Using ImageMagick to make sharp web-sized photographs - <AUTHOR> http://even.li/imagemagick-sharp-web-sized-photographs/ <comment><USER2> Part of the reason rescaled images look dim and blurry is because rescaling software usually assumes gamma 1.0 instead of 2.2: [http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html](http://www.4p8.com/eric.brasseur/gamma.html)

There are many more good essays on image rescaling here: [http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/](http://entropymine.com/imageworsener/)

<comment><USER3> Preview.app in OS X scales the picture correctly. I think any program that uses Cocoa/CoreImage/CoreGraphics etc. to scale images on OS X should get the right result.

However, Safari ignores gamma and produces a flat gray rectangle when scaling down the Dalai Lama image, like Firefox does. I seem to remember that Safari used to do proper gamme correction in earlier versions, but they were pressured to abandon it because it was more important to give the result expected by websites.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Dissecting a bad oneliner:

        ls *.jpg|while read i;do gm convert $i -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 `basename $i .jpg`_s.jpg;done

The part I take issue with is the unnecessary invocation of `ls`. The shell does the glob expansion. A `for` loop is better suited for this. Also, if using bash,* we can get rid of basename.

        for file in *.jpg; do gm convert $file -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 ${file%.jpg}_s.jpg; done

* zsh fans, I'm sure it works there too.

<comment><USER5> As long as we're _bashing_ , it could easily be written loopless like so:

        basename -s .jpg -a *jpg |
          xargs -I{} convert "{}.jpg" \
           -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 "{}_s.jpg"

EDIT: weird line breaking is to prevent sidescroll box

<comment><USER6> You could also easily parallelize this with xargs' -P option.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> mod_pagespeed (and ngx_pagespeed) can automate this for all your images. If you have inline width/height or inline style dimensions, it will do the resampling on your behalf: [https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter-...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/module/filter- image-optimize)

The advantages of having correctly sized imagery are immense, but in short.. something like 70% smaller total byte payload for mobile, huge reduction in image decode & resize cost, better scroll performance, and faster relayouts when orientation changes or browser window changes.

(And I do think browsers themselves should resample scaled images like this to achieve equal quality, but your users will benefit way more if assets are delivered well to begin with.)

<comment><USER8> where are the resizes stored when this directive is used?

       > pagespeed EnableFilters resize_images;

<comment><USER9> Probably /var/mod_pagespeed/cache, though I don't have it installed right now to check.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> My solution: [https://github.com/vladstudio/Vladstudio-smart-resize- Bash-s...](https://github.com/vladstudio/Vladstudio-smart-resize-Bash-script)

The biggest problem of scaling down an image is to find right settings for resampling and sharpening. After many expreiments, I found it impossible to achieve good results by simply running convert with a line of arguments. So I came up with this script, which basically does the following:

* configures -interpolate bicubic -filter Lagrange; * resizes source image 80%; * applies -unsharp 0.44x0.44+0.44+0.008; * repeats steps 2 & 3 until target size is reached.

<comment><USER11> This is fine if you have a limited set of images that you handpick and optimize.

Do you have any suggestions when there are thousands of images and all this needs to be automated?

<comment><USER12> He has an example at his github link where he uses a simple bash for loop to do many images at once.

<comment><USER13> but it does seem inefficient if you often have lots of images to process

<comment><USER12> how so?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just for the record, the "unsharp mask" filter doesn't really sharpen but it increases edge contrast, which makes it seem sharper. It _is_ something that you should only apply to the final version of an image, after all resizing has been done, however.

<comment><USER15> Sharpening improves "acutance"; your perception of boundaries. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acutance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acutance)

Unsharp masking is mostly aesthetic. For an image like the example, a mountainside, it gives you a _feeling_ of crisp details, but there isn't any more data there. It looks great on a landscape, but it can be disastrous on a portrait of a person (pores and stubble will be highlighted, usually in an unpleasant way).

(EDIT: incorrect assertion about unsharp masking before or after scaling removed)

Sometimes it's better to unsharp-mask it to a degree that looks slightly oversharpened at a large size, but looks great when reduced - especially for very small images, like avatars or other icons.

<comment><USER14> > I have found that unsharp mask is best applied before you scale the image. > Shrinking the image first will eliminate some of the details that you wanted > to enhance in the first place.

Unsharp mask doesn't work that way: you get the same results applying it before or after scaling, as long as you adjust the radius accordingly.

The reason I suggested applying it after scaling is because aesthetically pleasing settings don't change much as the image size changes.

<comment><USER15> I tested this with a couple of images and you are right. Except for a few errant pixels here and there the images are precisely identical. Sorry for the misinformation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Tangential to the point being made, 98 as quality seems way too high for an image to be shown on the web. 85 seems to be a decent tradeoff. Doing so might actually increase the image size.

<comment><USER16> I agree: that jumped out at me enough that I came here to make the same comment. I can hardly think of a case where I'd want to use a 98 quality setting on a JPEG. Maybe it would be a good choice if I wanted to preserve an almost-pristine copy of an original, but I'd compare the resulting file size to a lossless PNG first. Every quality step from 100 down to 95 gives a huge benefit in file size, and going from 95 to 90 almost always seems like a hefty savings for imperceptible differences, too. I usually save web images at quality settings between 70 and 90, and I've never felt like I'm losing by it.

<comment><USER17> This also jumped out at me. My company ([http://www.firebox.com](http://www.firebox.com)) is built on having amazing looking images for products. No one could see any difference between the quality of images between 87 and 95, but it saved us roughly 50% in file size. Also for what it's worth, we spent a lot of time a/b testing 87 vs 95 with our users, but there was no conclusive difference

<comment><USER18> We use GraphicsMagick at 92, as dipping into the 80s has an annoying tendancy to introduce visible noise on something like 1:50 images. It's very annoying to ship that extra bandwidth.

Interestingly, we've done WebP support, and while the files are smaller across the board, visual quality deteriorates _really_ quickly once you start dropping that quality value, even in small increments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The sharpened version looks over-sharp to me. You may find that a level or curves adjustment is more what this image needs to pop a little.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, I over-sharpened it a little so the effect is more obvious.

Though the amount of sharpening can depend on the context : photographers tend to be annoyed by over-sharp images, while on a marketing website it might be good idea to make the pictures pop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Trivia: The example image is taken at the Col de l'Iseran which, at 2770 metres, is the highest tarmacced road pass in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER21> ImageOptim has been my best buddy, been getting very agreeable results with it. It's just for compression but end results don't seem to have the need for sharpening. Using ImageMagick this way might be best for special cases... [http://imageoptim.com/](http://imageoptim.com/)

<comment><USER22> ImageOptim is not just for compression, it is for stripping away useless metadata, color palettes and other tricks.

For optimal images, you could do something like this:

1) Resize the image (And apply the trick from this article) use the proper quality marker (anywhere between 85-95)

2) Run it through Imageoptim

If you want a commandline version of ImageOptim, I have had good results with [https://github.com/toy/image_optim](https://github.com/toy/image_optim)

<comment><USER21> ah.. right on. cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Has anyone played / tested this with regard to the responsive image hack/trick by the filament group : [http://filamentgroup.com/lab/rwd_img_compression/](http://filamentgroup.com/lab/rwd_img_compression/)

<comment><USER24> I've actually started using this method, and it seems to work pretty well. It reduces file sizes significantly and yet the quality is fairly good. If you pay attention, you can see some quality loss/artifacts, though it's not bad.

An example:

[http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/](http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/)

Scroll down to the "Now is the Future" blog post. The cover image of the Seattle skyline is 1700x666 and ~65kb (though, it's been recompressed into WebP by mod_pagespeed if your browser supports it). The JPG (before WebP conversion) is ~88kb.

To see it without the recompression and turn mod_pagespeed off, you can look at the image on the page:

[http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/?ModPagespeed=off](http://www.andrewmunsell.com/blog/?ModPagespeed=off)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> For my games, I found out that the best thing when scaling is use IM Lancsoz filter.

Granted, my games use high-res hand-drawn vector-ish art (not pixel art, neither photo-style or paint-style art) so I dunno if this is applicable to photos.

