More on Scans of Old Books

The ghost in the machine

I was taken to task by a few people yesterday for implying that anyone could be dissatisfied with the Google Books and Gutenberg work to digitise old books. Surely, it was argued, we can hardly complain - it is wonderful that someone should take it upon themselves to provide such a resource.

I wouldn't argue with that. My only gripe is that it would be nice if the quality of the job was always up to the worthiness of the intention. I imagine the scanning work being carried out by underpaid but overqualified inmates of a big library somewhere. Whoever does it, then God bless them, but a bit of inspection and quality control after the event would offer so much extra value. The picture at the top of this post is an excerpt from Google Books' pdf version of Les Allemands sous les Aigles Francaises - Tome 1 - Le Regiment de Francfort by Lt Colonel Sauzey. It is good that the anonymous backroom staff should occasionally get a bit of visibility, and also good to note that Google obviously encourage the practice of safe librarianism.

In addition, I wish to make some quick - and largely uneducated - observations about the products of a company or companies known variously as Nabu, Biblio and other things, whose mission in life is to make rare old books available in print once more, by exactly this same scanning process. Some of these books are print-on-demand products. I would describe them as approximate facsimiles. I have nothing at all to say about the copyright implications, nor on the apparent furore arising from the public thus having access to works which otherwise exist only in American libraries or private collections. I think I have two specimens of Nabu's output. They are alarmingly slipshod, and the books are not especially cheap.

Strange that the translator of Foy's work knew HTML?

For example, I have the 2-volume English translation of Maximilien Foy's (that's me!) History of the War in the Peninsula, under Napoleon. It has misprints on the covers, no less. One volume failed to get a title on the spine, the front cover of the other is illustrated here - you will note that the main title includes the expression "&NBSP", which is, of course, the HTML code signifying a "non-breaking space" to an Internet browser type program. Classy, eh? A real attention to quality - a real pride in the mission - old books reproduced with care and love for the benefit of future generations.

These books also have a surprising number of missing pages - presumably the operator sneezed, or ended his shift, at these points. Fortunately I have a complete pdf-file version of the same books, so have been able to fill the gaps in my own copies by including printouts of the required pages. Something seems not quite right, though, and I am not comforted by Nabu's published policy statement, part of which says:

This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc that were either part of the original artefact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Cobblers. Are there any grown-ups at home?

I thank Nabu for their good wishes, and note that they are also committed to saving on production costs by not bothering over much with normally accepted ideas on quality assurance.

Not recommended.

e-Readers - What to Do?

I own a Sony PRS-505 e-Reader. I’ve had it a few years now. Originally I was really very pleased with it, and I have used it a lot, but gradually it is becoming just another electronic white elephant. It lies about the house, and on the rare occasions I wish to use it the battery is invariably flat. I don’t mean to be unkind to it, but if I stop using something it usually has some significance, if I can just work out what it is. Something like “voting with my feet”.

Much of my disappointment with the Sony machine is a result of the e-book market not moving in the direction that was predicted when I bought it. I bought it because my main interest is in being able to read free downloadable pdf format books – mostly 19^th Century memoirs and histories. I have a great many of these, mostly obtained from Google Books or Project Gutenberg. Much of the specification of what I need my e-reader to do is built around things I need and things which I do not like and am not interested in.

* I do not wish to be glued into a single supplier (such as Amazon) – they do not offer the books I am looking for.

* I require scanned pdf’s to be readable – one problem with my current machine is that the pdf’s have to be especially clear to display at all. Another is that the display size is not adjustable for pdf’s, and the simple task of turning the page requires the entire book image to be reformatted or reflowed, which takes about 20 seconds.

* I cannot use epub books for the material I study. It’s a nice idea, but the automatic character-recognition software used to construct these things at Google is mostly a joke. Being American, it has little patience with strange, foreign concepts such as accented characters, or with 19^th Century fonts, and it also attempts to interpret squashed insects and footnotes – to very strange effect.

