About these texts....
In the fall of 1991 I uploaded some miscellaneous etexts which I had scrounged
from here and there on the net to the NeXT archive site at Purdue. I had
collected them purely for my own enjoyment, and so I had no compunctions about
modifying them in any way that improved their utility for me personally. This
has remained my policy ever since.
In the two years since that upload several groups have been hard at work making
all sorts of lovely texts available to the world. However, what is out there
is still not in an ideal form for online browsing, at least not for NeXT users.
What's wrong with the stuff from the Gutenberg Project, the Internet Wiretap,
Cardinalis, the Oxford Text Archive, the Cleveland Freenet, and others?
* They are scattered all over creation, and not all of them are accessible from
any one site. Gopher, WWW, and other services should slowly improve the
situation, but for now one has to search a bit.
* The texts are nearly all single flat files, with `8-AND-3.txt' names, no
icons, and no chapter divisions. This is inconvenient for Digital Librarian
use, since the DL bogs down severely on files bigger than about 200 kilobytes.
It also may not be optimal on other machines, particularly those without
virtual memory, which will have to have a large file in RAM just to view it.
* The quality of the available texts is improving all the time, but there is
always room for one more spell-check.
* Finally, and most importantly, there are huge advantages to using RTF format
instead of vanilla ASCII, and yet not one of the major etext projects has
done so. Gutenberg prefers to keep it simple, with capitalization in lieu
of italics, two hyphens in lieu of an em-dash, and no distinction between
left-" and right-". The others try to preserve more of the information in
the printed texts with markup conventions, but these are not all as friendly
as they might be to rich-text conversion (the Oxford archive is the best of
the lot in this regard), nor are they easy to read through on line...and no
two groups use the same conventions!
Now, I really enjoy having beloved books in machine-readable form, for all the
obvious reasons, but since I don't like reading plain ASCII, with or without
the markup, I have devised a fairly complete set of sed scripts and by-hand
heuristics for breaking up texts by chapters and RTF'ing them as they appear
at the various sites. I've been spending a few hours a week on this for
over two years now, and have accumulated about 48 MB of good NeXTish etext.
NOT all of it is completely RTF'ed, and NOT all of it is spell-checked to my
satisfaction, but all of it is broken into chapters, and ALL of it has been
improved in some substantial way from the way I got it---at least a cursory
spell-check and a machine-heuristic search for left- and right-quotes, but
in many cases much more (small fonts for footnotes and in-text newspaper
extracts, italics for foreign words, ligatures and diereses and accents---in
a few cases such as Sherlock Holmes I've actually READ the books online, and
have fixed every typo of any sort that I noticed).
This trove of just under 100 books should be available to everyone who wants
it. It may not be of general net interest, since there are a lot of people
who can't handle RTF and prefer ASCII. But for those of us who can benefit
(I don't think it's just the NeXT world---aren't there RTF readers elsewhere?),
I think it represents substantial added value, and I would hate to think that
others will duplicate the effort. I don't think that any of the freetext
projects object to this sort of use of their texts, as long as they are still
acknowledged and the texts remain freely available.
The Purdue site seems to be full up at the moment; at least, their sysop hasn't
answered my letters, and submissions there seem to bounce. So I have offered
the texts to any archive that can promise archie and gopher accessibility, a
secure home for the texts for at least a few years, and room for expansion. If
you would like to contribute to the collection, please read the RTF file called
GUIDELINES for my thoughts on how texts `ought' to be RTF'ed. You certainly
don't have to follow my suggestions, but I've thought about this a lot, so you
might want to avoid reinventing the wheel. The main thing is not to lose any
important formatting that is already in the texts, while making them as pleasant
to read on-screen as possible.
Oh, two more things. (Sorry about the length of this note---I hope that the
topic is of sufficient interest to justify the bandwidth.) First, I don't
promise to maintain, improve, or do anything further with these texts; I
improved them for my own amusement, working hardest on those I cherished,
and I may continue to do so or I may decide to have nothing more to do with
them. They're being offered as is, but with no further obligation. Second,
I can _not_ honor private requests for particular texts; this has taken too
much time away from my physics research already. If you want the texts, help
yourself (assuming I have found an archive that will take them).
Finally, anyone who is not on a NeXT will wonder about the .dir.tiff files in
some of the directories. Those are icons, and most are original to me, though
the superb ones for Moby Dick, Pride & Prejudice, Keats, and Milton were done
by my friend Ayelet Lindenstrauss. For your convenience, I've gathered all the
icons, as well as many more that I have made over the years, into a collection
that you should find with this file, as MyIcons2.0.tar.gz. They're freeware,
but a grateful note is always very much appreciated. Better yet, check out the
etext sites for new texts, and RTF a few of them for me! We'll all be the
richer for it.
Thanks,
Joshua W. Burton, 12 Oct 1993
<burton@het.brown.edu>
P.S. For your convenience, I've listed the main archives I know of for PD etext
below. If you find any others, please let me know!
Project Gutenberg: mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu 128.174.201.012
Online Book Initiative: world.std.com 192.074.137.005
Internet Wiretap wiretap.spies.com 130.043.003.003
Electronic Freedom Fnd. ftp.eff.org 192.088.144.004
Oxford Text Archive ota.ox.ac.uk unknown
Cleveland Freenet--NPTN unknown unknown
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.