Nostr notes by Eric Hellman

Personal Note, January 1, 2026: I have a new job: Executive ...

2026-01-01T23:04:32Z

Personal Note, January 1, 2026: I have a new job: Executive Director of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Here's what I wrote for PG's January Newsletter.

Greetings from the new Executive Director

Happy Public Domain Day! You might hear people say that books published in 1930 have "fallen" into the US Public Domain, or, that they have lost copyright "protection". This is not quite correct. Rather, books published in 1930 have been FREED of copyright restrictions. They have ASCENDED into the public domain and into the embrace of organizations like Project Gutenberg. They now belong to ALL of us, and we need to take care of them for future generations.

On October 21, Project Gutenberg lost its longtime leader, Greg Newby, to pancreatic cancer. I had agreed to step up as Acting Executive Director so that Project Gutenberg could continue the mission that had become Greg's life work: to serve and preserve public domain books so that all of us can use and enjoy them without restrictions. Although I've been doing development work for Project Gutenberg for the past 8 years, I did not really understand what Greg's job entailed, or how many tasks he had been juggling. Three months in, I'm still discovering mysterious-to-me aspects of the organization. I've also been amazed at the dedication and talent of the many volunteers behind Project Gutenberg and our sister organization, Distributed Proofreaders. And at the large number of donors who make the organization financially viable and sustainable. So as of 2026, with your support, I'm continuing as Executive Director.

In the past three months Project Gutenberg has proven to be resilient; we took a heavy blow and managed to keep going. My top priority going forward is to make Project Gutenberg even more sustainable as well as resilient. In other words, my job is be one runner in a relay race: take the baton and make sure I get it to the next runner. That's what we all have to do with public domain books, too. We want them to still be there in 50 years! Whether you're already a volunteer or booster, an avid reader, or just someone curious about what we do, I hope you'll help us pass that baton.

https://go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2026/01/new-job-project-gutenberg.html

Personal Note: As of today, I am officially "Acting Executive ...

2025-10-02T02:57:34Z

Personal Note: As of today, I am officially "Acting Executive Director" of Project Gutenberg. PG's President and CEO, Greg Newby, is very ill and does not have the energy to do all the things that keep Project Gutenberg running. This is a big responsibility for me and it's going to be a lot of work. Please keep Greg and his wife Ilana in your hearts.

Here's something I've been working on for over 2 years, ...

2024-12-31T20:23:09Z

Here's something I've been working on for over 2 years, and I wanted to have something to show before Public Domain Day tomorrow: a fully accessible ebook, completely in the Public Domain. A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

The conversion of all 75,000 texts in Project Gutenberg to Accessible EPUB3 is an ongoing collective effort, but the last missing piece for Pooh was to supply image descriptions in alt text worthy of this iconic work. I hope we've mostly succeeded!

With work being done to implement the Marrakesh Treaty, national "authorized entities" are now able to share accessible versions of in-copyright works with each other internationally, but we don't have to wait for that in the case of works in the Public Domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marrakesh_VIP_Treaty

Project Gutenberg's accessible version of Winnie-the-Pooh can be shared freely throughout the world. If you don't like the added alt text, you are free to change it! (but maybe you'd prefer to work on one of the thousands of books that don't yet have image descriptions for the visually impaired!)

Creating alt text for a work of fiction is both hard work and a lot of fun. The descriptions have to fit in to the narrative of the text, without adding subjective interpretation of the illustrations. Not easy at all!

For example, the alt text for the illustration showing Pooh peering up at the bees can't call them bees, because in the next sentence, Pooh thinks: "That buzzing-noise means something. You don't get a buzzing-noise like that, just buzzing and buzzing, without its meaning something."

For Pooh, some technical corrections were necessary as well. The horizontal rules around the illustrations needed to be silenced with the HTML5 aria-hidden attribute. Six illustrations needed to be moved up or down a sentence to fit into the narrative.

In Chapter 7, the sentence: "If this is flying I shall never really take to it." had been rendered across 3 lines with margins and spaces, jumbling the word order. A change to vertical-align rendering makes it more accessible to everybody - I could copy and paste it!

We've played with AI for image description, and the results are quite good for complex figures and the like, but it will be quite a while before AI image descriptions can be set loose without human editors, especially for works like Pooh. AI's can completely whiff on the simplest images!

We're working to create UIs for alt text editing and creation to enable more people to help out in accessibility mitigation. Maybe one of these people will be you! There are thousand of books that need help.