you could look up how much information you could have without somebody else telling it to you we were always so dependent on somebody else telling us everything and each one of these gave people an opportunity to have a truly encyclopedic set of knowledge in their own house now when I was a kid these things cost 1500 bucks for the great books of the western world and the branica and the Americana and all those other things that I grew up with um today you know I'm sure that somebody here has gone out and bought the britanica for $115 on a DVD like I did brand new I couldn't tell you how many copies I have of the Banica on DVD and CD but I can tell you that I do have one for every 10 years for over a century in paper um these things are fantastic and it's just going to keep going on that way unless they stop us right now the concept of copyright has been determined by the US Supreme Court as to be possibly permanent there was how many of you have heard of uh Eldred versus Ashcraft before it was Eldred versus Ashcraft it was Hart that's me versus Reno and I was suing on behalf of Project Gutenberg but the lawyers were doing such a terrible job I fired them so I don't really that's not a great story but that the hey they came in they were going to lose five to four they lost 7 to2 all right but uh now the Supreme Court's even worse so I don't think there's any chance of getting the law changed unless there's somebody out there who's willing to be much more revolutionary than I am things are going to happen quite a bit differently a hundred years ago over half of all copyrights had expired and it was a very nice kind of ratio new stuff was coming into publication about as fast as the old stuff was going out kind of nice 100 years from now 99.99 and I don't how many more nines of everything that was ever copyrighted will still be under copyright if I I wanted to bring a bunch of dishes and do a stack of dishes and show you with pie charts on the dishes because if I took a couple stacks of dishes taller than I am I could make the mark of how big a percentage in the year 2100 by taking a plate and drawing a little triangle in it about that wide on a dinner plate that will be I mean if you take your kid to the new Lion King take a 5-year-old kid to the new version of The Lion King this year that kid would have to live to 2100 before that copyright would expire even if it's never extended again I don't want to go too far into that that may not be what you want guys want to hear about but every one of these five information Ages was countered by a copyright to stop the technology that could have given everybody basically all the information in the world all right this has happened before and I said going to have to have somebody more revolutionary than I am okay now why are they doing all that they're setting up precedents our legal system is based on precedents now I don't know how many of you guys have ever seen a replicator product in real life but I brought some ever heard of the MIT Fab Lab I gave a speech over there last week and they were kind enough to make me some goodies to show you this is a mounting bracket for a solenoid in and of itself it's not terribly cute except for the fact that it was made by a 40,000 lb per square in water drill cutest little gizmos I've ever seen we made a bunch of these this this is really cute and it's like I said there's nothing special about it other than the fact that how it was made nobody ever touched it you just threw this piece of metal in there goes you know got to have goggles on this is a pulley goes on a axle has a little Notch to put the Rope on and you ride the Rope around it and it was part of a triple set of pulley and they they gave me one this was cut out by a laser and a laser that was finely tuned enough I didn't even have to wear any laser prooof goles I got to watch it make this thing and this is seriously hard this is about 60 to 80% as hard as anything you could make the pulley out of it's not rapid prototype in anymore it's not just soft plastic you can make real operational stuff ready to go and this of course is a Starship and uh this is ABS plastic and there are half a dozen other materials you can make things out of that I just I've been fond of this whole idea for years and years and years I started talking about faxing pizzas and doing stuff like that back in the early 90s and that was I used to lose my audience when I talked about that stuff they just they just whoa this guy's out to lunch and it's pizza from a fax machine we got to shoot him what was that oh it's it's layer by layer it's one of those where they they run the layers and uh this particular one I didn't watch this particular one get made the one I watched being made was made out of the old polymer stuff this is if you can look this I can send you the program for this and I can send you a whole a whole list of the composits it's made out of so if you email me I have it in fact I have it right around my neck it's all right here when I was walking through the Fab Lab I stuck this into everything it was making and downloaded the instructions and I have permission from the MIT guys to put those three things on Project Gutenberg so you will see them you can download them and make your own and then you can find out exactly how it's made okay now