 I'm just here to show that when you don't have those restrictions, the possibilities of what you can do with an e-text are pretty impressive. Well, there was sad news last week because we found out that Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, passed away. He founded Project Gutenberg 40 years ago by typing in the Declaration of Independence into a computer. And that's in 1971. He was a pioneer in open access to knowledge. And he far preceded the free software movement or copy left movement, Creative Commons, anything like that. Michael Hart was an absolute pioneer. And one of the aspects of Project Gutenberg that I want to talk about today is the fact that the texts that they made available weren't under some copy left license, they weren't Creative Commons, they were simply public domain texts. They were public domain texts that were then available in formats that were unencumbered of technological restrictions. And there are a lot of benefits to that in terms of the Project Gutenberg archive being able to, you could just copy the entire archive and mirror it and host it around the world so that it was really accessible to anyone. But one of the great features from a user's perspective is that you could take those texts and you could make transformative uses of them, and not just transformative in the strictly copyright sense, but just like novel, innovative uses. And you can do this without worrying that you're running a foul of the law because these are simply public domain texts. So it's not even a question of whether you're comporting with some license. You just know that whatever it is you want to do with these texts, you can go ahead and do it. So there's that. And also they're available in plain text, HTML, EPUB, all these open formats that allow people to do interesting and great things. So today I'm going to show a lot of the great things that you can do. I'm going to show that you can use a variety of different gizmos to read Project Gutenberg texts, that you can do text to speech, you can have audio book versions, and you can use a lot of different kinds of software to make use of the texts. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Well here we have just like a handful of gizmos, and we're just going to show that with each of these gizmos, you can make use of Project Gutenberg texts because they're available in open formats and because there's no copyright restrictions on them. This is only a small, any gizmo on earth, it can basically read a Project Gutenberg text. Any mainframe computer from the 70s can read a Project Gutenberg text. Any computer, you can access them on Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, any operating system using software of your choice. You can write your own software. We can't show all of that. So we're just going to show a handful of pretty common devices, and we're going to show that they all can read Gutenberg texts. Now this is important to contrast with commercial ebook stores such as Amazon's Kindle Store, or Barnes & Noble's Nook Store, or Apple's iBook Store. Because all of those, they might, Amazon's actually pretty good about this. They make Kindle software for a variety of different platforms. But when you're in the Kindle ecosystem, when you're in the Barnes & Noble ecosystem, or in the Apple ecosystem, you can only do what they let you do with the text. You can only read it on the devices that they specify you can use, and you can only make the uses that they say you can use of the text. So for example, with the Kindle, you might not be able to make your own audiobook version of a Kindle book. But with Project Gutenberg texts, this is no problem. Okay, here I'm just going to walk you through various devices. And I'm going to show you me accessing the same exact ebook on different devices using different pieces of software. So now here's the Apple iPad. And I have the Pickwick papers loaded up in iBooks. There you go. You can read it with Apple's fancy animation if you want, or you can go back. And I have the same book loaded up in another application called QuickReader. Now with QuickReader, it just highlights. So people use this if they want to speedread or if they want to train themselves to read faster, if there's a lot of different options. But this is something that you can do with an open book that you can't do with a Kindle book that you can't do with a Nook book because of DRM and because of file format incompatibilities. Now here's the very same ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg, loaded up on an Amazon Kindle, an iPhone, and an Android phone. It'd be really belaboring the point to show that we could do the same thing for any device that can store text and display. We could do the same thing. Well here I am at the Project Gutenberg website and I'm just going to search for a particular public domain work, which I already know is here called the Pickwick Papers. But there's thousands and thousands of books here, all in the public domain. And this applies to all of them. So here I have the Pickwick Papers. It gives me the option to download the book in a number of different formats. If I click on the HTML version, I'm going to open it up in a new tab and go over here. Now obviously, you might not want to read an entire Victorian novel as HTML just in a web browser. Nevertheless, having it in HTML format lets you do a lot. For example, I have this installed called Spreed. It helps me speed read text. So if I just select text like this and I click on the Spreed button that I've installed previously, it takes that text and it sends it over to a speed reading application online at spreeder.com. And you'll see that it's doing this in a form called rapid serial visual presentation and that just shows you one word at a time, always in the same place. So you don't have to move your eyes around. And you can adjust this to really high speed. And people using speed reading programs like this that show one or maybe blocks of two or three words that once have been measured to read with comprehension at an extremely high word per minute. So another thing you can do on a computer is you can just download the EPUB, open it up in an EPUB reader. And this gives you a little bit more control than just a text file or the HTML file does. Use a specialized application to read it. And you can just click on the chapter and it just shows you the book this way. And here we're using Adobe Digital Editions to page through the Pickwick papers. And also I'm going to demonstrate. There's another project called LibriVox.org. Let me pull that up real quick. Now LibriVox volunteers take Project Gutenberg and other E-tex but primarily Project Gutenberg. And volunteers do free audiobook versions of them. So if you go to LibriVox, you can just like the Gutenberg website, you can search for anything and you'll be amazed at what they have. And I've already queued up here a version of the Pickwick papers again, done by LibriVox based on the Project Gutenberg text. Let's play that real quick. The one on a frosty day or as a solitary specimen of the other in the inmost recesses of an earthen jar? So, yeah, it's volunteers that read it. Sometimes there's different narrators of varying quality because this is sort of like Wikipedia, but nevertheless you'll find people that have all kinds of voices and accents reading them. Sometimes they're just professionals, professional voice readers doing this and they're spare time and other times it's people who are trying to apparently learn how to speak English, really varying quality. But nevertheless, because these works are in the public domain, because they're in accessible formats, it opens up the possibility to even have projects like this. This is nothing like this could happen with a book from anywhere else. And I'm going to show one more thing. I'm going to show a text-to-speech. Now this is an automatic, automated e-book. And this, again, you could not do with your Kindle. In fact, a lot of publishers believe that text-to-speech requires a separate license, which is news to the visually impaired community. But nevertheless, once you have an open format, I'll show you right here. I just select the text I want to text-to-speech. And of course you can do this. You can have it just go and create an MP3 or something of the entire book all at once. You don't have to sit here highlighting paragraph by paragraph. But nevertheless, here we go. One of the most popular personages in his own circle, present, was a little fat man with the ring of upright black hair around his head and an extensive bald plane on the top of it. So, you know, there you go. You can just take the text and you can have audiobooks automatically created. You can imagine how great this is if you're a person with a disability or if you're someone who, for whatever reason, prefers to listen to things read out. If you want to listen to them being read out by amateurs, you can do that. If you want to listen to them being read out by an automated voice, you can do that. And in fact, they're probably based on the same text. If you go onto audible.com, you can probably download a commercial version read by professionals of the same book. But nevertheless, because Project Gutenberg texts are always in the public domain and they're always open, you can have all these different uses of them. And another thing you can do when you have access to just a plain text version or an HTML version of an ebook is you can just do your own translation. So I'm just going to copy this paragraph from here, put it here, do an automatic translation. Of course, you could just make your own translation if you happen to be fluent in Chinese or you can do your own dramatic adaptation. You can make any number of derivative or transformative works of the Pickwick papers because it's in the public domain. Now, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with an ebook. But a lot of that cool stuff you can't do when you get ebooks from places like the Kindle Store. And the reason has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the fact that artificial locks are put on the books or copyright and licensing restrictions that just get in the way of people making innovative uses. Now, sometimes there might be business reasons for some of these. I'm not here to get into that. I'm just here to show that when you don't have those restrictions, the possibilities of what you can do with an e-text are pretty impressive.