Newsgroups: alt.etext From: bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) Subject: Re: [OBI] Online Book Initiative Mailing List Message-ID: Organization: The World Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1993 00:18:33 GMT Lines: 85 Hi, I created and manage the Online Book Initiatve, some updates: 1. The mailing list isn't active, perhaps I'll reactivate it some day but it took a lot of my time and didn't seem to be helping the goal of OBI much, managing a mailing list takes a lot of time. Perhaps this group can be used for some of the discussions instead so I don't have to spend my time managing a list rather than working on OBI, or maybe someone should create alt.etext.obi if the interest exists (I want someone else to do this to convince me that at least ONE other person wants this.) 2. We (OBI) currently have about 250MB of text on-line, most of it is compressed so it must be close to 400MB of text total. All of it is freely redistributable (to the best of our knowledge, some directories contain information about further redistribution.) All of it is available for free via anonymous FTP to world.std.com (this may move soon without much warning to obi.std.com which is currently an alias for world.std.com so you might use obi.std.com instead.) If you don't have internet access it is also accessible via our public access system (which costs for connect time), the modem number is 617-739-9753, 8N1, any speed, login as new to create an account, charges are $5/mo+$2/hr or $20/mo for 20 hrs and $1/hr thereafter.) (I mention that not so much as an ad [hey give me a break] as that mentioning OBI generally starts a flood of "what if I don't have internet access?" mail to me, that's an answer, there are other public access sites which offer FTP, see alt.internet.access.wanted and related groups.) 3. We don't currently provide any other method of access (magnetic media, whatever) purely because it's more work or bother and distracts from the main goal and OBI is not set up to sell things and certainly can't do it for free (we at least need to recoup the price of this and pay someone to fill orders etc.) Fundamentally this is an internet project, if you don't have internet access solve *that* problem! 4. We are probably going to spin off OBI as a 501C3 non-profit corporation one of these days soon (we've had some donation offers), when that happens we may address other issues above, such as producing a CD/ROM which is something I would like to do to help support the effort. Some items on OBI now may not be redistributable that way, but it will contain most of what we have. 5. Questions about OBI which take much time to answer (such as "what have you got online? can I have a list?") often go unanswered. Sorry, but this is a purely volunteer project and our goal is to build the repository, make it available as is for anon FTP, and that's it. Some more FAQ: Q. Why don't you put all this text into a consistent format like SGML etc? A. Go for it, donate it to OBI when you're done. Q. Why don't you have XYZZY on-line? It's out of copyright. A. Go for it, donate it to OBI when you're done. Q. Why isn't there a good index for OBI? A. Go for it, donate it to OBI when you're done. 6. A lot of interesting and important text floats around the net but is hard to find or perhaps exists on servers which then go away after a while so is lost. Our goal is to provide one place for as much of this as we can so you can find it in one place. One particular goal is to provide this as raw material for other projects you might have in mind. If you think something is a good idea, like SGML'izing everything on OBI, go for it. We also scan or type in texts, or encourage others to do so and put it up under OBI. 6. We started doing this around November 1989. I consider the project thus far to be a raving success, we get hundreds of transfers per week via anon FTP from OBI. One can always imagine it being more, and someday I hope it will be, but for now just gathering so much stuff in one place seems to be a very useful service. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@world.std.com | uunet!world!bzs Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD