Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died

513 pointsposted 16 hours ago
by ron_k
(pgdp.net)

70 Comments

acabal

11 hours ago

I'm shocked and saddened to hear this. Greg was a deep source of knowledge and support as I started and shepherded Standard Ebooks. He was generous with his time and experience, and unbelievably patient with me, some guy he had never heard of or met before who was just another cold-email in what must have been an endless stream in his inbox. We should all aspire to his high spirit of camaraderie, charity, and kindness. The world has lost a champion of both literature and the free web.

NoMoreNicksLeft

3 hours ago

Why are there no unique numbers assigned to Standard Ebook's ebooks? I understand that there is a cost associated with ISBNs, but it's very irritating to not have something that identifies them uniquely. Most (all?) aren't even in Worldcat, so I can't use OCLC numbers for that purpose either.

testdelacc1

3 hours ago

> very irritating

I think it’s possible to express this in a less caustic way. Because Standard E-books is high quality and free of charge right?

mastazi

13 hours ago

RIP. Project Gutenberg and IMSLP are two of my favourite websites. Every January, when new works enter the public domain, I go and download a bunch of books and sheet music. HN readers, let's not forget to donate to these websites that keep the Internet worth surfing.

zozbot234

12 hours ago

While new works do trickle into the public domain every year, it's worth noting that copyright status is not currently the main bottleneck to public domain cultural works being made widely available to the public under F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. There's a huge amount of extant literature and music in the public domain that someone has scanned and perhaps put up online as raw page images, but no one took the effort to transcribe/index/classify it yet and thus make it easily available for most uses - such that it might as well not exist as far as most people are concerned. This is where efforts like Project Gutenberg can be especially valuable.

kragen

12 hours ago

That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public.

Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user.

Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&...

• The trustee and the A. L. A.

• The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A

• The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A-

• A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton.

• The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated

• A book of shanties

• A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken

• A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian

This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw.

This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter.

Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do.

This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value.

Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa.

______

¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.

ipaddr

an hour ago

I find the no views on half of youtube videos to be difficult to accept unless counting non-public. If we filtered for a 5 seconds + perhaps that would fix that.

I would if youtube would prune anything without a view in the future.

zozbot234

11 hours ago

> But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.

Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.

kragen

11 hours ago

For a couple of different reasons.

The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.

The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.

If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.

This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.

Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.

gabriel666smith

10 hours ago

>Harry Potter('s)... influence will continue as long as there are people.

That was a fun sentence!

What do you see as being the predominant, near-universal metaphors and narratives supplied by Rambo? That's an absolutely fascinating point of view.

kragen

10 hours ago

I haven't watched it, so I may not be the best person to answer that.

However, I remember in about 01990 seeing an episode of Alien Nation (also fictional) reference a famous scene from it as one of the extraterrestrial characters is struggling to assimilate into human culture and construct a gender identity for himself (https://subslikescript.com/series/Alien_Nation-96531/season-... https://youtu.be/AqiPbBxLpNU):

> Like some Newcomer men. They don't feel truly masculine until after they've given birth.

> I'm afraid, George, that giving birth doesn't quite cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone? That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man.

> Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated with you?

Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a concerned response from IIRC his wife:

> If I wanted I could fall off a cliff and sew myself up.

> George, have you had your lead supplements today?

Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US conceptions of masculinity in general, the Rambo fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for many years, if we believe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized the possession of knives made to look similar, specifically having a sawblade on the back.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood1982 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene" (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole Victim", in which the most unpleasant person coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".

A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.

Some of them are applicable in nearly every situation. Whenever someone thinks that bad things won't happen to them because they're a nice person, for example, they're unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around "Asshole Victim", and Rambo's instance is just one drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when people learn that someone has suffered misfortune, "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search for reasons they deserved it.

Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.

eszed

10 hours ago

No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L. Mencken is likely to be a banger.

kragen

10 hours ago

Yeah, it's probably more enjoyable than the rest of that list put together. Still, prefaces? Generally I try to avoid reading those.

rsync

7 hours ago

If you are part of PG or closely related to Greg Newby I strongly encourage you to email info@rsync.net at your earliest convenience.

I will watch that inbox personally - please do be in touch as soon as possible.

Please also accept my condolences and best wishes - I've known Greg since the earliest HOPE conventions.

sevensor

13 hours ago

Every year, Project Gutenberg becomes a little closer to giving us access to every book worth reading, often in multiple editions and languages. It’s a treasure.

razeh

3 hours ago

I meet Greg when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University and he was earning his PhD. I helped out a bit with some of the graphics programming for his thesis. Greg was a class act, always patient and kind. It was super helpful to me when I went to UIUC for graduate schools and he showed up as a faculty member there; he knew how to get access to campus resources and was more willing to help me than faculty in my own department. He was a model RIP.

karambahh

3 hours ago

Met him at HAL 2001, volunteered together a bit there. I think he was heading the speakers herald team I was part of. First encounter with the hacker conference scene, he guided me wisely.