again I I want to leave as much time for you guys as possible um I designed a crayon jet printer years and years ago that you probably don't want to hear about cuz it's easy to think about imagine melting the little pieces of wax and firing them off and you could build up a really great relief map of anything you wanted uh I thought this was just totally cosmic until somebody printed me out a human hand and you could almost read the fingerprints the resolution was so good I mean you could read the you could take it to a palm reader and they could read the poem it's unbelievable stuff that you can make with these things um I do still lose people when I talk about driving away in a Ferrari that you print out on your computer because you got to get oil in between the cylinders and everything but I still say that you will be able to do it someday think about I'm sure some of you those guys were talking about the Coco and all that remember when there was only one color it was a bit it was either on or off that was it that was the number of colors you got and now you can't get less than 16 million colors and you can get a lot more I say say the same thing for these materials all you have to do is double the number of materials every so often and eventually you'll have all the materials you want so don't want to get too tied up in that but if you like that stuff read Diamond age if you look at my pictures on the web where I'm up in a tree reading a book this is what I'm reading this is the only hardback book I ever bought new off the shelf when it was new in my life and it was before I knew Neil I actually went to a conference like this one and I was standing in line with a couple of weirdos we're having a great conversation and make a long story short we got to the end and we put our badges on and one of them was St Jude and the other one was Neil and the other one was me and I thought wow what a coincidence it's like we put the badges on oh you're you oh you're you we had been yaking up a storm in line for 45 minutes and had more fun than we had during the entire conference okay engines of creation by Eric Drexler it's it's not a novel but I read it like one I just ate the whole thing up so you're interested in nanotech and replicators and all this stuff I'm telling you you can buy a 3D printer now for less than an IBM at cost in 1984 I'm talking about full book at not even counting inflation the same list price not counting inflation so you can build I want people printing out Donatello's David and Michelangelo's David and the Venus de Milo and all that stuff not just the monol Lisa okay uh got to get to oh this is details we can get into later I'm supposed to mention the World ebook Fair um I'm just gonna have to go for it I'm I don't like um I don't like blowing my own horn too much but I uh I asked a friend of mine to help me uh celebrate the 35th anniversary of me uh sitting down the on the teletype and typing in the Declaration of Independence so he gave me a quarter of a million books that I can give you and they're all right there if you go to World ebook fair.com for the next two weeks till August 4th there's all the Project Gutenberg books and there's a quarter of a million more not counting for duplication there's over 350,000 so we we're saying we got a third of a million and they're all free and just search them out and download them and give those to your friends too we just I just wanted to get the maximum publicity for everybody and this is a guy who sells these and he's given them away for free for a whole month just because I asked them so really nice more junk oh here's here's the traffic pattern for some reason nobody comes in on the weekend so if you get in there right now you should be able to suck up lots of books and it looks like a lot of our traffic is coming from Europe and Asia much more than we expected so that's the traffic pattern at the World eot Fair since the first couple of days where we had to switch servers and wires and do all sorts of other things because it was just getting overloaded to the max we've given away over a million books a day every day since about July 7th so the 32 days we're going to have I'm going to guess we're going to make it to 30 30 million books but we also gave away 30 million books right here at this conference okay we don't need to talk about that did that this is how you can volunteer the easiest way to volunteer is just send me email I love helping people volunteer got 50,000 volunteers and they all say I'm so sorry to bother you and I go that's what I'm here for I'm here to help you guys figure out how to get started more junk more junk all right so now officially we got back to the end in the beginning so now we can go to any one of those spots you want or other spots I apologize but I just wanted to make sure I got everything covered okay question uh yes I do have a quick question um since you do kind of push these open formats like can you not hear me since you do kind of push these open formats like raw text and stuff um have you had any blind visually disabled people call you up and say hey thanks a lot man because it traditionally they would have to find a book printed in Braille and not everything gets made into Braille right there it is a month goes by that I don't get a note from some visually