<comment><USER26> Imagemagick already uses a Lanczos resampling filter when downsampling. Lanczos inherently preserves sharp transient data, e.g., sharp edges in images, but it looks like the author wanted something more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the script to apply it to a folder could be clear with:

for image in *.jpg ; do gm convert $image -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 `basename $image .jpg`_s.jpg ; done

<comment><USER28> The script on the linked page deals with filenames with spaces while that for loop does not.

Neither of them deal with filenames with \n in them, eg 'pretty

sunset.jpg'

For that, you'll want to run find:

        find . -name '*.jpg' -exec convert '{}' -resize "900x" -unsharp 2x0.5+0.5+0 -quality 98 `basename '{}' .jpg`_s.jpg  \;

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> In my experience, scaling down an image makes it look _sharper_. A blurry image will often look perfectly fine when sufficiently scaled down; which is not surprising, because a blur with a five-pixel radius at camera size can easily become a fraction of a pixel at web size. Similarly, scaling down counteracts camera noise, because each output pixel averages out the noise between several different sensor pixels.

Of course, you can always make them even sharper with filters if you want.

</comment><comment><USER29> Reduce the quality quotient (severely, like .98 -> .3) and don't cut the resolution as far, e.g. Keep 2x the pixels.

Much better appearance for the same file size.

</comment><comment><USER30> Could also be useful to downscale images using the 'high contrast downscale' filter (as we call it in our lab; maybe this isn't the common name). For each set of pixels to become one, you compute min, max and mean, and select the one of {min, max} which is closer to mean.

Unfortunately, I don't have any examples handy.

</comment><comment><USER11> One problem I recently encountered is that some images refused to load on IE8. Turns out that the IE does not support CYMK color spaced images and the image appeared significantly differently on chrome and firefox. Was quite surprising since I had assumed that jpeg was a standard format and would be supported by all.

<comment><USER31> I run into this same issue when creating previews from print comps. You should be able to specify a colorspace to resolve that: [http://blog.rodneyrehm.de/archives/4-CMYK-Images-And- Browser...](http://blog.rodneyrehm.de/archives/4-CMYK-Images-And-Browsers-And- ImageMagick.html)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, but changing the color space to RGB also significantly alters the way it appears. Then I have users who complain that this is not what they uploaded and its a genuine complain.

I was going to suggest that the real problem is people using IE8 but that wouldn't go too well I guess

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think before _and_ after shots would have been helpful.

<comment><USER33> Although there technically are, the after shot is not available for those of us on mobile.

"If you hover the mouse on the image, you'll see the sharpened version."

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I have noticed that sharpening an image makes them look _worse_ on high resolution displays like the iPhone 4+ or Macbook Retina.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is this to be regarded as image quality preservation or a photo manipulation that increases sharpness "artificially"?

<comment><USER30> The latter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> It'd be great if you put two in this post so we can see the difference without having to run all of the commands first.

<comment><USER37> Apparently if you mouse over the image, the sharpened image overlays the original (no I didn't pick that up either, it was mentioned on another comment :)

<comment><USER38> But it totally breaks when you can't hover over the image... like on mobile

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Flickr does this, don't they? I always wondered why images on Flickr look sharper.

</comment><comment><USER40> Is this tool doing anything other than a deconvolution?

<comment><USER41> I would guess it doesn't even do deconv. but only adds a simple high pass filter to it. That would explain the parameter choices (sigma is the std. dev.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> madVR uses the ImageMagick jinc with anti-ringing filter to upscale video. Looks pretty good. :)

</comment><comment><USER43> really who time to do all this, image by image.I use aperture which is ok.

<comment><USER44> Read the bottom of the article:

 _> How do I resize a whole folder of images? [...]_</comment></comment>


Google In Discussions To Acquire Yelp For A Half Billion Dollars Or More - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/17/google-acquire-buy-yelp/

<comment><USER2> Doesn't Yelp offer astro-turfing for $$$? I hope that this practice doesn't fall under the umbrella of "don't be evil."

<comment><USER3> The accusation much more frequently levelled is that they extort business to pay to have negative reviews hidden:

[http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the- business-...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/eastbay/yelp-and-the-business-of- extortion-20/Content?oid=1176635)

It's not lying -- the good reviews that remain come from real people -- but it's certainly misleading.

<comment><USER4> I can vouch that negative reviews can be hidden, my friend wrote one and he sees "23 reviews" including his own, when he is logged in. Everyone else sees "22 reviews" and his is omitted.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really like Yelp and I think it's a great service, but I don't contribute because of the complete lack of data portability. Even their RSS feeds are heavily truncated. I'd contribute significantly if this changed. For instance, automatically posting my Yelp reviews to my blog would be a big incentive.

</comment><comment><USER6> well, they have almost 22B dollars sitting in cash. from an investor's point of view, that is wasteful. Easy way to turn that cash into growing revenue streams is to purchase profitable companies. Though 500 mil is a bit steep to pay for yelp IMHO.

<comment><USER7> Yelp is sitting on a massive store of local business data. That's useful for search quality. Yelp is in the first three results for the majority of businesses in their database. That's useful for search monetization. They also have a direct sales force calling on local SMEs. That's useful for Google Apps. I could go on.

<comment><USER8> More valuable than all that is the fact that Yelp is the de-facto real-world review site. Its brand is powerful, about as powerful as YouTube's was when Google bought them.

<comment><USER9> I have to disagree. Unless you live in a city, your average person has never heard of Yelp. When Google bought YouTube it was a different story.

<comment><USER10> I concur. I live in kansas City and work on computers all day. I've _heard_ of Yelp, but I've never used them or seen them pop up in search results for local business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This seems like a good marriage to me (or is it an adoption?). More and more on google, I see adsense results that are local in nature, and with more focus on android, this is a perfect addition to get more ad real estate that is location based.

I use a lot of iphone apps, but more often than not, when I have my wallet out, I use the Yelp app to purchase food or drink. As a user, I'd be much more reluctant to utilize an admob ad on an unrelated iphone app or game as opposed to clicking on an ad when I'm trying to find a good thai restaurant somewhere in the midwest.

</comment><comment><USER12> This would actually perfectly compliment the new PlaceRank effort in which Google is sending out all of those QR stickers - Think foursquare for check in + Yelp userbase/content + locally targeted adwords, and throw in AdMob.

About the stickers: [http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google- foursqu...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/check-in-google-foursquare- loopt/)

</comment><comment><USER13> you'll never, ever, ever hear me say this ever again: _i thought scoble made some interesting points_ (when he talked about facebook acquiring yelp). [http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it- missed...](http://scobleizer.com/2009/03/26/facebook-is-lucky-it-missed- buying-twitter-and-now-should-eat-yelp/)

but what does google have to gain? extend google maps/local? aren't they already scraping reviews and ratings? screw the "don't be evil," what's in it for them...especially at $500M?

and as a random peanut gallery jab, it kills me how "past the term sheet stage" indicates an 80% probability. isn't anything past .01% "past the term sheet stage?"

<comment><USER14> Yelp has a lot of relationships with local businesses, something they are trying to grow with AdWords.

They also want the dataset. The current reviews google is crawling are lousy compared to Yelp's.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> To max out profit Google may as well own the top 10 listings they display under major search terms (Knol) and long-tail local search (Yelp).

That should cover 50% of profitable searches yes?

Toddling monopoly?

</comment><comment><USER16> i wonder if msft allows google to grab yelp too.</comment>


Functional Programming Fundamentals Lectures  - <AUTHOR> http://codebetter.com/blogs/matthew.podwysocki/archive/2009/10/09/functional-programming-fundamentals-lectures.aspx <comment><USER2> Oh crap, the vids require Silverlight.

<comment><USER3> Just below the player are some other options. MP4 is an alternative.

<comment><USER2> Thank you, I overlooked that.</comment></comment></comment>


Flint toxic water tragedy points directly to Michigan Gov. Snyder - <AUTHOR> http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/toxic-water-tragedy-points-directly-to-snyder-588635715518 <comment><USER2> the truth of the matter, of course, is not covered by Ms. Maddow.

