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New developments in hardware & software

© Richard Loeffler

Several new happenings in the area of electronic publishing this week. I hesitate to speak of them in their order of importance because one can never tell what will turn out to be the most important event.

I'll begin with one of the oldest e-book sites on the net, Project Gutenberg. Well, it's not really Project Gutenberg but a software program that will make the texts of Project Gutenberg easier to read. For those who are not familiar with Project Gutenberg, I will give a quick re-cap. It was started more than a decade ago and the idea is to make all the world's literature (all that with no-copyright, anyway) available electronically to everyone. To do this, the texts are scanned and then converted into ASCII text files. The reason for using this simple text file is so that they could be read by anyone with almost any computer as ASCII is a universal file system. The difficulty is that ASCII files can be hard on the eyes, making the texts hard to read. GUTENBERG STATION™ is a web site developed by Curtis Keisler. The Gutenberg Explorer™ is the organisation's first effort aimed towards its mission to develop software to make Gutenberg texts easier to read. This software works in tandem with the Project Gutenberg™ FTP E-text sites all over the world. Project Gutenberg™ is an effort to convert public domain books into a universal format known as E-text. E-text is designed to make the public domain books available in just about any software on any computer in the world.

This is great news. I've read several texts from Project Gutenberg and they are difficult to read compared to other e-books. With this new software, this detriment will be removed and thousands of books will be available in a more readable format. Bartleby.com has announced its latest addition, the Boston Cooking School Cook Book. The book itself is a classic but most cooks are more familiar with the school's famous director, Fannie Farmer (1857-1915). The book was released under its original title but later changed to The Fanny Farmer Cookbook. It was an international best-seller with nearly 4,000,000 copies sold in its first 70 years of sales. Bartleby.com's web presentation of this classic American cooking reference includes 1,849 recipes in a full-text searchable format and is only the latest offering from Bartleby.com. Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, Strunk's Elements of Style and the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.

On the international front, the French government has announced a budget of FF115m for its Programme pour la Recherche et l'Innovation dans\ l'Audiovisuel et le Multimédia (Priamm) for this year. The money will finance private companies'

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