impaired person who says please don't ever stop making plain text ebooks now I I got to I got to straighten a couple things out it's not that I'm against all these other formats people have misquoted me because they wanted to fight for some other format and said Michael heart wrs to kill Adobe you know I don't want to kill Adobe I just want to have plain text to I went to meet with a Tei guys back in the 90 or something like that and they wanted to destroy plane text there was a uh Library of Congress uh workshop on eext uh in 1992 that never once mentioned plain text and a great Revenge I got because they published it in PDF format and wanted to get some feedback off the list servers and nobody answered and week after week after week I got to teach tease them in front of 10,000 readers and say you know why they're not answering because they wanted in plain text they don't want to play with PDF now this is 1992 it didn't come up automatically okay you had to fool around with it they never got one message from one person until they put it out on Plain text so monuma I got my revenge and and do do you have do you have a sense if they use more text to speech or more oh yes they're much easier yeah plain text works for everything right now this this xtml kind of thing that Greg was talking about you should be able to create plain text out of that so I got nothing against being able to go this way and that way as long as you can get back to something that the average person wants to use uh interview coming out in the itle E Magazine today I think uh was really hard on me about that and I said the reason I do that is because I can stand here and say I dare you I double dog dare you to find one computer that won't read our books yeah let me mention about Braille also the uh uh blind Bookworm is uh one site where they uh have a lot of stuff about um uh use converting to a braille format with nfb transs is something that we're planning on offering I've done that a little test basis again good opportunity and uh but I really want to plug Aaron Aaron is uh the guy that manages our cdrom giveaway project he was the guy that burned 1,500 of these brand new uh isos brand new uh DVDs from ISO to give away he's blind he's a college student in totally blind he's a college student in Iowa that's Aaron Canon so thanks to him lots of help you uh ebooks are fantastic for educating people around the world but uh for poor areas of the world the hardware to read ebooks might not necessarily be as readily available things like the $100 laptop project certainly help that sort of thing $50 laptop probably better but we'll get to 100 first uh I'm just curious what your take is on the hardware with eaper e Inc Solutions things like that that are starting to come out now well I got two answers to that one is while I was in MIT I just happened to meet with the $100 laptop guys and we're going to do some kind of joint project with them and my own I I like to work from the bottom up I'm I'm a simple guy when it comes to that stuff all my stuff is from garage sales everything that you see almost everything I own is from garage sales and my solution to that particular question is cell phones in the next 12 months they're going to be a billion new cell phones in the world and I'm pushing uh for a friend of mine named John mezy from Malta who has a little site up mobile books and stuff like that email me and I'll tell you all about it or go to our uh latest newsletters that I wrote a month ago because I've been on the road a month and um you can download 5,000 of our books that have already been converted into a WAP compatible uh cell phone and we're going to put lots of other cell phone uh the iPod was only out for a week before somebody wrote a program to read our stuff on the iPod I'm waiting for somebody to read it out loud on the iPod uh all sorts of things like that so yeah cell phones I got a message a text message from a guy from his cell phone on the STI plane in Africa who was reading one of our books in uru and I thought yes that's the definite way for this to go you guys are going to have to decide who was in line first I'm sorry I think it was me um I actually uh I thought I was this is sort of a side note almost but the um idea of distributed proof reading um I Heard also from the folks at ebus media which I don't know if you guys know it's really a lot of fun they're the folks who revealed that um through distributed journalism research they revealed that there was a um a guy who'd been allowed into the White House Press Corps who was not only a republican plant blogger but was also a male prostitute so um you know so they're also working that's sort of a side note but they they're um but they they also have distributed proof readers and distributed fact checkers wondering how long do you think that model is going to be viable because it's one of those things that just sort of you know takes a lot of time it's labor of love how long will that go on I can't imagine it stopping for several reasons the first reason which was valid 20 years ago as it is today is that you can take a diff program or a comp program and compare any of the files that different people proof read and see all the differences in one second somebody changed one comma in the thing it's going to pop up so you know