See: [http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2015/10/26/opinion-...](http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2015/10/26/opinion- flint-water-disaster/74657458/)

It was a 7-1 vote, motivated by the huge increase in Detroit's fees, which would have cost over $19 million more in the first 8 years alone. (That was the 2013 estimate; DWC fees have increased faster than that, even.)

[http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/03/flint_city...](http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2013/03/flint_city_council_approves_re.html)

The problem in detail:

[http://cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/CoF-Water- System-Q...](http://cityofflint.com/wp-content/uploads/CoF-Water-System- QA.pdf)</comment>


How search worked before Google - <AUTHOR> https://insights.hpe.com/articles/how-search-worked-before-google-1703.html <comment><USER2> I remember going to Yahoo to manually type in URLs. "Hey if we want our computer user group to get noticed, we should make sure they list our website!"</comment>


Abolish The Patent, Vanquish The Troll - <AUTHOR> http://www.rackspace.com/blog/abolish-the-patent-vanquish-the-troll/ <comment><USER2> I've been thinking about the connection between biological signaling and advertising; like colored plumage or a large chest cavity, a multi-million ad campaign is a hard-to-fake signal, and in a way, such campaigns are as much about overt displays of power than the contents of the ad.

In that sense, this move is the pinnacle of the best form of advertising. Whether they are acting out of pure altruism or pure strategy (it's probably both), they are demonstrating their values with non-trivial risks and resources, thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers. Awesome.

<comment><USER3> "thereby earning genuine trust with current and prospective customers"

I don't disagree with that in general but I will raise the issue that you would need to know the percentage of current and future customers that really care about things like this to know the effect that it will have on their business in dollars.

Consumers and business are fickle. Good will has a value but people will drop you in a dime if the next shiny ball comes along with a better product and/or lower pricing. My guess is that the community that cares about this relative to their sales volume is not as significant as your statement suggests.

As an similar example, people on HN regularly hate on godaddy but they are still a giant in the domain business and end users that use them (I deal with those end users since gd is a competitor of ours) don't care about any of the shenanigans. And the "tech guys" that feed business to gd in general seem to be pretty happy with the relationship judging by transfer rates.

<comment><USER4> Funny that you mention domains, because, while there might be some public good in patents, it's much harder to say about domain name squatters. Why have we not put adequate regs in place to eliminate squatters? I liked a particular domain name for a new startup. I approached the domain name owner -- a FB engineer no less -- who had bought the domain, and I offered him a price that would have yielded him 7500 in profit. He turned us down and continues to squat on the domain and do nothing with it. We ended up going with a dotme domain, which isn't ideal.

Now, as a lean startup we probably shouldn't have been looking for an expensive domain name in the first place. But ineffective squatter rules (10K for an arbitration!) are preventing the marketplace from making the most of attractive, catchy domain names, and instead we're settling on domains that do not adequately describe the business.

<comment><USER3> So let me see if I understand your point. You are saying "they aren't using it so therefore we should be able to use it" and are somehow comparing that to what patent trolls do?

Further you are saying that someone who holds a domain name (or any property) should have to satisfy a requirement of "use" of that property or domain name? And if not they should sell it to you for a price that you find acceptable or maybe just give it to you?

If that is the case then please tell me who will be in charge of determining what "use" of a domain name is?

What do you define as a squatter? Because it's not someone who registers a domain name and just holds it although that is the popular culture interpretation of the word.

By the way there is no such thing as "arbitration" with domain names. There is the filing of a UDRP (which costs much much less and you can file on your own) but to do that you would have to have some basis. I can assure you that if you have just formed a startup you don't meet the requirements for filing a UDRP. It isn't meant to protect people who "just want a particular domain and the seller isn't being reasonable" it's meant to protect those with true intellectual property interests (from what I'm reading in your comment you don't meet this in any way).

<comment><USER5> The mistake is in thinking that domain names should be property. They're not property, they're address space. Imagine if trademarks worked this way -- right now to get a trademark you have to actually use it (or certify that you intend to use it), you can't just squat on a thousand different names and hope somebody is eventually willing to pay you for one of them.

And the solution should be the same. You can't sell a trademark. What you can do is sell the goodwill it has accrued and transfer the mark along with it. That sounds like the same thing, right? But if you haven't used it there is no goodwill -- in fact, if you stop using a trademark then you eventually lose the rights to it. It shuts down the squatters but not anyone else, which is why we don't have trademark squatters the same as we do domain name squatters.

<comment><USER6> Define "using" a domain name. I have a couple of domain names where my primary reason for holding them is for email addresses, or an inside joke with friends.

Admittedly, no-one is clamoring for these domain names, let alone offering me $7500 for them for their business, but just because you can't see the use _doesn't mean that they're not being used._

Yes, domain name squatters suck, but they're making money, so they'll keep doing it, and there's no way to fairly stop them that doesn't take away my right to hold stupid domain names.

<comment><USER5> Nobody has to stop you from holding stupid domain names. Hold them all you like. You _are_ using them for something. Nobody said "something" has to be hosting a website. But don't try to sell them without having built any value into them -- you should only be able to profit from the transfer if you're transferring it incident to something of value you've created, like an email service or website with actual users. And yes, that means some of the squatters are going to try to create sham transactions and commit fraud, but at least then you can prosecute it where you can prove it, rather than allowing their useless, irritating, wasteful arbitrage-based businesses to continue lawfully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "IPRs can be risky and costly. We know this IPR will cost us more than the $75,000 that Rotatable wanted to extort from us. But we are not just fighting for us; we are fighting for all the app developers who are also in the line of fire."

Clearly the patent system is defective and needs to be fixed radically (or patents entirely eliminated in the software space, which I personally believe is preferable).

Nevertheless the above suggests a possibility for a shorter-term fix. If companies could proactively band together in some kind of association to fund IPRs for every single troll attack, spreading out the costs of the IPR amongst the member companies, it would seem that this would make life for the trolls much harder. Indeed, simply listing your company membership in such an association on your website might be sufficient to ward them off, same as sticking alarm decals on car windows wards off many would-be car thieves.

<comment><USER8> Check out John Walker's PATO proposal from 1993, following Autodesk getting hit with a bogus patent: <http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/chapter2_105.html>

<comment><USER9> God damn; PATO is exactly my proposal. I shall sue him, having come up with it 15 years _after_ his publication... ;-)

<comment><USER10> Except it doesn't work.

Here's what really happens:

PatentHoldingShellCompany60852, Inc. files a lawsuit. They have no products and no services and so cannot be countersued for any conceivable infringement. Even if you do manage to sue them successfully, the company's only asset is the patent. It declares bankruptcy, nobody involved in setting it up gets hurt, and tomorrow PatentHoldingShellCompany60853, Inc. is filing in East Texas to try to shakedown somebody else.

<comment><USER8> I think the modern wrinkle would need to be establishing a common defense fund with the goal of funding all the way through invalidating bad patents, not just settling a suit. Right now most of these players simply risk losing their time investment, not the grounds for future extortion or possibly even invalidating other settlements.

A well-funded, well-known legal team could have an easier time doing filing to consolidate cases, making the strategy of repeatedly going after small companies less one-sided.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I totally applaud Rackspace's dedication to the public good. But I think their response is their best move economically too, despite the initial cost. They are basically saying "Troll me, and you risk losing the whole patent." It's like dealing with a playground bully. Once you display a willingness to fight, they go pick on someone less assertive.

<comment><USER12> ditto Newegg

"Newegg Crushes Patent Troll in Online 'Shopping Cart' Suit"

<http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414778,00.asp>

edit: better article link:

[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg- crushe...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/01/how-newegg-crushed-the- shopping-cart-patent-and-saved-online-retail/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nothing makes me want to become a rackspace customer more than posts like this. I adore integrity.

<comment><USER3> I'm also a RS customer but how do you see this as "integrity" as opposed to a regular business decision done with the intent to prevent future problems?

(Noting also that there is the PR value of spending money this way as your comment proves!)

<comment><USER14> Countless other companies in their position would pay the settlement and sign an NDA. We can never know the extent of this problem unless companies like RackSpace speak up.

<comment><USER15> Yes, it is also an indicator to me that if I am a RackSpace customer, and other issues come up (could be patents, could be government surveillance, or something else) that will affect me as a developer, Rackspace is more likely to be on my side than against me.