* I am a dinosaur. I do not wish to share my books with all my friends by installing them in a cloud or similar, I do not wish to browse my collection by Genre or Playlist, unless the management software is really intuitive and helpful. I like drag and drop and organised hierarchies of folders, and I wish my portable device to be USB compatible, and to be recognised as a detachable storage device by my computer when I plug it in.

* I do not care for iTunes or RealPlayer – mostly the software for these is banned from our house. Also Creative’s software products – I have a nice little Creative Zen mp3 player, which is almost ruined by the moronic management software. These things, apart from being a pest to use, will usually try to install a whole pile of stuff you don’t want, and make themselves the default for every kind of file you use. Creative even re-installs itself after you remove it...

* More positive – my wife has a Kindle and loves it. She uses it properly, and downloads actual Kindle books, and it is great. It will pay for itself all over again this year when we go away on holiday. We do not know how to install pdf’s on it, and somehow it would feel wrong to have to ask Amazon if it’s all right to download a book which has nothing to do with them. The newer Kindles look even better, though I do not wish to have one which thinks it might be a tablet. I need to find out how easy/possible it is to install my dirty old French memoirs on a Kindle, without passing through my Amazon account and without straining my poor brain, which is almost full.

* There are books available from Sony’s own eBook store, but they are expensive, not very interesting, and the range and scope seems to be much less than was expected a few years ago. Not a promising source.

* For a little while, it seemed to me that tablets might be the future of reading books on screen. The drag and drop and file management arrangements look about right, screen clarity is excellent – I really thought that tablets might blow the Kindle (etc) market out of the water, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. The trade-off between portability and readability is tricky, and a decent tablet is potentially a bit large, a bit fragile and definitely a bit expensive to shove in your pocket just so you can read a book on the train.

* Of course, I have a friend who tells me that he always has some books installed on his iPhone. Only in his more relaxed moments will he admit that he finds them very difficult to read, and therefore doesn’t use this facility. Bong! [i-Idiot alert]

* It is very unlikely that G4 will ever make it this far out into the forest...

* This morning I watched a couple of YouTube reviews on using Kindle with pdf’s, and they were quite frank about the fact that a 9-inch tablet or a Sony reader (not the one I’ve got, I guess) are a much better option, because of slow refresh and memory issues.

Dirty old French book - no wonder they say I'll go blind

I think some kind of vague idea of what I would like is taking shape. Ideally, I would like to find some miraculous way to make my existing PRS-505 into all the things I hoped it would be. Failing that, I really like the format and clarity of the new Kindles – particularly the PaperWhite, but have not yet read anything that assures me that I will be able to shift pdf’s of Marmont’s Memoires and Sarrazin’s history of the Peninsular War from my desktop computer to the device, and be able to read them comfortably if/when they get there.

Given a Kindle, I’m sure I could also occasionally find something available in Kindle format which I was interested in, and buy it for download in the approved manner. Despite my traditional anti-Apple (for example) posturing, I have a fairly open mind about what sort of device I need, though the cost and practicality have to make sense. Some of the received wisdom online appears to suggest that what I really want for this role is a cheap 9-inch tablet – Nexus? Could this just be the next white elephant? Hmmm.

If anyone can understand what I’m on about here and can offer a little advice (preferably based on actual experience rather than statements of faith from the Apple Chapel, for example), I shall really be very grateful.

Embarrassingly so, perhaps.

   

Hooptedoodle #84a - The Big Drop

Our resident artist's impression of the alternative Lottery Rainfall system 

Further Mathematical Rambles with a 10-year-old

The only connection with the previous post is that this one also is prompted by conversations with my son. For a while we have chatted idly about the idea of the rain falling as a single drop – which is potentially amusing and environmentally catastrophic at the same time, but doesn’t actually convey very much unless you try to put some numbers on it.

Numbers would also involve defining some boundaries. It seems unlikely that Nature would distribute rainwater to match municipal or parliamentary dividing lines, but we can well imagine what, say, an inch of rain looks like, in the measuring glass, in the puddle on the lawn, in our garden, in our county...