we always had the issue way way way way back when of 1984 ISM if you'll notice the first books I did there are like 20 or 30 versions of Alice and Wonderland literally there all the way up to Alice 30. HTM and stuff because every time I changed it I put a new file up so you could see the whole Evolution from the first one and how we got rid of the errors little by little now distributed proof readers for those who don't know is a setup where you can come in and proofread one page while you're waiting for somebody to come pick you up you can just log in and grab a page you can grab another page you can sit there and grab a page as often as you want you can claim a whole book if you want but a lot of people just pop in here and there there are single we had a big rush one weekend I think where there were like 12,000 people proof reading in one weekend uh it it just gets absolutely berserk as of how many pages you can get done and we have every one of them done twice by the way we have done copyright research and all sorts of other things for anybody who was interested in ebooks ever since I started I I just want to promote ebooks you notice in our mission statement it didn't say public domain ebooks or nonprofit ebooks or anything like that says my job is to promote the creation and distribution of ebooks period the very everybody who started in the ebook business way back when called me and I helped them to the best of my ability uh it's the way it goes distributed proof readers is uh an organization that's a a a you know extremely close affiliate you know we buy their Hardware uh uh we have uh you know really tight ties but they make their own decisions also about uh uh what to to process and they do focus a lot on the public domain and that's great uh we uh encourage people and they'll help to set up additional distributed proof readers so we have uh one site that's up and running pretty successfully DP of Europe and we'd love to set up other sites so if uh people have particular areas that they're interested in then uh then you can you can work with the DP folks to get the code so uh access to manuscripts and papers is a big deal in scientific publishing and I don't know if you guys have had any uh connections with people at the public library of science pl.org a little bit okay we've swapped emails with them um sometimes people like that ask us to make a backup for them and sometimes they want us to keep it private because they want to get all the hits again we don't care who gets the hits uh we we help in any way that we can for them and if you if you know somebody there and you think you can make a connection for us we' we'd love to do it no I do but I just mentioned it because it it it it takes the same issue of opening up copyrights and access to Scientific literature um and so my question is about um scientists and and just any reader in general people build up their own libraries over the course of their lifetime and yet you know I want my library to be accessible by anybody my personal library and I think you know if somebody wants to share their library with me I should have access to that so to what extent have you thought about developing models or standards for making real you know distributable libraries or or making your library accessible to you and everybody else from anywhere okay I think that I'm going to answer your question I hope but it's it's it's something that I already thought of and not specifically in response to your question so I may not hit the nail on the head um I call the philosophy that I work with unlimited distribution the idea basically is that once Project Gutenberg puts an ebook online every BBS and every guy with a Coco and anything else out there who wants to put that book on their little system is just dandy with me um you you know like uh blus Pauling or uh sorry blus tals uh said you know real men don't use backup or you know only wimps use backups real men put their stuff on FTP and let the whole world download it he had the exactly the same thing same idea I did I just was trying to do it with more stuff um in fact I I got a little story that may be worth telling about that where I pulled an all nighter I mean a literal all nighter one of those things where you're just wasted and you fall into the sack and you don't even think about which side you're going to sleep on and I did three books that night from end to end and when I I put them in two copies on East Coast two copies on a wet coast and two copies in the Midwest and I went to sleep and when I woke up they were all gone and I was just totally freaked because I knew it'd be a week before I had enough energy to do that again and then I got to wise's idea after pounding my head against the wall for a while of sending out an email to a 100 of my favorite friends and say did anybody download these before they disappeared yes I was saved because all our stuff goes up immediately and people have little clocks set all day long for people to back up our system they're are syncing every minute of every day so it's now hard for us to lose a book and the that whole idea is based on the fact that we put a book up for example I I did a uh Icelandic book called Cormac the scald and there's only one copy of it in existence that's known and I didn't know that I didn't know we