Obviously, I expect Rackspace to pursue its own business self-interest, but often there are multiple ways to do that, and not all of them are win-win for both the hosting company and for its customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I wish the best of luck to Rackspace.

As an independent Android developer, I live with the slight fear that one day I'm going to eventually be hit with one of these absurd patent lawsuits. I only program for Android as a hobby aside from my day job as a web programmer. What can an independent/hobbyist developer like myself do when we are eventually challenged with something we can by no means defend ourselves against without loads of money? Reform is needed, soon.

<comment><USER17> If you are independent, then can't you defend yourself in court?

<comment><USER16> It's not that, it's that I wouldn't have sufficient money to do it. Or bankrupt myself in the process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> On the topic, this is quite an interesting TED talk given by Drew Curtis.

 _"You need to know that the average patent troll defense costs $2M and takes 18 months... when you win."_

Drew Curtis: How I Beat a Patent Troll

<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_lb3D7Ay-M>

<comment><USER19> Drew is exaggeration. I took on Acacia, it cost me nothing more than the travel, and time away from my primary business.

Lawyers cost a lot of money, but for something like "the ability to rotate a mobile screen" that rackspace is fighting you don't need a lawyer.

Prior art exists for rotating screens on desktops and tablet PCs. Feature parity on Mobile is not innovative. Obviousness is the challenge to a patent and the defense against its infringement.

This is not a "risky" case. It is not a case that requires 4 lawyers for a year. It is a case for 1 guy part time for a year. Which if he is $400k a year could be $75k but it doesn't need to be that.

<comment><USER20> I believe the keyword here is "average". There are probably examples of cases on both ends of the spectrum: cases that dragged on to be very expensive and others that were resolved with a phone call or letter.

<comment><USER19> Yes a billion dollar fight would skew the average a lot. Several fights between porn companies and streaming media changed the numbers as they were in the hundreds of millions range at that seriously messed with the average. The typical need not be so high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To me, this is a strong sign that the patent holder should at least run a substantial risk of getting charged for legal costs if they lose. It might require a bit more due diligence on the part of the patent holder in genuinely enforceable patents, but it would all but eliminate the motivation of patent trolls when they know their patent is dubious.

I applaud Rackspace for this act of charity to the community, but it should not be necessary. Let's root for Rackspace, but it's more important to fix the system.

<comment><USER22> At some point it should be more than legal costs. Threatening someone with a patent that is manifestly not applicable should be considered a form of fraud in extreme cases, just like it is if I send you a false invoice in the mail demanding payment. We need to raise the risk factor enough that patent trolls can't simply write off their losses against all their successes. They'll keep going as long as the benefits outweigh the risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> If you cannot understand how people could possible think that software patents are acceptable, I recommend reading this article. [1] Not because it will convince you that software patents are good — it won't. But it will help you understand the thought process of lawyers who do think that there should be some software patents. For example, Goetz writes that he supports "patents where the preferred implementation of an inventive machine process is in software (via a computer program), hardware (via circuitry), or a combination of both software and hardware."

[1] [http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/in-defense-of- softwa...](http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2010/09/in-defense-of-software- patents-part-2.html)

<comment><USER24> Personally, I support software patents. I'm just against _idea_ patents, as opposed to _invention_ patents.

Screen rotation is no invention. It's an idea; once you have it, it's trivial to implement. That, IMO, does not afford patent protection. However, certain things can, and should be patents. RSA, for example. It's a non-trivial procedure that was non-trivial to invent and there are not very many alternatives.

<comment><USER25> There's an interesting question about just what an invention is, though. At least in software, actual implementations are covered by copyright, and I can't see any hard and fast distinction between ideas and inventions.

For instance, determining the optimum layout of a mail application for a four inch screen probably takes a lot of tweaking and user testing. But there's no way that you can call it an invention, and your competitors are free to copy the layout, so long as they change the style enough that customers can clearly distinguish the products.

On the other hand, using a magnet to hold a power connector to a laptop seems like a really obvious idea once you've seen it. You don't have to study detailed documents to see how you could make it. But calling it an 'invention' seems reasonable - and it is patented. And it's perhaps the only thing that attracts me about Apple laptops, but that's not important right now.

<comment><USER26> I've seen these magnetic power cords on water boilers for a long time. We got one from Asia in the 90s. <http://www.zojirushi.com/products/cvdyc>

That may have merited a patent (if it wasn't already invented, and I suspect it was), but Apple's implementation does not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've worked as a patent prosecutor for a top ranked patent prosecution firm; and I know first hand that most patents are 'pencil patents' worthless subtle distinctions that are allowed because 'obvious' arguments do not stand up.

However, some innovations, maybe 1 in 1000, are really worthy. And if the inventor did not have some way to protect their research - google or microsoft or anyone else could usurp the idea from the average joe who spent a lot of research and effort to resolve the invention. just my 2 cents.

<comment><USER28> It's much more likely that google or microsoft would absolutely annihilate the average joe with a countersuit rather than license anything from them. They hold a much bigger patent portfolio and can afford to pump money into a case for several years. There is absolutely nothing that makes patents attractive to the "lone inventor" type. The innovations may be worthy, but patents do nothing to help there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I really hope this is successful. I will begrudgingly admit that some patents probably are useful (that's a separate argument), but in the specific case of software, so many were granted at a time when general knowledge was very naive and so were unintentionally made to broad sweeping. Eliminating them is the best course of action.

The fact that it will take an independent committee up to 1 year to do so for each one is rather less encouraging.

</comment><comment><USER30> > _Patent litigation typically costs defendants between $1 million and $5 > million just to stay in the fight._

A battleground where only the rich can win a fight. There doesn't seem to be any justice left in the American courts :(.

The only way to win is to not play their game. It's probably cheaper to buy a shotgun and show up at the doorstep of the person suing you with the message: "I know where you live" :S

<comment><USER31> You got it wrong. "It's probably cheaper to HIRE someone" _

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Patent and copyright laws are both in serious need of radical reform in the US and globally. Thank you Rackspace for not caving in to the patent trolls, but as you wrote, it has become a never-ending game of "whack-a-troll".

That's because with existing legislation, the patent troll business model is financially very sound if also inherently corrosive to society as a whole. "The dynamics of local vs. global optimization" is jargon from the team- building and process-design communities that applies here: a successful business strategy for the patent trolls is a huge failure for the community as a whole. This could also be considered a perverse incentive <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive>

There are perverse incentives in both copyright and patent law that undermine the original Constitutional goals of "promot[ing] the Progress of Science and useful Arts..." that are especially powerful in our age of ever-increasing innovation where digital computers and The Internet have created a radically different "landscape" than that which existed when the first such laws were drafted.

Ideally, thoughtful legislative reforms would prevent such perverse incentives in the future so that both copyright and patent law would once again be aligned to serve the common good rather than the good of a few.

Large and democratic communities (such as those Joel Spolsky helped create) full of good questions and answers could go a long way towards helping to craft such thoughtful legislative reforms. See Ask Patents <http://patents.stackexchange.com> for such a community on patents, and <http://goo.gl/5YDHa> for such a proposed community on copyright.

Anyone who feels strongly about these issues, please go get involved by "Follow"ing the proposed CopyrightX community and submitting 5 Example Questions. With enough voting and other participation, the CopyrightX community proposal can graduate to an actual community like Ask Patents.

And with two vibrant communities full of good questions and answers related to IP law, perhaps future legislation will be free of perverse incentives, and we can once again rely on our laws to serve ALL of our best interests.

In the interim, thanks again Rackspace for being willing to continue the costly game of "whack-a-troll" on behalf of all of us.

</comment><comment><USER12> _> Patent trolls then follow each filing with a settlement demand "at a price far lower than the cost to defend the litigation." (Id. at 1326.) This allows trolls to use the high cost of litigation as a club against operating companies. _

This smells like another ugly practice by "rightsholders". Namely, the RIAA/MPAA litigation against individuals.

<comment><USER33> It's a common pattern in almost any litigation, not specific to IP rightsholders.

