Book People Archive

Re: Etext Newsgroup

Eric Eldred wrote:
[Regarding discussions of etext production]

> My preference is for a moderated mailing list such as this one.
> But many of the readers of this list seem to be firmly against
> discussion of the technical details of OCR and HTML that Alan
> has proposed and that I agree are greatly needed.  Thus I'd like
> to see a separate list for the "sausage makers" instead of the
> "sausage gourmets".

Personally, I often find that gourmets make the best chefs, and vice versa.
Mary and I intend this list to be both for people who read on-line books and
people who produce on-line books.  And we're quite interested in having people
do both.  That's one of the reasons we started the Build-A-Book project,
for instance-- among other things, it gives people who may be new to on-line
books a chance to try producing one, without having to commit to doing
an entire book on their own right away.  Lots of people have signed up for
chapters; I'd be interested in hearing some of them post to the list
about how it's been going for them.

Both Mary and I also welcome posts about technical issues involved
in on-line book production.  If the same points start coming up again
and again, that usually means that a FAQ should be written for them.  For
instance, after the question of which books are in the public domain came
up repeatedly, I wrote up a summary of how to determine public-domain status
and posted it on my Web pages.  Similarly, I'd be happy to add summaries
of common answers to questions on OCR and formats, if they come up repeatedly,
though I may need to rely on people in those threads to write the summaries.

I do remember that there were some complaints from readers earlier when
a technical thread was going on.  In some cases, some people weren't
interested in that particular thread; in other cases, readers felt like
the volume of the list was too high.  Regarding the first point, I'll point
out that nontechnical threads and technical threads can go on at the same
time; so if you'd rather talk about something other than the current 'hot'
topic of conversation, go ahead and post about what *you're* interested
in talking about.  There's no reason there can't be a conversation about
the characters in the _Chronicles of Avonlea_ stories going on at the same
time as a conversation about how best to format _Tristam Shandy_ for on-line
use, or how to get good scans of antique typefaces.  Regarding the volume,
I'll point out that as discussion lists go, this list has always been on
the low-volume side compared to other mailing lists I've encountered.
I realize that some folks do still have a problem with anything more than
a low-volume list.  I agree that archives (and digests) would be helpful for
people in that situation, and hope to have the time to set these up, though
this won't likely happen until at least January.  In the meantime, though,
I'd prefer people to speak up about the issues they're concerned with,
rather than holding back because they fear their comments aren't welcome.

We hope that this list will help the on-line book community continue to grow.
We have nearly 500 people on this list currently, and the number of books
on-line has grown impressively.  I just ran across a Scout Report from
late 1994 for the On-Line Books Page, which noted that my page listed
"over 300" books.  Three years later, there are nearly *6,000* books listed,
and I've got a backlog of on-line books still to list.  Imagine what
resources we'll have on-line with another twentyfold increase in a few years.

John
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