GITenberg is an open source community for publishing ebooks in the public domain

gravitas|5 years ago

The https://standardebooks.org/ project has been rebuilding ebooks (open ePUB format) with an eye on quality and readability on mobiles/tablets (fonts, copyedit, etc.) which might be of interest, all books and the website revision are tracked in git.

sethish|5 years ago

I'm a big fan of standardebooks! They're doing fantastic work producing better ebooks from Project Gutenberg sources.

thangalin|5 years ago

I wrote a technical comparison between various public domain eBook projects:

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

koolba|5 years ago

They’re probably going to have to change their name to something that does not have “git” in it: https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...

sethish|5 years ago

Gitenberg was one of the alternate spellings of Gutenberg in the 1400s.

bhickey|5 years ago

> It's hard to hold them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet exist.

fwiw, Gitenberg has been around at least since 2012.

metiscus|5 years ago

They've been named like that for six years apparently so I'm not sure how that works for what you linked above. It is a valid point that hopefully doesn't cause problems.

maire|5 years ago

This looks like a subset of Project Gutenberg?

The Girl from Alsace in Gitenberg: https://www.gitenberg.org/book/35926

The Girl from Alsace in Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35926

The numbers are even the same which seems suspicious. Hmmm.

sethish|5 years ago

Yes, absolutely. Apologies if that's not clear from the website. GITenberg started as an experimental fork of PG, but due to the work of Eric Hellman at the Free Ebook Foundation, much of the infrastructure such as metadata formats, CI/CD for building books, and DVCS backend are being ported upstream to the Project Gutenberg infrastructure.

chmod775|5 years ago

"GITenberg is an exploration of how Project Gutenberg might work if all the Gutenberg texts were on Github, so that tools like version control, continuous integration, and pull-request workflow could be employed."

https://ebookfoundation.org/

bhickey|5 years ago

It's a version controlled dump of Gutenberg.

gluejar|5 years ago

More accurate to call it a fork.

hnarayanan|5 years ago

I don't know why, but I expected some amazing typography in their PDFs. :(

sethish|5 years ago

[Standard Ebooks](https://standardebooks.org/) has accomplished a lot in producing better ebooks of public domain texts.

sethish|5 years ago

You might be more familiar with another project the Free Ebook Foundation maintains: https://github.com/EbookFoundation/free-programming-books/ Which is one of the top-10 repos on github by number of stars.

anaphor|5 years ago

I like how they're able to accurately tag translators vs original authors, e.g. https://github.com/GITenberg/The-History-of-the-Peloponnesia...

voldemort1968|5 years ago

What is improved by adding Git to PG?

bilinualcom|5 years ago

Well, for my side project, https://www.bilinual.com I needed version controlling for changes that are made on a book (fixed typos, ...) and I found GITenberg project. There are several interesting tools developed during the project accessible here: https://github.com/gitenberg-dev

sethish|5 years ago

It's not so much about just adding git to books, but git to the transcriptions of books from printed materials. There are errors in the transcriptions, many books are lacking formatting, and many books pre-date Unicode and are in ascii. Tracking the book's source files in git makes it easier to collaborate on making these changes, or seeing what changes have been made.

42 comments