<comment><USER12> I guess you're right. Even when "people" sue companies, they typically just settle out of court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Patent trolls suck. But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation. The issue is not that Patents are bad, it is that you can patent a "unique way to swing on the playground" and be awarded a patent. Patent officer often don't know what they are awarding a patent for.

This is supposed to be kept in check by the fact that you can fight a patent.

I think that if you file a patent, sue someone over it, and lose you should be forced to pay 8X the amount you were suing for. That would severely limit who would try.

I also think that patents should only be allowed to be resold twice. This would limit the number of patents which could be used to extort money.

Lastly I think you should only be able to sue for patent infringement if you have a product using the patent currently in the market.

Those 2 simple rules would remove a lot of trolling.

<comment><USER34> "But with out patents there is no incentive for innovation."

What a merry little idea. Has it occurred to you that there are a large number of people who invent, innovate, and develop because it's simply not an option not to? That it is a sort of compulsion, a reason for being?

In a market without patents, I'm sure capitalists will find a way to keep making money, just as I'm sure that inventors and makers will continue to keep inventing and making.

<comment><USER35> It totally depends on the field. In software, perhaps this would work nicely, because rapid iteration and expansion prevails.

That said, in the pharmaceutical or material science worlds, the cost and pace of research require that protection be afforded to those who choose to invest and disclose the fruits of their labor to the world.

It's not so black and white that there are _no_ incentives for disclosed innovation, but patents are a big booster in some areas, for good reasons.

<comment><USER36> There was plenty of invention before patents existed as a legal concept.

Patents exist because some people who came up with clever ideas thought (properly) that it was in their best interest to be granted a legal monopoly on the implementation of their ideas and lobbied lawmakers to grant them these monopolies.

Patents did not come into being because we, as a society (speaking as an American), determined that our pace of innovation was too slow and decided that we needed to do something about it.

This idea, that patents encourage innovation, is the justification, not the motivation, for the legal construct that is the patent. There were no experiments done to test this hypothesis. In fact, I think the history of invention before patents suggests quite strongly that they are not needed; that, in fact, people will invent simply because we are tool builders and tinkerers.

EDIT: To testify to the fact that people invented before patents: <http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/2011/12/machine-power.html>

A book from 1606 showing illustrations of gear and hydraulic powered devices. Some are fanciful, others less so, but they all clearly show humankind figuring out every last way to apply a technology to the tasks of every day life.

<comment><USER37> Have you researched the history of patents? I'm no expert, but my understanding is that they were established in response to the guild system, in which a lot of technical knowledge was kept secret. Invention may have been occurring, but it didn't benefit the larger society the way it could have.

<comment><USER38> One legal theory behind patents is that they were a tool to incentivize immigration. It benefited the United States even before it was the United States, as people was encouraging to stay in the country during the duration of exclusivity, and gave the country a working model of the invention so people could learn. Before patents, many invention was treated as city or state secret.

I can recommend a very interesting talk by Professor Eben Moglen, who teach law history and actually read discussions that happened between the people who wrote and worked with the first implementation of the US patent law (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LPzpBn-XGxw>).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "IPRs can be risky and costly. We know this IPR will cost us more than the $75,000 that Rotatable wanted to extort from us. "

Would love to have the breakdown of where the legal fees are going to file the inter parties review. To me seems like several hundred hours of legal work involved. (75000/400 approx.)

<http://www.uspto.gov/aia_implementation/bpai.jsp#heading-1>

(Wondering also whether the IPR stays any legal proceedings that have started or prevents any legal proceedings.)

</comment><comment><USER39> Why should reexaminations be so expensive?

I think this is an area where Google could really be useful. With their database and search algorithms, it'd be doable for them to put together a service to do prior art searches. Maybe use text analysis to summarize prior patents into English (since they're written in a fairly structured way to begin with).

It doesn't need to be advanced AI. Anything they came up with would certainly be better than whatever process the USPTO uses now.

</comment><comment><USER40> I like this approach. I would be mathematically surprised if there exists any patent that cannot be invalidated via prior art. It seems there is a strong correlation between the amount of information online and the probability of there existing easily accessible prior art for any arbitrary patent.

In other words, if the amount of information on the web doubles every year, the probability of finding prior art that can invalidate any patent doubles as well. By this point in time, with the amount of information that has been moved online, the probability of having a patent not subject to prior art claims seems astronomically low.

As an anecdote, I just saw "The Mother of All Demos" (1968 - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs>), for the first time the other day. That video alone contains dozens of inventions that I thought were relatively recent.

<comment><USER41> The "information" on the web is not doubling. The number of accessible bytes are.

Ten million cat videos don't constitute prior art against RSA, for example.

<comment><USER42> No, but it certainly increases the possibility you might see a cat chasing a laser pointer:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_exercising_a_cat>

<comment><USER41> Touché.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's an unsettling trend in startups today on IP protection. A lot of incubators/accelerators seem to think that having a protectable IP = innovation.

By placing more focus on patents rather than on real innovation, we are far from acting as a catalyst to promote innovation in developing countries like India. Intellectual monopolies in the developed world prohibit SMEs in developing countries from growing to the point where they are able to compete in global markets with the western IP heavyweights. It is imperative that developing countries like India and China place careful thought before committing to restrictive FTAs that are specifically designed to keep them at a lower level of technological development.

</comment><comment><USER44> If IPR for screen-rotation ends up with nullifying the patent, can organizations like EFF start doing that pro-actively for other ridiculous patents like One-Click-Buy and Swipe-to-Unlock? Or does the patent-holder have to be proven as a troll?

<comment><USER45> The patent holder would have to sue someone first or there would be no standing to bring a case.

<comment><USER46> Anyone can file a re-examination request ex parte. The EFF have done this occasion, without an actual filed lawsuit from the Patent Assertion Entity(PAE="troll") but it still costs thousands of dollars in fees and the EFF lawyers time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Without a doubt, one of the most honourable deeds that a company can do for the rest of the world. The courage and altruism displayed by Rackspace should serve as a reminder to any company:

We _cannot_ afford to let patent trolls win.

</comment><comment><USER48> I'm not a lawyer but this patent troll litigation would seem to be a textbook case for estoppel by acquiescence. [1] These patent trolls are deliberately waiting until the patents are firmly established norms in the industry so that finding alternatives are that much harder. Furthermore, the trolls wrongly allow time to go by so that they can claim a higher damage reward than they otherwise would have.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel_by_acquiescence>

</comment><comment><USER49> Question to the Rackspace guys:

Why don't you make a kickstarter project to pay for the IPR?

As you said, other companies are interested in sharing the cost, as trolls go after them too. Why not sharing the cost too?.

Companies that are affected by trolls are acting like independent entities, witch makes them extremely vulnerable to big companies and capitalized trolls.

You need to unite!

Small and medium business are most of America's or European business, but if you act alone and divided you will be easily defeated(divide and conquer)

</comment><comment><USER50> When I read the title I thought they were talking about abolishing patents altogether, which I think is not such a bad idea. At least for software patents I definitely think they should be eliminated.

Eliminating this one patent is pretty useless. Admirable in a certain sense, but there are thousands of other ridiculous patents. You can't fix the entire system one patent at a time.

</comment><comment><USER51> This sounds like it could be a good PR move for Rackspace. I've heard from quite a few developers who, for whatever reason, have a negative opinion of Rackspace. Does this action change your opinion of them?

But perhaps it ultimate comes down to their service, the products they offer, and price.

<comment><USER52> Just curious why you've found that people don't like rackspace?

We've used them for a while without any major complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> These sort of things are scary to me, I am planning on starting a business, using money from my own pocket and the fact that random companies are going to sue me just cuz they they can makes me not want to start one which just lowers then innovation that takes place.

</comment><comment><USER54> This type of behavior is commendable. Cheers Rackspace.

</comment><comment><USER55> Rackspace is really smart here. By making it a public policy they're showing patent trolls that they're out of luck trying their antics with them.

</comment><comment><USER56> If you abolish the patent, you would then become like China and Russia and a few of the other countries where lots of STEALING takes place...Hence, a dive in creativity would happen, just like you see in China and Russia for the last 100 or so years since socialism and communism.