got a hold of the only copy uh I somebody just sent it to me and said here and I put it up there and I I woke up in the morning and I thought you know I didn't do enough copyright research on this book even though it's like from 1100 or something like that and uh well no no make enough changes and I thought I'm going to do I'm going to wake up and I'm going to see if if somebody claimed a copyright or this that or the other so I logged in and I did a search and I got one hit I thought great I'll find it it was us we were already listed in the oclc catalog so by the time I fell asleep to the time I woke up to check but we're now the authority on this book so it's really it's really strange I mean we list I'm sorry go ahead I just we all in the same time I found out we were listed as having the best Robert Lewis Stevenson collection in the world and and stuff like that just every once in a while I turn around and find the weirdest dang reference to Project Gutenberg that I nobody told me they don't call me up and interview me before they write these articles half the time and then somebody says did you know and I go no and just we just did I knew we did a lot of Robert Lewis Stevenson I didn't know we were the best okay anyway um part of the question was about uh um building personal bookshelves and stuff like that well that that can be distributed I mean we all curate libraries and curation of of your technical papers and all that is a big deal and you should benefit you thinking P top yeah no he's thinking of personal bookshelves so so so we we haven't done a lot of that on the main Gutenberg server because mostly what we say is look we're really good at creating books getting them out there storing them providing some basic cataloging information we want other folks to uh to provide all these these ways of reaching in that we didn't you know yet dream up I'm going to show you one right here invite you to make others and mention that uh we also in a related thing we we work with Wikipedia so right now we were talking about hey let's do author bios let's do uh bibliographies let's do about this book and then we say wait a minute we're not really set up for that we're set up for for you know like these big files that don't change all that often and we started working with Wikipedia so now we link to them and we let them do that um so that's one sort of sort of uh or two sort of directions the other up on the screen I apologize for Michael's choice of uh colors here these are really weird colors but uh snowy. r. alaska.edu PG ISO that's where I made this image although I had to tweak it a whole lot after afterwards people make their own collections of our ebooks and uh there's not a ton here because we haven't uh there's not a ton of people that have uh seen this yet but um they create their own collections right so you select some some of our stuff and you publish it and then someone that says hey I'd like to get some of that stuff you click over here and you say make me an ISO and it makes you an ISO and emails you when it's done so those are a couple of things that we're doing but I think it the larger question your answer is we don't want to do all that stuff we want to try to focus on what we're good at and we say yes you know we always encourage people to do stuff and then of course people discover oh well you know now I got to work and we also got a 15minute warning so if if everybody asks a question it only takes three minutes we're going to run out of time yeah so okay um hi uh I just like to say thanks CU this project is is amazing and great uh but also uh my question is about uh the text formatting uh I know you mentioned that I mean I I I completely agree with the with the plain text formatting and and how it's essential and you said you were doing uh a little HTML to make it a little more readable and I'm wondering if you've if you've experimented with with things that are more for like printed page like like Tech or or something like that which is plain text but um has a little more facility for page form in and and is is a lot easier to read in the read the actual uh markup than HTML is because of all the Clos tags and you're talking to the wrong guy yeah the the answer is yes we'd love it we have plenty of techbooks we have not I shouldn't say plenty we have more more HTML and stuff like that but uh especially for mathematical techs Tech is the answer um we really interested by the way this uh Newton's principia we really want to get Newton's principia online and it's a bear it's a monster but you're not going to do that in anything but but Tech L Tech probably these days so what what's the reasoning for the choice of of HTML we don't choose we we we encourage we enable we accept volunteer makes the book The Way They want to make it yeah we answer yes now the HTML is because hey there's a lot of great tools for HTML they're accessible you know all that stuff um and so and so that's what we get when we change to XML we'll have more options for spreading into further formats um but but Tech is an option and and maybe there'll be some future stuff that's okay as well we got we got um 20 30 something different formats including nfo we're not doing any more nfos okay no more of those folio but almost any other reasonable format we haveit yeah we got yeah