Newsgroups: alt.etext From: samizdat@world.std.com (B+R Samizdat Express) Subject: Internet-on-a-Disk, Issue #3, May 1994 Message-ID: Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA Date: Sun, 8 May 1994 17:14:34 GMT Lines: 260 INTERNET-ON-A-DISK #3, May 1994 Newsletter of public domain and freely available electronic texts Circulation: direct = 2435, indirect (estimated) 100,000+ This newsletter is free for the asking. To be added to the distribution list, please send requests to The B&R Samizdat Express (samizdat@world.std.com). Permission is granted to freely distribute this newsletter in electronic form. We plan to produce new issues about once a month. We welcome submissions of articles and information relating to availability of electronic texts on the Internet and their use in education. ************************************************* WHAT'S NEW (texts recently made available by ftp, gopher, LISTSERV, and www) from the Gutenberg Project -- ftp mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu /pub/etext/etext94 The Apocrypha: Deuterocanonical Books of the Bible (apoc9.txt) The Arabian Nights Entertainments, selected & edited by Andrew Lang (arab10.txt) At the Earth's Core by Edgar Rice Burroughs (ecore10.txt) Sun Tzu on the Art of War, trans. by Lionel Giles (suntzu10.txt) The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic (ware10.txt) A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton Porter (limbr10.txt) The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle (poisn.txt) Maria, or the Wrongs of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft (maria10.txt) Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton (ortho10.txt) from the U.S. Dept. of Education ftp ftp.ed.gov gopher gopher.ed.gov http://www.ed.gov Goals 2000: Educate America Act -- the full text, as signed into law on March 31, 1994 (in gopher choose /Department-wide Initiatives/ Goals 2000 Initiative/Legislation) new edition of Guide to US Dept. of Education Programs (in gopher choose /US Dept. of Education Programs -- General Information) PLEASE NOTE -- This gopher server has added a very useful search feature. If you choose What's New, you can search by number of days back or since a particular date and get a list of the latest items from which you can elect to go straight to the item you want, by-passing the directory structure. from NATO LISTSERV@CC1.KULEUVEN.AC.BE gopher stc.nato.int All the latest information from NATO and related organizations -- including the military and political activity related to Bosnia -- has been available by LISTSERV and now is also on gopher. The gopher server is complete, well- organized and easy to use. In addition to NATO, it includes the North Atlantic Assembly (NAA), the Western European Union "(WEU), the Assembly of Western European Union (A-WEU), the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), and Le Corps Europeen. It will soon include the Council of Europe (CofE) as well. Plenary Sessions of the Assembly of Western European Union are in French, as are the documents from Le Corps Europeen. The rest of the material is in English only for now. From this gopher, you can also easily reach a number of other interesting sites that you might otherwise not have known existed. Found under "Other International/Strategic Affairs", these include: Baltic Regional Research Centre Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research, ETH Zurich Conflict Studies Research Centre, RMA Sandhurst Foreign Military Studies Office Foreign Systems Research Center Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute (Daily Reports on Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union) Stockholm International Peace Research Institute The George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies from the Helsinki City Library in Finland http://www.kaapeli.fi /maailma/kalevala/kalevala.html ftp nic.funet.fi /pub/doc/literary/etext/Finnish The Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, in Finnish (kalevala.gz) from Project Runeberg http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg.html gopher gopher.lysator.liu.se 70 ftp ftp.lysator.liu.se /pub/runeberg The explanatory material here is in English, but the texts themselves are in Scandinavian languages (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese). The Scandinavian texts are not in ASCII, since that code cannot represent all the letters of the alphabet used in these languages. Instead, the texts are offered in a variety of extended, standard character sets. The current offerings include the Bible in Swedish, a list of Scandinavian Authors, Translators and Artists compiled by Lars Aronsson, who runs the Project; as well as numerous novels, plays, and poems. from Spunk press ftp etext.archive.umich.edu (141.211.164.18) /pub/Politics/Spunk/texts/@writers This archive is devoted to anarchist literature. It includes (in English) brief excerpts from works by and about Michael Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Errico Malatesta, and William Godwin. Several sites which are loaded with good electronic texts and which you should check regularly did not have anything new of note since our last issue: wiretap -- ftp 130.43.43.43 /Library/Classic/ Oxford Archive -- ftp ota.ox.ac.uk /ota/english/ Libellus Project -- ftp ftp.u.washington.edu /pub/user-supported/libellus/texts LANDMARKS -- **ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS ON THE WORLDWIDE WEB Check out the home pages and creations of students at the following schools: Hillside Elementary, Cottage Grove, Minnesota http://hillside.coled.umn.edu Grand River Elementary, Michigan http://web.cal.msu.edu/JSRI/GR/grintro.html Lincoln Elementary, Iowa http://indy.radiology.uiowa.edu/LincolnElementary/Lincoln.html Buckman School, Portland, Oregon http://davinci.vancouver.wsu.edu/buckman/aboutbuckman.html In particular, check the research reports written by sixth graders at Hillside, which include hypertext links to the sources they cite. Also, take a look at the illustrated Spanish counting (1-10) booklet put together by kindergartners at Buckman. **PERU (IN SPANISH) ON THE WORLDWIDE WEB La Red Cientifica Peruana, a non-profit organization in Peru, connected that country to the NSF backbone in February and now has a Worldwide Web server. This looks like it's the first Web server in South America. Nearly all the material is in Spanish -- which makes this a useful resources for teachers of that language. http://www.rcp.net.pe/rcp.html gopher gopher.rcp.net.pe *********************************************** SUGGESTION -- PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD While very few K-12 schools have good Internet connections, nearly all have PCs or Macintoshes. And one of the best ways to introduce them to the treasures of the Internet is by providing them with electronic texts on disks. (That's a lot easier and cheaper than giving them printouts.) For those who do not have the capability or the time to retrieve electronic texts from the Internet, many are available at a nominal price from PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, a project of The B&R Samizdat Express. For further information, send email to samizdat@world.std.com ********************************************************* AN AUTHOR'S VIEW OF ELECTRONIC RIGHTS & THE PUBLIC DOMAIN by Richard Seltzer, The B&R Samizdat Express Twenty years ago, when the small press movement was gaining momentum, my wife and I started a little company to publish a children's book I had written -- The Lizard of Oz. Offset printing had become so inexpensive that anyone could be a publisher. You no longer needed the blessing of an established publishing house to bring your words to the public. There were book fairs everywhere, and a spirit of camaraderie and sharing prevailed among beginners like us. Everything seemed possible. The world would be transformed. Gradually, we woke up to the fact that while it was easy and inexpensive to put words onto paper, distribution was slow, expensive, and inefficient. Even with good reviews (the media were actually looking for small press material to review), it was very difficult to get books into stores. And even if you did get them into stores, they didn't stay on the shelves for long. That's the way the business was set up -- they have to make room for the latest offerings, and there is only limited space. And with that system, the price of books is designed to pay for all the copies that will be returned by the stores and remaindered or shredded. So instead of manuscripts gathering dust in writers' drawers, boxes of printed books gathered dust in their closets. Now we are experiencing the same kind of excitement and sharing with the Internet. Only this time the information is in electronic form. That means that not only can anyone publish, but the means of distribution are available to everyone as well. The main barrier to writers using this means to deliver their work to the public are psychological. Often we presume that while the score and the players change, the rules of the game remain the same. But we are now at a turning point in the history of publishing. With the proliferation of electronic texts, old rules do not necessarily apply and new ones have not been established. The choices that authors make today can help establish what will be common practice for many years to come. Traditional publishers are waking up and beginning to include "electronic rights" in their contracts and are trying to get their authors to sign over electronic rights for previously published works. Authors should think very carefully before signing such documents, should consider the other options and their implications. Step back. Why do you write? -- to be read. Yes, you would like to be paid for your work, though you realize that is likely to be more symbolic than substantial -- an indication that your work is valued and accepted by the establishment. (Very few writers receive significant sums for their work). But, most likely, your primary motivation is to share your thoughts and creations with others. Why does a traditional company publish your work? -- to make money. They invest in your work because they expect to get a return, whether from the marketplace or from grant money. Even university presses will not keep a book in print if they cannot make a profit from it. In cyberspace, an electronic book can stay in print indefinitely, at practically no cost. As long as the work exists at one public site on the Internet, it remains available to everyone who is interested, everywhere in the world. And electronic texts on diskettes can be quickly and inexpensively copied for colleagues and students. This means authors can keep their works alive either by placing them in the public domain or by retaining copyright, but making them freely available in electronic form. Examples: New life for out-of-print works: Norman Coombs has placed his The Black Experience in America in the public domain and made it available over the Internet. Outlet for works of limited scholarly interest: Dale Grote placed his never-before-published Study Guide to Wheelock's Latin in the public domain on the Internet. Jean-Michel Margot. president of the Jules Verne Society, is making available through PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, a little-known Jules Verne novella that was recently published for the first time: Le Mariage de Mr Anselme des Tilleuls. Free electronic edition available in parallel with print edition: Bruce Sterling retained the electronic rights to his Hacker Crackdown and made it freely available over the Internet, in parallel with its paperback publication by Bantam. Eric Raymond retained electronic rights to The New Hacker's Dictionary and made it freely available over the Internet in parallel with publication by MIT Press. And I've made my Lizard of Oz available in electronic form, while the paper version is still in print. By all indications, this parallel approach actually increases sales of traditional print editions by making the work more widely known. When authors put their work in the public domain or retain electronic rights and make their work freely available in electronic form, the public gains access to their work for the indefinite future, and the authors win new readers. So if a publisher offers you a contract that includes electronic rights, think before you sign. You may want to join the electronic revolution. ************************ Back issues are available from us on request, and are also found in the archives of Computer underground Digest (CuD), housed at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: ftp ftp.eff.org /pub/Publications/CuD/Internet_on_a_Disk gopher gopher.eff.org /Publications/CuD/Internet_on_a_Disk http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/CuD/Internet_on_a_Disk You are welcome to include this publication on your ftp or gopher or webserver. Please let us know the address, and we'll compile a list. Published by PLEASE COPY THIS DISK, The B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 161, West Roxbury, MA 02132. samizdat@world.std.com