Also, China, only very very few are rich, definitely less than the USA's 1 percent. And only those in power make the decisions, those little guys ideas are easily walked on by a number of "market competition" methods.

<comment><USER57> _If you abolish the patent, you would then become like China and Russia and a few of the other countries where lots of STEALING takes place...Hence, a dive in creativity would happen,_

You have no way of proving this connection. Practice even shows completely the opposite - absence of software patents increases creativity. "Stealing" is using the patents to extort money. Or should I rather call it robbing to sound more appropriate? So abolishing software patents will reduce robbing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I wonder if there are any active patent trolls outside of the US, or is it just not viable.

</comment><comment><USER59> Coming from the company that put a "TM" after every mention of the generic word "Cloud Server" on their website.

<comment><USER60> A trademark is different from a software patent. A trademark addresses specific product branding in a specific market; a software patent -- at least the ones in question -- address a generic process that's not limited to a specific market. Consider the trademark on the Wikipedia name versus a (hypothetical) software patent on "a method for storing and displaying user- generated content."

<comment><USER59> Ok. If i want to start a cloud server company, can i use the generic word Cloud Server? if i do, will Rackspace sue me? Even if they are different things, seems like they reach the same outcome.

<comment><USER60> INAL, but my understanding is that you can use a generic phrase like "cloud servers", where both "cloud" and "servers" have pre-established meanings in the space, as long as you don't use the name for a product competing in the same space. E.g., you could call a service providing base images for clouds "Image Marketplace," but not "AWS Marketplace".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> You don't need to kill patents to kill the troll: modify the law so that the only way patents can be transferred is when the company gets acquired.

This makes patents a valuable asset for start ups while completely killing the patent troll business.

Patents can be useful, don't throw the baby out with the bath water.</comment>


Catfish hunt pigeons in France - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/general-sciences-features/67959-catfish-hunt-pigeons-in-france <comment><USER2> Having been an angler (mostly fly) for almost my entire life, I've seen things like this fairly often.

Fish are very attracted to surface animals in the water due to their relative inability to escape once in the water. Ducks make easy prey and watering birds in the shallows are only moderately more difficult. Probably one of the most voracious shallow-water predators is the Northern Pike, which I've seen catch birds, mice and other animals many times while fishing in Canada. At my Dad's house in northern California, we see Bass suck under small ducklings many times a year.

Unlike the Catfish, Bass, Pike and other shallow water predators have specific behavior for lying in wait. They will stop in the water, use the pectoral fins to hold stable and then curl their tail to one side. This allows them to rapidly straighten their bodies and blast forward in one swift stroke to seize prey. Note in the video that the catfish do not employ this - they make a snapping/sucking motion with their jaws to draw the prey in.

One of the largest Bass I ever caught was hooked using a fly I tied, made to look like a Robin. I had seen a 14+ lb. Largemouth attempting to eat robins that were landing on lily pads. I tied the fly over about 1 week and caught it on a gorgeous Sunday morning just after the sun came over the trees :)

<comment><USER3> Do you have a picture of the fish?

<comment><USER4> It's a big fish:

<http://www.kingsailfishmounts.com/UserFiles/northernpike.jpg>

Pike grow to a relatively large size; lengths of 150 centimetres (59 in) and weights of 25 kilograms (55 lb) are not unheard of. The heaviest specimen known so far was caught in an abandoned stone quarry, in Germany, in 1983. She (the majority of all pikes over 8 kg or 18 lb are females) was 147 cm (58 in) long and weighed 31 kg (68 lb). The longest pike ever recorded was 152 cm (60 in) long and weighed 28 kg (62 lb).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe it's the cat genes... ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> How long until we start seeing anglers using pigeons (hopefully decoys) for bait?

<comment><USER3> Most flies used in fly fishing incorporate some sort of feathers, but that's usually to imitate an insect or fish. The largest "terrestrial" that I've ever imitated is a mouse (the fly consisted of some other type of non-mouse fur-- rabbit and deer). This is typically done at night, and it's a lot of fun.

I know people who have seen fish eat ducklings, and I've seen fish try to grab damselflies out of the branches of trees. But watching a fish grab an entire pigeon off of the shore is pretty cool.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, I'm a fly fisherman myself, so my response was partly tongue in cheek.

I had a vole-type fly as well, but never used it in anger. Biggest for me would be a fry/minnow imitation.

People always talk about pike taking ducklings, or duck's feet, but I agree saying a pigeon being taken would be cool.

<comment><USER2> I've seen lots of Bass and Pike go for ducks :)

As a note, the vole or mice flies are fantastic for Trout streams, Bass and Pike. Big rainbows or Brown Trout will snap up a mouse fly on the surface - draw it past with a very rapid staccato motion to make waves on the surface.

Then watch their wakes rocket to the fly. Total blast :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm I live at 100 meter of this river, I think I need to spend more time watching and filming the pigeons.

</comment><comment><USER8> Interesting adaptation of a non-native species.

<comment><USER9> The article also mentions that these are non-native, but why is that relevant? Is the suggestion that in an area in which catfish are native, they wouldn't exhibit this behavior?

There must be areas in which native catfish are hungry and in proximity to birds. Maybe it occurs there too.

<comment><USER8> _"There must be areas in which native catfish are hungry and in proximity to birds. Maybe it occurs there too."_

Its the combination of birds being available and regular food _not_ being available and then one has to be successful enough at it to survive. Catfish are pretty opportunistic feeders, which is perhaps why they would consider birds to be food if they were otherwise starving.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This reminds me a bit of one of my favorite episodes of this "X minus 1" old- time radio show.

[http://www.podcasts.com/x_minus_one/episode/student_body_073...](http://www.podcasts.com/x_minus_one/episode/student_body_07311956)

</comment><comment><USER11> Does that make them catfish hunters...?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catfish_Hunter>

</comment><comment><USER12> why is this on HN?

<comment><USER13> Because someone found it interesting, and it's not an article about a poisonous topic like politics/economics. I didn't find it terribly interesting myself (the article was too short), so I did not vote for it, but it doesn't seem likely to generate boring/repetitive discussions, either.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, something fresh and unique article wise can never hurt. I always figured the mentality of a hacker was to be curious about everything in the world around them, even if it's not directly related to start ups, programming and technology.

Curiosity leads to wanting to figure out why things are as they are and how they can be improved. Never know when something seemingly independent can lead to some other inspiration.

However, I do agree the content is lacking and it says that the actual research behind it is on an open site (though no link). Would have been nice to link that instead of the above link.

Since it wasn't posted here's the direct link to the research: [http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0050840)</comment></comment></comment>


Automatic Colorization of Grayscale Images - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/satoshiiizuka/siggraph2016_colorization <comment><USER2> "We learn to automatically color grayscale images with a deep network. Our network learns both local features and global features jointly in a single framework. Our approach can then be used on images of any resolution. By incorporating global features we are able to obtain realistic colorings with our model."

This is so cool. I'm bandwidth constrained at the moment, but I'm looking forward to try it. Machine learning applied to colorization. I wonder how the past century photos will look. Congratulations to the authors and thank you for releasing it in the wild.

Color me impressed :-))</comment>


Ask HN: Where to host your projects? - <AUTHOR>

Looking at things like Snowpocalypse, ThreeWordsMe and the kid who just did the three words "clone" 5factsabout.me; as a noobie who wants to dip their toes in the webapp space, I'm wondering where people host these smaller projects. <comment><USER2> Well as you describe yourself as a noob I'll say this. Take a good look at Google App Engine before committing to it. Maybe read this too <http://www-cs- students.stanford.edu/~silver/gae.html> . I'm sure it works for some people but I wouldn't want to find my product taking off and then having to port off GAE to deal with it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Rackspace Cloud has a $10/month 256MB instance (though traffic is extra). Amazon EC2 micro instance is free for one year (traffic is extra). VPSLink is a little pricier but works well. Linode is pricier still but (2nd hand report) works extremely well.