with the the P P and all that stuff okay again thank you it's one of my most excited projects thanks oh listen someone ask a question about mirroring let me just answer really quickly there's a mirror howto okay uh it's about 160 gigabytes right now we do a lot of rsync and uh the reading R server which is running this World ebook Fair has been pushing 60 to 100 megabits for two weeks and has been doing great uh but uh by and large uh getting your own copy of the collection on your own server that you can use for your purposes your friends or whatever pretty easy see the mirroring how to got a question about and if you leave out the human genome it gets easier my question is about whether um Project Gutenberg is interested in craft instructional materials there's a lot of Orphan um books and magazines and pamphlets from the first half of the 20th century that that are really just being lost because the um Publishers don't exist anymore the irn companies that originally published them aren't you know they have never renewed their copyrights um and then within the craft Community there are people who say oh but everything's copyrighted and so you can't circulate that um would Project Gutenberg be interested in things like knitting instructional materials definely will help we help um the thing when when people say that that uh uh you know we think this is copyrighted whatever is copyrighted as I said unfortunately we're experts and uh and usually send an email to copyright PG f.org I get that and uh and we'll try to help out um again a little related to the other question we got sometimes formatting can be a real issue you know we don't want to we don't really want to have a tiff and just a tiff or something like that you know we really want to actually turn it into an ebook that you can uh uh use for all these other purposes you know derivative Works cutting and pasting uh sharing with a bunch of your friends printing you know if you want to that's by the way what we didn't mention that's one of the things that we really think distinguishes Gutenberg from some of the work we hear coming out of uh you know your Googles and yahoos and and so forth they're mostly doing picture pictures of books with raw OCR we feel like you need a little more push unfortunately that little more push is a lot of work to get it to where we really want to be with being a usable ebook it's a longer answer than you bargain for short answer is yeah that would picture of a book is not a book if I have a Ferrari I want to drive away in it if I have a pipe I there's a famous painting of a pipe that says this is not a pipe under it and when people ask me why isn't a Google book A book it's because you can't search it you can't you know but the most most important thing is so you can read it and that's that is definitely the most important part but it's not an ebook it's a something it's a Google book project googleberries if we want to make that happen um but is there another country that we could work in Iraq has uh very limited we uh we understand they uh they haven't yet signed the burn convention it turns out Afghanistan is the other one that never signed the burn convention I don't know I don't know if that's related or not um copyright has been extended in uh the European Union as a lot of you know to 70 plus Australia just said 70 plus years most of the rest of the world is life plus some number US is a is a fixed amount um again short answer is there's not a whole lot out there and if you want to think in terms of like uh data repository types of things you know a lot of you know about Haven Co and and you've read uh the Neil Stevenson book that talks about that um the problem is that if I'm in the US I'm the infringer in the US regardless of whether the data live you know on on uh uh you know sea sea island or and I talked to The Haven Co guy and he didn't want have anything to do with it yeah their bandwidth was little too expensive for us actually yeah but uh but anyway so so unfortunately it's not that good a uh an opportunity uh we we tend to be really really cautious as I said uh we have collaborators uh the Project Gutenberg consortia Center who's who's running this World ebook Fair most of it anyway is um uh slightly less um sort of paranoid than we are and there are plenty of other people that say Hey it looks public domain smells public domain no one's complained and we'll put it up for uh for download but that doesn't get us the uh the Contemporary stuff that's kind of perpetually under copyright it doesn't look that good for the rest of the world but we are doing more and more contemporary stuff and there's a lot of contemporary stuff at the World ebook fair right now if you want to see stuff that was just printed in the last couple years get on there and go to some of the sponsor sites sadly to say Jim Bane died while I was on my trip I didn't know that um I wanted to meet him in New York he was he's one of the sponsors of the World ebook fair and he gave us a heap of books that we can all give away to you guys and uh uh just you know we we're going to have there's stuff I can't say because people have made me promis not to all I can say is we're going to have a lot more books thanks as you amass a huge amount of of material um what sort of solution do you have for indexing