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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

The idea has a lot of merit. So for that two thumbs up. But I would much rather see a separate website for it. Using Github feels very strained. Perhaps Github would be willing to help set you up with your own instance of their platform which you could modify to better suit the purpose. Maybe even Project Gutenberg would be interested in participating in that.

BTW, I recently learned the Gutenberg was not his name and is really a significant historical inaccuracy. His name was Hannes Gensfleisch. "Gutenberg" was just one of the places his family resided.

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> Perhaps Github would be willing to help set you up with your own instance of their platform which you could modify to better suit the purpose.

Alternatively, you could use, and customize, an open-source self-hostable alternative, such as gitorious https://gitorious.org/gitorious

> BTW, I recently learned the Gutenberg was not his name and is really a significant historical inaccuracy.

Do you have any source for this fact that Gutenberg wasn't using "Gutenberg" as his last name?

I don't think the 'Gutenberg' name could be described as a historical inaccuracy, but there is some truth to it. From Wikipedia:

Wallau adds, "His surname was derived from the house inhabited by his father and his paternal ancestors 'zu Laden, zu Gutenberg'. The house of Gänsfleisch was one of the patrician families of the town, tracing its lineage back to the thirteenth century." Patricians (aristocrats) in Mainz were often named after houses they owned. Around 1427, the name zu Gutenberg, after the family house in Mainz, is documented to have been used for the first time.

It's all checked into git now, and I have an API to fetch the repo names via github's api. Migrating from github to self-hosted would now be easier than doing it from scratch.

Github does have issues with Unicode repo names, so it may be worth moving elsewhere for that reason.

But in the short term, I like Github because they have the most to gain by making git easy to use. If I can get away with people editing books in their browsers on github then we have a editing/rendering toolchain right out of the box!

Anyone creating an OSS collaborative authoring platform could benefit from lessons learned in commercial authoring platforms:

http://blog.inkling.com/2014/06/problem-of-structured-author...

http://alistapart.com/column/wysiwtf

We need momentum around one integrated OSS toolchain, including illustration (Inkscape) and CMYK color for printing (Scribus). This would help editors and publishers who want to move away from rental pricing for authoring software.

As anyone who has tried to find good books in a sea of free books knows, there isn't a standardized way of collaboratively improving book Metadata. This needs to include e-production history, translators, print publication history and content objects _within_ books, viz. Doug Engelbart's purple numbers, http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/ohs.html

I would love to help standardize this workflow, but it has to be a community process and discussion. I'm meeting with the inkling folks sometime next week to collect more information.

re: Metadata. I'm slowly working on that problem. I'm a HUGE fan of purple numbers.

> it has to be a community process and discussion

Would you recommend any existing orgs, mailing lists or forums where there's already an active community for discussion?

GITenberg has a mailing list: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gitenberg-project

And there has been some conversation about the project on the OKFN-humanities list: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-humanities

OKFN is organizing a skype call about the project on the 1st of September 6pm UK time that will be announced on the humanities list in the next few days.

GITenberg is more of a reference to Project Gutenberg at this point than Johannes. But no, I didn't know that at the time :-(

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