Patient and kind indeed.

He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting friendships and tech partnerships. Very saddened by this news.

So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.

That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to interact with.

I know that these threads are always full of "this recently deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I interacted with.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

melling

12 hours ago

Recently competed in ultramarathons and has now died from cancer at age 60. Very sad.

There are new tests coming that will catch cancer early so hopefully it’s not late stage, increasing one’s survival rates.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/grail-stock-price-cancer-st...

I’m about Greg’s age and I had colon cancer last year. Now I can’t unsee cancer in the media.

thechao

12 hours ago

I'm at high risk for colon cancer & had my first screening last year after putting it off. For those who've not done it yet: it's really no big deal. The most challenging part is drinking the fluids. Please get screened: caught early, it's easily curable, but it definitely kills.

exhilaration

12 hours ago

My wife got this from her doctor as an alternative to a colonoscopy (in the US): https://www.cologuard.com/

It's an at-home collection stool test. It seems like a super easy and cheap first step before getting a colonoscopy.

melling

10 hours ago

I took one of those. I was negative but definitely had a tumor. My doctor said you have to take the home test every year.

It’s no replacement for a colonoscopy. They’ll snip those polyps before they grow to become cancerous.

CaptainOfCoit

11 hours ago

What is the difference in accuracy or other tradeoffs with that compared to a proper colonoscopy? Wasn't clear from the landing page, but I'm guessing there is something, at least not as high accuracy.

melling

10 hours ago

Definitely get a colonoscopy. Colon cancer is the one cancer you can detect before it’s a problem. I felt a little dumb once I found out I waited a few years too long then needed surgery and chemo.

That liquid biopsy should be used to detect the numerous other cancers.

melling

12 hours ago

Ask about the Sutab pills instead of the fluids.

Yes, the colonoscopy is a breeze, especially compared to the surgery and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy was definitely harsh. Fortunately, I was a candidate for only 3 months of treatment.

boredhedgehog

10 hours ago

None of the cancer screening programs have been able to demonstrate an effect on life expectancy, neither colonoscopies nor mammographies.

tombert

an hour ago

Well that's a bummer, not even terribly old.

I never met the guy but I love Gutenberg. Back before I had any money it was always this constant force that would be guaranteed to provide something entertaining.

knob

14 hours ago

Thank you to Mr Greg Newby for this project. RIP

kragen

13 hours ago

Newby did an enormous amount to help Project Gutenberg, but he was not its CEO or founder. Probably if you want to thank one person for the project it should be Michael Hart (PBUH). As WP explains:

> Newby got involved with Project Gutenberg in 1991 or 1992, became friends with founder Michael S. Hart, and was "undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer", according to a scholar writing about the history of the project.[10][21] In 2000 or 2001, Newby formed the associated nonprofit organization, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, and became its director and CEO.[10][22][2] He also worked to integrate Distributed Proofreaders into the project.[21] He was a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation at its formation in July 2006.[23][24] He led improvements to the technology platform underlying Project Gutenberg[25] and navigated challenges related to the copyright status of books in different countries.[26]

duk3luk3

13 hours ago

Your citation appears to directly contradict your argument. How did this happen?

kragen

13 hours ago

My citation explains that Michael Hart was the founder of PG, and the foundation that Newby headed didn't even exist until 02000. Newby would never in his life have wanted people to think that he had founded PG!

I've edited my comment above to make it clearer what its central argument is, since you seem to have misunderstood either the argument or the quote.

bux93

13 hours ago

Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.

bryanrasmussen

13 hours ago

I'm generally pretty good at figuring out even the most abstruse jokes, but not getting this one. Care to explain?

sevensor

13 hours ago

On the award of her Grammy, Kanye West grabbed the microphone and said this to Taylor Swift. I think Newby is Swift in this analogy.

Edit: MTV Video Music Award, not Grammy.

dkga

13 hours ago

Wow I can’t believe this happened!

giancarlostoro

9 hours ago

I can't tell if sarcasm, but he was very drunk, and it became one of his first big scandals. He's had so many more after that it pales in comparison.

kragen

12 hours ago

Just wait until you find out who won the US presidential election.

castillar76

8 hours ago

Genuinely saddened by this. I had Dr. Newby for a Linux admin class in college in the late 90s and it was one of the courses that got me interested in systems administration. I remember him as patient, kind, and enthusiastic about open-source and the possibilities Linux represented for changing the Internet.

abawany

7 hours ago

I will cherish his email response to me when I emailed PG about a donation issue a few years ago and he helped resolve the situation. I remain grateful to PG for their amazing work. RIP Greg.

ethagnawl

9 hours ago

Greg Newby was also very actively involved in the production of the HOPE Conference. If there's a broadcast tonight, Off The Hook (AKA The Hacker Radio Show) show on WBAI (99.5 FM in NY) and wbai.org will almost certainly be in his honor.

RIP

JoeMattie

10 hours ago

I am very sad to hear this. Greg was my mentor during my first internship at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in Fairbanks Alaska back in the very early 2000s.

toomuchtodo

6 hours ago

I did some volunteer work with/for Greg a lifetime. He will be missed, and the world is a better place due to his work.

aestetix

10 hours ago

Can we get a black bar for Dr. Newby?

kragen

13 hours ago

Just to clarify, Greg Newby was not the CEO of Project Gutenberg, which was founded in 01971, but of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which he founded in 02000 or 02001. It has contributed immensely to Project Gutenberg, but they are not the same thing. Newby would never have attempted to take credit for PG.

Edit: the post title has been fixed now.

ron_k

12 hours ago

Yes, the title has been changed. The one I posted clearly said "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation”.

kragen

12 hours ago

Can you change it back? Currently it says "Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, has died," which seems to be misleading people.

ron_k

12 hours ago

I can’t, sorry, there’s no edit button, I guess because of low karma. Maybe the mods (or who changed it) can revert it to the old title.

kragen

11 hours ago

They seem to have done so now.

rom1v

13 hours ago

Are the years intended to be read in octal?

walkabout

9 hours ago

They’re intended to derail every thread that includes them into discussions about this stupid date format, thus wasting lifetimes of person-hours.

It’s surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for humanity. If it’s coming from any benign motivation, then it’s totally misguided.

nappy-doo

12 hours ago

It's one of these Long Now things. The goal is to get people to think in long term time frames.

kijin

12 hours ago

According to javascript, 01971 is just 1971. Meanwhile, 01671 is 953.

kragen

12 hours ago

Man! JS never stops trolling you.

drfuchs

12 hours ago

That’s a ZipCode.

benterix

13 hours ago

You got me curious about the leading zero.

kragen

13 hours ago

Oh, it's just a bit of fun: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...

You'd be amazed at how seriously people can take things like date formats sometimes.

armarr

12 hours ago

The time we will collectively waste for the next 8k years typing that extra 0 will not weigh up against the benefit.

dkga

13 hours ago

I love how each HN post is a gateway to miscellaneous obscure knowledge with a technical point behind it

casenmgreen

13 hours ago

I find it improper that we count from 2025 years ago.

We should count from the beginning of time.

daeken

12 hours ago

I've become an unironic proponent of HE, the Human Era. For CE dates, we just add 10000 (I'm writing this from 12025). But for BCE dates, they're subtracted and it makes things so much clearer when it comes to telling how long ago something was. E.g. the sundial was invented around 6000 HE, steel was developed around 9000 HE.

Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject: https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs

There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major historical events: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71a711_295e365a6ec64d6ca7f87e...

zozbot234

12 hours ago

It's better to call this Holocene Era even though Holocene didn't exactly start in 10,000 BCE, because modern humans were around for a long time prior to the 10,000 BCE epoch. Some people have proposed 8,000 BCE as an epoch, styling this "After the development of Agriculture". According to this epoch, we'd currently be in year 10025 A.D.A., which is neat.

kragen

11 hours ago

An unfortunate suggestion of that nomenclature is that it suggests that "humanity" came into existence only 12025 years ago, which would mean that the creatures before that time were all non-human. This is especially unfortunate given that it strongly implies that, for example, either Khoisan people, Australian people, or European people are human, but not more than one of the three, since they diverged genetically before that date. While, on one level, this is merely a semantic issue about the definition of the word "human", on another level it mirrors the ideological justifications for mass enslavement and genocide that caused historically unprecedented atrocities in the 20th century (unsurpassed until Mao surpassed them), because most people's ethical systems accord special privileges to "humans", for example holding that killing any number of nonhumans is justifiable if it saves even one human's life, or, in most cases, even if it merely provides them with meat to eat.

While I don't believe the Kurzgesagt staff endorse genocide and cannibalism, I think they may not have clearly thought out the implications of their choice of terminology.

Premack's timeline that you link does not make the same error, calling it the "Holocene Era", as Emiliani did.

thechao

12 hours ago

It's October 22, 14 billionish. Been that way for a while.

DannyBee

12 hours ago

My birthday was October 17th, 14000000005, but after some new physics estimates, it turns out it’s really October 13th, 14000000008.

sangeeth96

12 hours ago

There's an xkcd in the making here, if it doesn't exist already.

imdsm

13 hours ago

Long term optimist perhaps