it for finding things finding any particular thing if you don't know exactly what you're looking for well if you go on to the uh Project Gutenberg consorti Center side uh that site has been totally crawled word by word and you can search any phrase and find it in any one of the books any way you like uh it takes for freaking ever to run that search and we actually bought new UPS's because the searches were taking two or three weeks and the thing would crash sometime during the two weeks so we just get it done indexing would take two or the index search searching is a little faster than that indexing takes oh yeah no our search takes longer than your search yeah to build the index that you guys get to search like that takes two or three weeks and uh and finally what we did was we farmed it out to somebody else just it just got to be too much of pain we should plug them actually it's uh coup C q.org and they've been running that so reading r. Ms has been pushing as I said up to 100 megabits for the last couple of weeks they've been serving we don't know how many queries millions of queries and we crashed them they rebuilt they grew they rewrote the program for us yeah they're they're actually pretty pretty uh Google of course indexes the main gudenberg collection we have a search for them Yahoo has us in a special program where you can do like author title searches so uh we also have cataloging for our books so we try we're not professional catalogers and as I said we we we try to leave some of this stuff to people that know it better than we do but uh we try to do a little bit of everything the other thing we have is an rdf uh XML file that you can download and build your own catalog using our data as input and all the stuff few things I just mentioned are on the advanced uh offline catalog page at gutenberg.org the $100 laptop people made big noises about rebuilding our catalog for us too but they haven't answered my email since I left MIT so they don't know but one thing people don't realize how big this is so you know a quarter million files yeah you know you got a quarter million FES but Accord you know uh uh 20,000 titles um can be an awful lot there are issues with character sets languages uh having author names that don't quite match and we fix these as we get errors but but we really uh I want to encourage people to do to do um probably a better job than we do of uh of the basically the cataloging type of stuff finding a type of things thank you very much Michael you started a thought that I'm not sure you finished and I want to see if I can get you to finish I never finish anything you were talking about copyright copyright stopping uh the information waves yeah and then you said why are they doing this they're setting precedent and then you start talking about the Neil Stephenson stuff and I never we what precedents are they setting okay okay have you read Diamond D yes okay I I strongly suggest everybody here read Diamond age anybody who doesn't like it swear to God send it to me or give it to me or whatever I will pay you at least half of what you paid for it and I'll give it to somebody else that's just I mean this is hundreds of people but I will do it because I could never get enough copies of it anyway same with dandelion wine by the way okay now the reason I recommend talking about D now you may want to plug your ears or something I I I want to mention a couple things and I hate maybe I should do this by email spoiler warning yeah this is a definite spoiler warning but I'm going to ask it as question so I'm going to do Socratic method here rather than tell you the answers so the the real question is why does it start with Bud of all the creepy low lives in the world why does it start with bud when you can answer that question you'll understand a heap more about Diamond age and a heap more about my what I was talking about in the sense that every time that people the masses can have stuff the haves versus the Have Nots want to step in and make sure they can't have it now I can go into you want to look up the history of fashion a particularly Italian fashion there were laws about how long you're fre toes on your shoes could be so that if you had toe that's why by the way that's why Italian shoes have pointy toes because it was against the law if you were one of us to wear the pointy toes it was actually against the law to wear those kinds of clothes now the we Star Trek anybody watch Star Trek my favorite favorite quote quote I'm not a real treer or Trey but there's some seriously good stuff in there now and then and my favorite quote is in one where uh Warf and data find these Frozen people one of them's a folk singer one of them's a zillionaire and one of them is just somebody and the folks singer says I got a whole new audience I can go out there and do all this stuff and I want to know the lady wants to find her relatives and the zillionaire says freaking peard I could buy this ship several times over and long story short gets to the end and peard finally tells them very gently that there's no such thing as money and the guy's about ready to freak out you well what do you invest in and peard says we invest in ourselves we live in a society where we are defining ourselves by our possessions as long as we Define ourselves by our possessions having