</comment><comment><USER4> I host all of my side projects on Google App Engine and write them using Gaelyk. It is a lightweight Groovy framework for GAE, if you already know Java you're good to go. Once you get one project out, it is amazing how productive you can be. Check it out here: <http://gaelyk.appspot.com> Let me know if you want any help or would like to work together on something.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you dont want to get involved with the sys admin

Heroku for Ruby Apps Google App Engine, Java or Python Windows Azure .net

If you want to maintain the server yourself a VPS is probably the best best Linode/Slicehost

Amazon S3 for static file storage

</comment><comment><USER6> If you're a python or java programmer you could use Google App Engine. It seems ideal for small projects.

I know breakupnotifier.com was hosted on GAE.

<comment><USER7> And even if you aren't a java programmer, there's probably an implementation of your language of choice written for the JVM, which might work on AppEngine. Clojure definitely works, and I think JRuby does as well.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Wow. Great advice everyone. I'll probable start with GAE and see where I go from there as my experience/abilities improve.

</comment><comment><USER8> i seem to remember threewordsme being hosted on Linode, they always seem a good choice. (btw, im no expert at all! no my side of the business :P)</comment>


Ask HN:  Marketing experiment - <AUTHOR>

I've heard a couple different people mention blogs where they pay someone in the Philippines to write content.  The blogs run Adsense or something similar.  These don't bring in tons of money, but they are profitable if marketed well.
A friend and I found this a little ridiculous.  We wanted to give it a shot.  1) It would improve our marketing skills, and 2) it would make an interesting story.  We wanted the site to be relatively worthless, content-wise, but still be able to gather a following.
We came up with an idea that wasn't completely worthless though.  Our blog is music recommendation service, focusing on good songs to wake up to in the morning.  Revenue would be through affiliate advertising for the songs and Adsense.
We launched our blog, wakeuptomusic.com, about 2 weeks ago and we have really struggled to attract a following.  We've focused mainly on using social media to attract followers, which hasn't brought a lot of traffic so far.
I wanted to ask the HN community for any ideas you might have on how to market something like this.  We're looking at some interesting ideas with Twitter, like a iTunes giftcard raffle, crowdsourcing posts (the post will be the top tweets about the song, instead of one we right ourselves), etc.
What are some standard practices in marketing a blog like this?  What are some crazy left field ideas that might work?  This is above all an experiment and an exercise, where we have an uphill battle marketing a semi-useless blog.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I'm not in a brainstorming state of mind at the moment, but as for your initial point, it is true. I know of several people that hire people from the Pacific regions via Odesk to do content writing. Combine this with some decent SEO implements and your traffic should see a steady rise in 3 months.</comment>


Ask HN: Are corporate hierarchies the only way for work to get done effectively? - <AUTHOR> Could an online community work as a liquid democracy?<p>or a digital co-op? <comment><AUTHOR> One idea I had was a something that starts out as a private company but instead of IPOing it sells itself to it's users as some kind of mutual company(like some insurance companies are structured) except more accountability/transparency to it's users.

<comment><AUTHOR> By making it private at first it could attract VC money and initial adopters, but once it got big enough for network effects to kick in the system would act like a giant digital asset black hole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> There are worker cooperatives in the tech world too: [https://github.com/hng/tech-coops](https://github.com/hng/tech-coops)

<comment><AUTHOR> Seems like digital assets are more potentially lucrative.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Non-hierarchical decision making structures are often effective at small scales but tend to fail when the number of participants passes a dozen or so.</comment>


ASUS will release a bootloader unlocking tool for the Transformer Prime - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/ASUS/posts/300815559961849

<comment><USER2> That was pretty quick. Nice to see they were on top of things.

Also looking forward to getting Ice Cream Sandwhich on the 12th of January. I ordered mine a few days ago, but Amazon was out of stock so it looks like I may have to wait a while.

<comment><USER3> It's nice to see they were on top of things, but it's pretty chilling to see why they had locked the bootloader in the first place:

"Regarding the bootloader, the reason we chose to lock it is due to content providers' requirement for DRM client devices to be as secure as possible."

It's nice that in the end they prioritized what their customers wanted over what other parties whose interests run completely counter to their customers want. It's frightening that the content cartels have enough influence to essentially try to lock down general purpose computing in the first place.

<comment><USER4> I think you may have misunderstood either who ASUS's customers are, or what those customers want.

You are not a normal ASUS customer. If you were, you wouldn't be here discussing this. "Normal" customers want Netflix, Hulu+, Kindle, and the like, not hackable boot roms.

Open source boxes that are not locked down generally do not get to have an official Netflix client, Hulu+ client, etc. Users won't buy things that don't have the content they want, and Hollywood won't let things have that content if users can easily compromise the digital path.

Btw, it's not ASUS's issue, it's that users want movies and Netflix has them. It's not Netflix's issue, it's in their contracts with DRM providers and studios, contracts they have to sign to have the movies users want. To carry the movies, lock things down. Users want movies, ergo, things are locked down.

For all the Apple hate, Jobs stared down the record labels, and unlocked music. To solve the "open" business, Google should put money behind open business models for movies, enough money that Hollywood capitulates and all these contracts up the chain can get redone in the consumer's interest.

<comment><USER5> > For all the Apple hate, Jobs stared down the record labels, and unlocked > music.

Amazon is responsible for getting the record labels to release music as DRM- free MP3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Happy to see that they're addressing the bootloader problem.

Less happy to read that GPS is beyond fixing. I don't particularly care about that, to be honest, so I might end up buying one anyway (once they're available in the UK, damn), but still, it's one of those where you wonder how the hell could make it through QA (and if they missed that, what else did they miss...?)

<comment><USER7> I doubt they missed it, they just made the decision that most tablet users won't be using GPS. Most smartphones don't have GPS reception indoors, so tablet GPS reception is mostly a non-issue. It was probably a decision to either scrap millions in development cost plus delay launch, or just go forward with it.</comment></comment>


The origin of XEmacs according to Richard Stallman - <AUTHOR> http://stallman.org/articles/xemacs.origin

<comment><USER2> For the sake of completeness, Richard P. Gabriel's account is here: <http://www.dreamsongs.com/DiBona-OReillyLetter.html>

And Jamie Zawinski's account of this is here: <http://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> Forking. Sacrament, not a sin. But don't tell that to the prophets.</comment>


Tab stacking in Opera 11 (YouTube) - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqSGGk1YTI

<comment><AUTHOR> Link to the announcement page: <http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/opera- goes-to-eleven>.

I wanted to focus on tab stacking, which is why I linked to the video instead of said page.</comment>


Ron Conway To Focus On Real Time Data Startups: 40-50 New Investments - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/03/ron-conway-to-focus-angel-investments-on-real-time-data/

<comment><USER3> The key point here is that real-time monitoring of data is the next big thing. I agree wholeheartedly that it is one of the biggest next things coming up. That and data visualization so that people make sense and understand what the data is saying.

Calling it Web 3.0 is just rubbish. There is real value in services that can produce info/knowledge/data in real time, and we certainly don't need a silly label for it.

<sarcasm>Maybe now _live_.com will become useful for something </sarcasm>

<comment><USER4> i'm starting to become increasingly skeptical that with all of the free-flow data out there, there is no algorithm that can magically "put it together" in a way that shows you exactly what you want to see.

the problem? what you want to see is mixed in with a whole lot more things you don't want to see, and there is no metadata available that enables anyone to automagically figure out what to show you -- the data's just not there, even for facebook, and if facebook can't do it, twitter doesn't have a chance in hell.

absent of that magic sorting algorithm, "Real Time Data" becomes too time consuming to sort through.

<comment><USER3> No one said it was easy, and we have a good model of how the industry might evolve: the problem of "search".

We had things like Altavista, Yahoo!, etc, and then came Google with a better algo. It made sense of the data out there without any real use of meta data (meta tags in HTML notwithstanding, at least initially).

And even to this day, we're seeing interesting experiments in solving the problem of finding information on the web, and how to present it. All I'm saying is that the next step is doing this in real time.

<comment><USER4> i certainly won't exclude that it's in the realm of possibilities... just that, lately, i'm finding it more and more unlikely.

twitter "authority" seems to me to be an even more difficult problem than blog authority, and even that was easily game-able.

besides, twitter doesn't even have the same social graph for me as facebook does, and facebook still has a pretty difficult time separating the wheat from the chaff.

if that breakthrough doesn't show up, it will be revolutionary. if it doesn't, the "real time web" might just be overhyped.