We spend a significant amount of time watching, or being aware of, rain falling outside the windows. Our own county seems a reasonable area to consider – we know it pretty well, can envisage it. An inch of rain is a reasonable concept, too – it is not uncommon to get an inch on a particularly wet afternoon. I am confident that I have taken part in many picnics, hill walks, barbecues, football matches and so on which involved an inch of rain. I have also, I am reminded, visited the odd battlefield in such weather.

OK – to specifics. We had a go yesterday. The results are the sort of thing that prompts reactions such as:

1) Wow

2) Imagine that

3) What shall we play now?

4) I wonder what’s for tea?

This is an honest effort here, but we make no guarantees about the decimal point always being exactly in the right place – decimal places are not a strong part of my act. East Lothian is a small county on the East coast of Scotland. It seems it has a land area of 679 sq Km, which is certainly not large. If we take 1 inch as 2.5-something centimetres, an inch of rain all over the county (imagine, if you will, a rain cloud the same shape) gives a volume of almost exactly 17 million cubic metres – that’s 17 million metric tonnes of water. Two tangential thoughts – firstly, that represents 867 metric tonnes for each resident in the county, and – secondly – intuitively it seems astonishing that such a delivery doesn’t batter us to our knees and flatten everything in sight. And remember, an inch is not an exceptional amount of rain for a single day.

Obviously this all works because the stuff is sprinkled gently over the area, trickles into ditches and streams and drains, then into rivers and eventually into the North Sea, apart from any bits we choose to keep for later use. Our original idea, though, was to examine the effect of applying a National Lottery principle to rainfall, and dumping a single, giant drop on some poor fellow at some random point in the county [tee-hee]. One inch for East Lothian, we calculate, would require a spherical drop of water 318 metres in diameter – i.e. a bit larger than the average football stadium.

That’s big, isn’t it?

For later use - Hopes Reservoir, Lammermuir Hills, East Lothian

I wonder what is for tea?

If you realise that we’ve messed up the arithmetic, and the required droplet is disappointingly smaller than this, there’s probably no point in letting us know, since our attention span has now been exceeded. We are bored with this now, and are moving on to consider other sources of wonder, like how much does the moon weigh, and why wood-pigeons always say exactly the same thing.   

Hooptedoodle #84 - Fun with the Recycling

With the completion of the ECW infantry, I was once again encouraged to look at the rate of increase in my collection of painting bottle-tops, and also the likely trend in the sizes of my future figure-painting batches. The two curves do not meet, my friends. I have reached a situation where I cannot throw out a bottle-top of the two proscribed types (Tesco’s fizzy mineral water for infantry and Tesco’s semi-skimmed milk containers for cavalry); the collection is continuing to grow without purpose, simply because it has been doing so for a while and it is hard to break a habit.

So I have decided to keep 40 of the little ones and 30 of the big ones, and throw the rest out. Sorry -  that should read “put the rest in the recycling bin”.

My son (who is 10) is a real maths enthusiast, so we spent a little while piling them up before they went away, and did some messing around with tetrahedral pyramids, and a touch of gentle finite difference theory to see if we could construct a formula for the number of bottletops in a tetrahedron of side n (and so on). Oh what fun....

We had enough of the smaller tops to make a tetrahedron with a side of 11 tops, it turns out, which our formula tells us contains 286 bottletops. It did occur to me that if I have the spare time to fiddle around with this stuff (it was for the boy, really...) then someone else might have the time to look at a photograph of the event.

The eleventh tetrahedral number is 286

Good, eh?

We have subsequently thrown them out (though it was a struggle to part with them in the end), together with the other surplus tops which didn’t fit into the construction. Now then, at 500ml a bottle, let’s ponder how much water that represents, and where it has all gone now. And then there’s the gas... 

Hmmm.

ECW - Finished the Foot

A small landmark today - still maintaining strict parity (8 units of foot for each side), I've now completed the infantry target for the first phase (you mean there will be a second?) for my ECW project.

Here are the Royalist greencoats of Broughton and Gibson, on the left, and the Parliamentarian units of Brereton and Mainwaring. Dragoons and artillery are coming along, and recruitment of cavalry will continue for a while.

The odd lighting in the photos is the result of a strange luminous object appearing in the sky over South-East Scotland today. I feel an inexplicable urge to rush out and sacrifice a lamb, or a maiden or something.

I was listening earlier to a discussion on the radio - some people were complaining that a ceremonial funeral for Lady Thatcher seemed a bit of an extravagance in the current economic situation. I think it is an excellent idea - in fact, I think they should break with tradition and hold the procession in Leeds, or maybe Glasgow, so that her loyal former subjects can take the opportunity to show their gratitude and affection.

I'll see you there? Looking forward to it.

Bamburgh Castle

Since we have the school holidays upon us, and since my health is (infuriatingly slowly) getting back to normal, the lad and I took a trip down to Bamburgh Castle yesterday. It’s only an hour and a bit down the road from here, and I haven’t been there for years and years.

We managed to take the wet, wintry weather with us, so anyone in Northumberland who was enjoying the onset of Spring should have been warned of our coming, to be strictly fair. We loaded up our German refresher course on the car stereo and donned our arctic service underwear and off we went.

It was a good day out – I’m not going to attempt any sort of serious tourist review of Bamburgh – it was too cold for us to see everything on offer (we swerved the walk down to the sandhills – we can die of hypothermia doing that sort of thing at home).

There has been a fortification on this site for thousands of years, and it really is a terrific looking place, but somehow it doesn’t quite feel right for an ancient monument. It is a real place, with real history, but it has been destroyed a number of times – most notably by Edward the Kingmaker – and much of the rebuilding that has taken place has been aimed at making it a nice place to live. People still live there, for goodness sake, and the state rooms are in excellent condition. There was a hefty amount of refurbishment done in the 18^th Century, and the Earls of Armstrong (that’s the engineering Armstrongs) made it an elegant and comfortable home from the 1880s onwards.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s an excellent place to visit, but it doesn’t give you the immediate step-back into history you might expect. It’s all very well maintained and very obviously has buildings from all sorts of periods. They have an interesting little museum for the Armstrongs – mostly of aviation and marine specimens – and the state rooms hold a wealth of examples of armour and weapons.

I believe that in the village church there is a monumental window for a young cavalry officer killed at Waterloo, but we didn’t get that far. Too cold. Nick liked the tea-room and the dungeons best (he took the photos) – I think I liked the artillery pieces on the walls, which included a splendid 6-inch Georgian mortar and a carronade. Apparently the whole lot are about to get sand-blasted and refinished, so this will remove 200 years of paint in short order.

Nice castle – I liked it. It looks like a proper, kid’s idea of a castle, and it’s mostly in very good shape, which is why it has been used for so many films.    

ECW "BattleFinder" - alternative map cards for the North West

After some previous mention here of my intention to produce some tweaked map cards for the BattleFinder battlefield generation system, with place names which are more appropriate to an ECW campaign in the North West of England, a couple of people kindly emailed to express their interest in such cards. I've produced the first of an intended three sets of add-on cards, and they are here. If they are any use to you, please feel free to download them.

To put this into context, BattleFinder is available (free) from the website of The Perfect Captain, along with their Tinker Fox ECW campaign game and a few other goodies. These cards are not a corruption or rip-off of BattleFinder - you will still need to download the official rules and the playing board - my map cards use the original artwork and are merely re-named to suit a mythical area stretching from the old Lonsdale Hundred of Lancashire to the West Riding of Yorkshire - the idea is that the place names should sound reasonable rather than be real places.

As I sit here, I believe it is unlikely that I will use The Perfect Captain's Very Civil Actions or Spanish Fury tabletop rules, but the campaign stuff is definitely intriguing. My thanks to my son Nick for his skill with PaintshopPro and the magic copy-&-paste touch.