the distinction between the halves and the Have Nots will be the most important thing and that philosophy has governed all of our civilizations all the way back to the amoeba the amoeba says it's better if I have it and you don't that's the way it goes now up until electronic books there was only one thing in the the whole world that all of you could have as much as you wanted of what was it air very good air today you can buy any computer off the shelf and download a million copies of that Declaration of Independence I typed in and you won't even notice it put a dent in your hard drive right you can have as many of those things as you want the first thing besides air that you can have as much as you want of I bought bought a terabyte half a terabyte drive a couple weeks ago for 200 bucks a week later it was $10 cheaper you know you're getting to the point where you can hold in one hand and this is some what I said the day that I started ebooks the day I started Project Gutenberg which technically by the way was July 5th it was after midnight um I I talked about laptops and I talked about that you'd be able to carry the entire Library of Congress in one hand and I immediately appended to that and they will make a law against it no no don't no no I wasn't a smart as it sounds I I was you you read a lot of the stuff that I wrote back then and I look at it God it sounds like I knew so much more than I really knew I was just on the right Trail I didn't understand what I was doing I just knew it was the right thing to do Project Gutenberg is as much of a right brain thing as a left brain thing for me you remember I'm the seat of the pants guy I don't I can't read a circuit diagram because I'm dyslexic they don't make any sense to me I can't read code I can't even read a GP it's too crazy for me it it makes me dizzy to look at a regular expression but I do run command lines I love I'm a command line guy rather than a pointand click don't again I don't understand why this all works out the way it does and uh we're running out of time and I've said some really good things here it would be a great place to end but I we always got more one room for one more question the question is what is the website or websites that we should be going to gutenberg.org gutenberg.org do. Au or something like that I'll email you all the sites uh start at gutenberg.org that's a good place to go um that's with not the uh the occasional German way with two T's it's uh thank you gutenberg.org yeah email me anytime and I'll send you a whole list of the sites and even about how much is on each site there's a contact page there it lists both of our uh our emails and there's a help address also goes to me copyright address also goes to me and uh we'd be happy to talk to you there's uh 50 languages at gutenberg.org there's over a 100 at gutenberg.org the Australians they're coming they're almost up to a thousand and Project Gutenberg of Europe started a couple years ago and they've got over 300 we've got project in Portugal okay go ahead semi- rhetorical question um Diamond age when I walked into my favorite professor's department or office in my department for the first time I noticed there was a copy of it on his shelf the book is sort of a major Touchstone so my question is when and where is the first conference that centers on the diamond age well I know the guy who runs diamond ag.org really so if you email me I'll ask him for you okay he's a replicator guy by the way just in case you didn't think that already but uh I am so far into this replicator thing I just to me the replicators are magic they're they're as far out there as my quintilian books what about the the primer Prim yeah ladies young ladies primer well again it's the right there's a right brain aspect and there's a left brained aspect the young ladyes primer is the right brained aspect and the whole programming thing you know where she start she starts playing with the chains and doing all that stuff that's the left brain aspect and now there's another uh spoiler all right the end of the book think about what happens at the end no I won't I'm not going to say it but what does she become what's the result of what she does you know she basically creates her own civilization all right so you start with bud you end up with this new file that won't mean anything to people who haven't read it and uh that's kind of what I'm trying to do here is I want to turn that the original logo for Project Gutenberg was a big long lever huge lever with the moon as the falc the Earth on the short end and his little bitty guy stacking books on the long end and little wiggle marks and the and it said underneath dragging the world Kicking and Screaming into the third millennium that's where we started anybody ever heard of cow tipping I'm into World tipping I want to sneak up on the world while it's not looking I think we're done we need people people in the back so we're going to we're going to wrap up yeah I'll be more than happy to talk to anybody who wants to talk until I run out of gas and if you feed me that'll be a long time we're going to uh shuttle right to uh pentop North and there are a bunch more DVDs if you didn't get enough I'll I'll try to grab a couple handfuls and uh and ask me through the rest of the conference thanks everyone thank you