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JSeikoyesterday at 4:15 PM18 repliesview on HN

Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/


Replies

svatyesterday at 8:14 PM

Have you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans.

I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.

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jefuriiyesterday at 5:59 PM

When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!

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lucb1eyesterday at 8:00 PM

Huh that's interesting: 4.5 seconds for the TCP handshake and an additional 9.2 seconds for the TLS handshake. Is this some kind of captcha, since most bots would disconnect before that, so if you complete it once then it knows you're good? (Until the bots catch on of course, but so long as it works it's relatively unintrusive and not discriminatory against uncommon client software (that is, non-Chrome/ium).) The rest of the requests were lightning fast

Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!

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Guestmodinfotoday at 1:36 AM

Hi for the past 20 years I have known about Project Gutenberg and I used to read a lot from it. One of the obstacle that I face is that there is no way to arrange the books in the order of their original publication. Do you know of any such way. Surely we can arrange the books by their release date on Gutenberg but it has long baffled me as it feels to me the most useless way of sorting the books. Thank you for Project Gutenberg.

0x0203yesterday at 10:15 PM

As long as you're taking suggestions, since many of the books are quite old, adding a publication date or date range to the search functionality might be nice. I personally would find it very useful since I have a tendency to look for things that are older than year _x_ when researching various things.

Thanks for all the effort put into the site!

Falimondayesterday at 4:27 PM

The book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement.

Keep up the good work!

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xrdyesterday at 4:49 PM

Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.

excitednumberyesterday at 4:59 PM

Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet

zamadatixyesterday at 7:30 PM

Thanks for the free work! Project Gutenberg is nice to have :).

On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?

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ExtremisAndyyesterday at 4:56 PM

Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!

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smallnixyesterday at 5:04 PM

There's a minor bug with chrome in android where the menu will not close when you tap outside the menu or on the menu link/button

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freedombenyesterday at 6:44 PM

I can't say for project Gutenberg specifically, but in general a huge issue I see is OCR errors. What do you all do to address OCR?

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shuvrojityesterday at 5:03 PM

Great Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.

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samcollinsyesterday at 4:30 PM

Very cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links?

(I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)

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TimorousBestieyesterday at 5:55 PM

Wanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!

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openclawclubtoday at 1:07 AM

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nomoreusernamesyesterday at 5:59 PM

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BiraIgnacioyesterday at 5:23 PM

Thanks so much for the work you and your team do!