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Manybooks.net vs. Project Gutenberg
June 19, 2007 | 11:39 am
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By Robert Nagle
As much as I enjoy manybooks.net (especially the recent reviews and the ability to create custom PDF and custom html), two things about the site are starting to get on my nerves.
When you download ebooks from manybooks.net in mobipocket format (and presumably other baked formats), you are downloading formats based on text files, not HTML files. Why is this inadequate? It means that the table of contents lack the sorts of links we come to expect. Compare the manybooks.net version of John Ruskin’s On the Old Road with the PG html version. The PG version not only has hyperlinks on the table of contents, but also footnotes. (In the zipped version of other ebooks, there are even illustrations).
This may not be as big a deal for novels (which are read in a basically linear fashion). But with other books (like poetry and essay collections), it’s more natural to want to skip around, to return to the Table of Contents periodically to plan what you will read next.
I am finding that instead of using manybooks.net version I am first checking PG to see if they have HTML versions of the text I am seeking (and then to use mobipocket on my desktop to do the conversions).
The other issue is prefatory legal material. Has anyone noticed that the legalese crud introducing many PG works are really long? The Wizard of Oz etext contains a legal preface of about 1500 words (and that appears at the top of the txt version, which means that the manybooks.net version means you have to page through a good number pages before you begin. This etext is perhaps a special case; it was one of the earliest texts scanned and produced by PG. (Later texts such as this one put the legalese at the end, although it now numbers 2900 words)
Having a preface at the top of an ebook would not be such a big deal if it were only a hyperlink in a Table of Contents which the reader could bypass. That brings us once again to the question of Manybooks.net and the fact it does not use hyperlinked versions of many texts.
I don’t want to sound too harsh on manybooks.net. After all, Project Gutenberg has a team of proofreaders and formatters spanning several continents; later versions of PG texts have much better layout, so it’s hardly surprising that PG should be winning the formatting wars. Also, manybooks is a one-man job (and pretty much a fine one at that–has anyone given manybooks.net a donation lately?)
But as ebook readership increases and PG produces more sophisticated layout for their etexts, readers are going to expect better formatting on ebooks (illustrations, footnotes and other things). Given Project Gutenberg’s existing infrastructure and its ability to do simple ebook conversions already (such as with Plucker), will PG turn out to be the best source for well-laid out public domain ebooks?
Robert Nagle (aka idiotprogrammer) will have his first new artistic video, John Ruskin: An Introduction, appear online this summer.
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Comments:
We do this differently with Feedbooks: TOC, footnotes, we add a short description of the author, a few recommendations from similar users at the end of the book etc…
Instead of representing a book as a single chunk of text, we use some kind of structure to separate it into multiple items (parts/chapters/sections).
We’re still deep into beta, but our PDF output is already much more advanced than what Manybooks provide. We’ll focus on improving the presentation and the typesetting of each format, instead of supporting dozens of formats. Next format we’ll support ? OPF !
PG to me is still a little bit of a vast jungle. Good for finding and fiddling with something if you know what it is, but not as good for just *browsing* which can be a lot of fun and is one of the reasons people like my stepmother (an avid reader) has never been able to get into e-books. She just likes to go and look to see what’s there. If PG went just a little Web 2.0 they might get people like her onboard. Web 2.0 does have its drawbacks (if anyone can add content, anyone will, and that is not necessarily a good thing). But to me, doing a PG search and getting 5000 titles many from authors I have never heard of (the old’rescuing from the dustbin of history’ curse/blessing) and no way to narrow it further or know what you’re getting does not make for easy browsing. Manybooks.net has lists, reviews, keywords and other sorting features which imho make it much more useful for browswers.
[...] 20. Juni 2007 von Claudia Gundacker Allgemein Heute morgen habe ich einen interessanten Blogeintrag (Teleread) gelesen, der sich mit unterschiedlichen E-book-Lesererfahrungen beschäftigt. Verglichen wurde das Angebot von manybooks.net mit Project Gutenberg. Robert Nagle, der Autor des Eintrags, macht sich in seinem Beitrag Gedanken über das Layout von e-books und geht der Frage nach auf welche Art und Weise und ob bereits Klappentext, Fußnoten, Hyperlinks, Indices und Bilder/Grafiken in die Textstruktur eingebettet sind. Das sind wirklich wichtige Frage, die abgesehen von ihrer technischen Umsetzung eine Fragen der Usabiltiy aber auch der Ästhetik ist. Überhaupt ist die Frage der Ästhetik, wenn es um Bücher geht, eine zentrale. Vor kurzem habe ich einen Artikel von Klaus Nüchtern im Falter (Ausgabe 16/07) gelesen, der die Überschrift “Muss ein Buch hässlich sein?” trug. Meine Antwort ist eindeutig: Nein, soll es auch nicht. Abgesehen davon, dass Klaus Nüchtern zu Beginn des Artikels digitale Speichermedien von Text mittels des Begriffs des E-books über einen Kamm schert, stimme ich seinem Plädoyer für ein schönes Coverdesign, hochwertige Buchgestaltung, Bindung und insgesamt Verarbeitung der Materialien etc. zu. Angesichts der zunehmenden Bedeutung die digitale Medien bzw. digitale Formate auch im Verlagsbereich gewinnen, ist es daher meiner Meinung besonders wichtig die Ästhetik nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren und ihr gebührend Zeit und Raum (z.B. Speicherplatz!) zu widmen. Dass bei den digitalen Medien Wahrnehmungen wie Haptik, Geruch und Design auf eine andere Art und Weise wie bei den klassischen Printmedien ins Spiel kommen, ist naheliegend. Der Blick in das gedruckte Buch, das in seiner vollendeten Gestalt vor einem aufgeschlagen liegt, hilft allerdings wichtige Gestaltungskriterien nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren. Das Lesezeichen, das Eselsohr oder die Widmung helfen dabei. Die Buchhandlung, das Antiquariat erinnern uns daran, wie wichtig es ist, den Lesern auch virtuell die Möglichkeit zu geben, sich umzusehen, zu schauen, zu stöbern… Tags: E-book, Gestaltung, Buch, Cover, Layout, Ästhetik, Stöbern [...]
Joanna, do the Bookshelves (relatively new!) help?
“If PG went just a little Web 2.0 they might get people like her onboard. ”
The bookshelves are (part of) a wiki.
Branko, I hadn’t known about that. It’s a start
But it would be nice to be able to click on a title and get a capsule description of what the book’s about. I think for me, the ultimate dream would be a vast, free database which combines the best of amazon.com (capsule summaries, user ratings and reviews, keywords, thematic lists, user-created thematic lists, ‘people who downloaded this title also downloaded’ lists etc.) with Wikipedia (editable information about the author and title, related websites). I imagine people could go in and search, browse and review like at amazon.com and download in one easy place. I think manybooks.net is closer to this idea than PG is.
librarything.com might serve that purpose eventually, although it still doesn’t have the volume of reviews that amazon does. The thing is: librarything is focused only on the print world.
Project Gutenberg also has links to Wikipedia, albeit from and to the author pages only. There has been talk about doing more in the area of catalogueing, but if no volunteers stand up and do it, it’s not going to happen.