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Noodlot, by Louis Couperus (etext #17659), is the first book at Project Gutenberg that I have scanned. The title means “fate”, “destiny”. I have helped produce a lot of books for PG, hundreds probably, but this is the first one that I actually bought in a store or on a market, that I held in my hands, and that has now been digitized completely, so it is a little bit special for me.

I haven’t actually read it, though, so I cannot tell you what it is about. PG has Plain Vanilla Text (PVT) and HTML versions, and undoubtedly websites like Manybooks will have … drats! that’s fast … has it in many more formats.

The Royal Dutch Horeca (Koninklijke Horeca Nederland, abbreviated to KHN; most links in this entry lead to Dutch web pages) has purchased many hours of music for its members; bars, restaurants, et cetera. This is instrumental music intended for background use, muzak. In doing so they landed themselves in hot water with BUMA (often called BUMA/Stemra), an organisation whose sole purpose is to collect levies from people and organisations who play music in public. BUMA believes that although KHN has bought the rights from the rights holders, KHN still owes BUMA money for playing the music. (Which BUMA presumably would then be paying back after subtracting a modest fee for its own services and those of ms. Britney Spears.)

In The Netherlands, copying and publication are two distinct acts recognized by the law that are the sole province of the copyright holder (usually the publisher, sometimes an author or his heirs). However, getting permission from each copyright holder for all of these acts, sometimes thousands a day for a single person or location, can be quite daunting. This is why most countries that subscribe to rigid copyright laws have some system in place where acts of publication or copying can be performed without the copyright holder’s permission, but with payment.

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Although I expect to live to see 150, looking a million years ahead is a bit of a stretch even for me. Nevertheless, in the late 1800s it seems to have been quite the sport to do exactly that. (Well, maybe not.)

HG Wells predicted that after a million years, man will have evolved to a creature that is all brain, and little else, swimming in liquid food to sustain himself.

A writer for The St. Louis Republic on the other hand predicted that man will shrink considerably, and dumb down to match. This process, apparently, will start around the year 3000!

Future man swimming in pepsine. Source: Punch.

(Hm, I suddenly realize that my colouring is quite caucasiocentric. Here’s how I determined the colour: I looked at my hand. Here’s how I determined the colour of the liquid food: I Google Imaged for pepsine. Not that pepsine is blue, but I found enough evidence to make sure my swimming-pool blue wasn’t entirely impossible.)

Herbert George Wells is having trouble writing a book. The book itself is a trifling affair, since it is going to be published by a company that firmly believes in the power of leaf-gold inlays and the accentuating effect of deserts-full of white-space. In other words, the book should write itself.

But the dedication has him stumped. Having tried several approaches, he hits upon the following:

I think it was “X.L.’s” book, Aut Diabolus aut Nihil, that set me upon another line. There is, after all, your reader to consider in these matters, your average middle-class person to impress in some way. They say the creature is a snob, and absolutely devoid of any tinge of humour, and I must confess that I more than half believe it. At any rate, it was that persuasion inspired—

To the Countess of X.,

In Memory of Many Happy Days.

I know no Countess of X., as a matter of fact, but if the public is such an ass as to think better of my work for the suspicion, I do not care how soon I incur it.

Source: Certain Personal Matters by H. G. Wells. I quoted from this book earlier, when it had not been published yet at Project Gutenberg. Via Logiston.

I just sent in my reply to the EC’s working paper on Digital Libraries. I was one hour late, so I fear the comfy chair.

These golfers are strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except that many are bright red about the middle, and they repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing, weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling; muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their career,—demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls, that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent, ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog, all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg.

H. G. Wells on golfers in “The Amateur Nature-Lover” in Certain Personal Matters, 1901, to appear soon at Project Gutenberg.

Via Odd Ends.

Lib.ru is a Russian Project Gutenberg. But instead of limiting itself mostly to public domain books, it publishes a large amount of in-copyright works, even translations of popular modern American novels, with permission from the authors and translators, according to Lib.ru founder and maintainer Maksim Moshkow (Teleread interviews: part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4). Lib.ru has approximately 40,000 books in its catalogue. Is Russian copyright so different, or do Russian authors have a greater desire to be read?

(This entry posted to Slashdot, but rejected.)

On May 2, 2103, Elwood Caswell walked rapidly down Broadway with a loaded revolver hidden in his coat pocket. He didn’t want to use the weapon, but feared he might anyhow. This was a justifiable assumption, for Caswell was a homicidal maniac.

Thus begins Robert Sheckley’s Bad Medicine. On December 9, one of the few authors present in Project Gutenberg with copyrighted works, Sheckley passed away at age 77 in Poughkeepsie, USA. The New York Times says in its obituary of Sheckley that he “is considered one of science fiction’s seminal humorists, and a precursor to Douglas Adams”; but “a better comparison might be to Kafka, a fabulist who could never understand why his friends didn’t laugh when he read his stories to them”.

Speaking of lineages: the other day I saw someone observe that Terry Pratchett “must surely have read, and enjoyed, the Kai Lung books by Ernest Bramah“. I am fairly new to Pratchett, but have read enough to feel that checking out Bramah may be worthwhile.

The connection between Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams is of course that of both has been said that they admire(d) P.G. Wodehouse. Adams discovered Sheckley and Wodehouse after he had started his Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy trilogy, and claimed that the Wodehouse influence must have been immediate when writing The Restaurant at the End of the Galaxy.

(Also posted at Teleread.)

If you are one of my Dutch readers and would like to help out proofreading for Project Gutenberg, there is now a little project doing the rounds that seems to fit these dark, cold days just nicely: “Alleen op de Wereld” by Hector Malot is currently being processed by Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders. Anyone can sign up and correct a page or two.

If you don’t know Alleen op de Wereld (original title: Sans Famille), it is the story of the orphan Remi, who gets bought by the owner of a dog troop, Signor Vitalis. The small troop visit villages in the French countryside where they perform sketches with the dogs as actors. Then Vitalis dies and Remi is left alone with his dogs, with nowhere to go…

(Yes, boohoohoo, now go and proofread.)

Ik ben op zoek naar mensen die voor een experimentje een of twee alinea’s willen vertalen uit The Tell-Tale Heart van Edgar Allan Poe. Ik wil zien of meerdere mensen die aan een vertaling werken een consistente stijl kunnen opleveren. Maak je niet druk over taalfouten of literair niveau; dat zijn dingen van later zorg. Als je me vijf minuutjes van je tijd gunt, ben ik je zeer dankbaar.

Zie hier.