Month: April 2004

There is a site where you can go and proofread ebooks destined for Project Gutenberg, where they make available free electronic versions of books that have passed into the public domain (are more than a hundred years old). This is a very good thing.

See, these old books aren’t popular with most people, but they are there, and with a little effort they could always be there, for anyone who could ever need them, ever. Such a database/library can only make us as a culture richer, as well as each individual richer in their options of free material. The problem is that when the books are scanned in they are just photos of pages, which transmit and store poorly, so text-recognition software is used. But the software makes mistakes, sometimes a lot of them.

Thus someone has to go through all the machine-generated text and make sure it’s kosher, that’s where you and Distributed Proofreaders come in. They offer a simple web interface where you can donate a few minutes of your time, one page at a time.

Consider it, Project Gutenberg could be the next library of Alexandria, and you were just going to waste your time anyway.

Lawrence Lessig has just released a new book, Free Culture onto the world. He has also given it away.
(here for text only)

Part of the reason for this, I’m sure, is that books that are given away on the internet seem to sell more copies. More importantly, though, is that this is a book about copyright and the public domain. About a culture that is being deprived of it’s essence and history by corporations that refuse to give to the public what has become a part of it’s consciousness, and about the ideas that just might help us keep the peace among the technologies that surround us.

So somehow keeping it to himself might have seemed a bit greedy.

It is written in a way that is both readable, and incredibly relevant. He frames the ideas he discusses within the history of various media, using stories about our cultural past to explain our present and future. It has been released under a Creative Commons license, something wonderful that he helped pioneer and which I have recently applied (see at left) to all of my own content.

Obviously, this isn’t a book for everyone. But if you are creating in our current culture, than it is relevant to you, as it is to anyone consuming or thinking in it.

We are at a point now where the realm of copyright seems to expand into infinity, trailing just ahead of a certain anthropomorphic rodent. We are losing culture, fast. The least we can do is to understand how it is happening.

(also, there is a flash-lecture of the same name that briefly covers the relevant material. Definitely worth your minutes.)

You know you want it. You know you always wanted it. Now you can have it.

He’s always been your favorite rationalist, now he can be your favorite tshirt too! Mekka (fellow journalcomicker and philosophy student) is now taking pre-orders on these little gems. Tell him I sent you and I get a discount on the up and coming Marx and Kafka shirts.

It’s win win.