Not too long ago I downloaded Eucalyptus, a slick new ebook reader for the iPhone. I love it. I didn’t think anything could knock Stanza down from being king of the hill in my ebook-reading world, but Eucalyptus did it and with style.
Caveat: Eucalyptus can only read books from Project Gutenberg. But that’s not really a problem for me, since most of what I wanted to read was on there anyway. (Well, most of what I wanted to read that already happened to be free.)
Fast forward to this morning. I’m Mormon, and I want to read more Mormon-related texts. I searched around on Project Gutenberg but only found six or seven books — the Book of Mormon (of course), James E. Talmage’s Jesus the Christ and The Story of Mormonism, and then some outsider and/or anti works. Hardly anything.
I want to change that.
There are lots of public domain (pre-1923) texts related to the Church which would be valuable to make available for free, so my new goal is to start digitizing them and putting them into Project Gutenberg. (So I can read them in Eucalyptus. ;))
Yes, yes, I’m aware that there are already places like GospeLink with plenty of these texts. That’s great, but I want Mormon books in Project Gutenberg, and so far that hasn’t really happened. It’s been seven years since I submitted The Story of Mormonism to Project Gutenberg, and the number of Mormon-related texts added since then (if any) is paltry at best.
I’m going to start building a list of the books I think should be added, and if you have any additions, let me know. (The only real stipulation is that there has to be at least one edition of the book published before 1923, to ensure that it’s out of copyright.) First on my list is John A. Widtsoe’s Joseph Smith As Scientist. I also plan to add the D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and eventually the Journal of Discourses.
I’ll also be developing my Unbindery web app as part of this, and I’ll need volunteers to help with proofreading. When that part is ready, I’ll let you know, but if any of you do want to help out, shoot me an email and I’ll add you to the list.
Last but not least: I like naming things, mainly so I have a way to talk about them. To that end, then, I’m going to call this the Mormon Digitization Project. Here we go. :)
Comments
I didn’t check, but http://www.kirtasbooks.com, has almost 200,000 volumes. If the book hasn’t been digitized, they do “digitize on demand”. If you order it they will digitize it, you can then get re-printed copies, or digital downloads etc.
I’m very interested in the project, Ben. How will we know what ’s going on with the project? Will there be an email list or something?
Will you use Distributed Proofreaders (http://pgdp.net)? A Team on DP might be the best way to go about this, since they have a great system for getting books done in a very high quality way. At this point there doesn’t appear to be a Mormon project, so it might be a very good idea.
As for a list of titles, I suggest you look at the list I put together for the Mormon Translation project. The list is based on Curt Bench’s list of the 50 most important Mormon books up to 1980. You can find it at 50 Important Mormon Books (you may need to register to get to the page). BTW, the Mormon Translation website is what it sounds like — a place to work on collaborative projects to translate Mormon works into other languages.
I look forward to hearing what you are doing with this, and to helping to get some projects off the ground.
Todd, Kirtas Books only scans the books — they don’t OCR. While Kirtas’ products look great, they aren’t the same thing that Ben is talking about. You can’t copy and paste some random paragraph out of the book — you would have to either OCR it or re-type it to get the actual text.
Project Gutenberg books are the actual “plain vanilla” text.
My priorities have recently gone topsy-turvy (I’ll be blogging about this soon), and as a result, I’m afraid this Mormon Digitization Project is going to be backburnered for the time being. I do plan to return to it later, but it might be a while. (If anyone wants to head it up in the meantime, it’s all yours.)
Kent, I was actually going to use Unbindery instead of DP since I’m not a very big fan of the DP design (very 1990s). (See http://unbindery.org/new/new.php for the initial pages and http://unbindery.org/new/editpage.php for the interface, and I should add that hitting Ctrl-Enter will show/hide the console for international characters, and it probably doesn’t work in IE. :)) Unbindery isn’t close to done yet, but when I finally do get around to these projects again, I’ll finish it and probably use that instead. (Though a team on DP would be a great way to get it done faster. Hmm.)
Throw in your two cents