<comment><USER3> Remember we've only just recently managed to accumulate all this data in a mainstream way. It will take time for that breakthrough to happen, but it will happen.

Example: when AOL released their "anonymous" data, it took the NYT a few days to personally identify a user. It took humans, working on it for a good few hours, being creative, and produced only one data point (one person), but it still happened. We need to find ways to make deep data mining happen much faster... in real time :)

Emphasis on mainstream, by the way, because data mining is not a new field by any measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The better definition I have heard of technology cycles (via UX's Jared Spool):

1.0 (First generation) is all about the technology. "Hey check out my Motorola cellular phone. It weighs 2 pounds and is portable."

2.0 (Second generation) is all about features. "Text messaging, pictures, ringtones, games, address book, MP3 player, J2ME, comes in pink"

3.0 (Third generation) is all about the user experience. The iPhone.

<comment><USER6> Efficiency, effectiveness, experience. They don't have to all be generations, they can co-exist.

 _Cars_ : Compact, SUV, sports car

 _Laptops_ : Acer, MacBook, MacBook Air

 _Grocery Stores_ : Costco, Whole Foods, Wegmans

<comment><USER5> I agree. Generations might not be the best term, even though generations of people (grandparents -> grandkids) can definitely co-exist and learn from each other. Maybe a better term is waves (as in one wave rolling into another)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Oooh. New buzzword. Goodbye, Web 2.0, Hello "Real Time Data."

For those of you who aren't older than dirt, "Real Time" probably first appeared circa 1972.

EDIT: s/1972/forever/

<comment><USER8> The OED has quotations going back as far as 1953:

1953 Math. Tables & Other Aids to Computation VII. 73 With the advent of large-scale high-speed digital computers, there arises the question of their possible use in the solution of problems in 'real time', i.e., in conjunction with instruments receiving and responding to stimuli from the external environment. The criteria for satisfactory operation in such real-time service are different from those generally encountered.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the correction. Anyway the discussion of real-time vs. batch has been going on since (before) I grew up. I would even argue that the term "scalability" bandied about these days is really a reversion to batch processing - even caching algorithms are a form of batch processing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Personally, when it comes to investing, I'd rather be a contrarian. Out of these 40 to 50 investments, most will not fly unless they get acquired. "Hope we get bought, fingers crossed" is not a business model. It only works if you invest across a broad section and one of them hits big (which Ron is doing).

I'd rather invest in 40 to 50 simple cash-producing businesses on the web (affiliate networks, lead generation, sticky / viral apps in closed platforms, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER10> Where is the value?

There has always been important real time data like stock market prices, weather, air traffic control etc. None of this changes a bit with the proliferation of internet and web apps, so it is hard to expect any new value here.

The new real time data is generated by real time user interaction - <USER2> users and computers and among users (using computers as intermediary). The real time user interaction itself has value and this has been demonstrated: we have continuously invented new kinds of social media built on computer networks. For social media instant is certainly better than fast.

In fact, focusing on data seems wrong here, you'd better focus on the interaction. Even if the actual value is the data, this is where the data would be both generated and used.

<comment><USER11> Doesn't it seem like the information you mention has become available in a fundamentally different way (quantity, speed) with the internet?

In this data stream, it would seem that the interaction itself would be part of the data, that is, "user-a -> user-b at 21:31:22.034"

The trick will be to find the value in this data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wanted to know what Eastern Time Obama's speech was going to be. I spent 10 minutes on google with no luck.

I went on twitter search and immediately found 100s of people with the same question. It took me a few minutes to find a post with the answer.

</comment><comment><USER13> "Real time" to me means an interaction delay in the range of milliseconds. If the delay is more in the range of seconds like the web application i am working on then "live" would probably be a better term.

<comment><USER14> I think event-driven (as opposed to request driven) is probably a better term to describe the conceptual difference being discussed here. Obviously you could then have different latency requirements for event delivery depending on the application.

<comment><USER11> I think this is the best way to think about it. Event-driven unstructured or lightly structured data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think that real time data is indeed going to be the next big thing. One question which remains is are there any data sources outside of twitter which can be aggregated to make something greater than the sum of the parts?

</comment><comment><USER16> I know this is a generic question that's a bit off-topic, but how do you pitch to someone like this? How do you get introduced (especially if you're in Europe)?

<comment><USER9> Not easy. Connections, basically. Better yet, build something on your own that gets traction. Then Angels / VCs will come knocking on your door.

He's the top Angel in the valley. It's like asking, how do I pitch "Speilberg" when I'm in Europe. Instead, do your own Indie film, get it in film festivals, get traction, and the right people will find you.

<comment><USER16> Perfect answer. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Maybe with the Real Time hype my <http://lloogg.com> is worth something?

</comment><comment><USER18> it's a shame people are figuring out things to term web 3.0 before anyone figured out how to really monetize web 2.0

</comment><comment><USER19> The "Real" real time data mining will happen when credit card companies/banks offer an API. Otherwise, this whole real time on the web is not that big of a deal for most people.</comment>


Standard Ebooks: Free public-domain ebooks, carefully produced - <AUTHOR> https://standardebooks.org/ <comment><USER2> > Other free ebooks don't put much effort into professional-quality > typography: they use "straight" quotes instead of "curly" quotes, they > ignore details like em- and en-dashes, and they look more like early-90's > web pages instead of actual books.

True. I hope you guys get proper funding and keep this project on.

Contribute: [https://standardebooks.org/contribute/](https://standardebooks.org/contribute/)

(I was thinking a Slack or Discord would be better than Google groups mailing list for this?)

<comment><USER3> Why would you force people to use nonfree proprietary software in order to contribute to an open project?

<comment><USER4> That's a good point. I find Zulip better than Slack/Discord for discourse (even better than mailing lists, with some caveats, and it's Apache-licensed:

[https://zulipchat.com/](https://zulipchat.com/)

<comment><USER5> I knew about Zulip but wasn't aware of the free hosted plan. I can truly see it now as an alternative for orgs who can't afford running these things themselves.

<comment><USER4> I use the free hosted plan and intend to pay for it when I need more features. It's _excellent_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's great that these are in a consistent formatting style. When trying to extract some contents programmatically from some Gutenberg texts, I kept running into different formatting styles. That combined with being able to check out the entire repository makes it much simpler to do data processing on the works.

And, of course, fixing more errors is of course a noble goal. Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg?

<comment><USER7> > Are these corrections going to make it upstream to Gutenberg?

It's an issue worth raising to the team. In the spirit of GPL, I think reporting any instances of clear typos in the source text upstream would be a good idea.

The problem is that so much work is done to the text as part of StandardEbook production that we can't exactly just submit a single patch or diff. It would be difficult to identify the textual corrections from stylistic changes in an automatic way, _unless_ we were to enforce typo corrections to occur in a single commit. We're currently encouraged to use an [Editorial] tag when modernizing spelling such as "any one" -> "anyone", so perhaps we should see about a [Transcription Error] tag for obvious typos.

The upshot is that all of the books' sources are hosted on GH. So an interested party could, in theory, review the commit history and pull out what look to be typo corrections. See, for example:

[https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the- lerouge...](https://github.com/standardebooks/emile-gaboriau_the-lerouge- case/commit/50958e4ed3cc22cf9afb26dabcd93d9f986f9b8a)

Failing that, the contributor could simply manually keep track of any typos they fix and report them to GP.

<comment><USER8> "Modernizing" is a very questionable thing to do IMO.

Fixing typos is fine I guess, but books are the result of an era and grammar or writing style is an inherent part of a book that should not be altered.

<comment><USER9> We're pretty light touch. For an example, the biggest change a typical novel gets is amending "to-day" to "today".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> A similar project for books in french (french books and books translated to french) : [https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ebooks.php](https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/ebooks.php)

<comment><USER11> Thanks! I've been looking for a website with free French ebooks for quite some time...

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A book that might be of specific interest for HN's audience is the recent production for Standard Ebooks I did of Charles Babbage's autobiography:

[https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles- babbage/passages-f...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles- babbage/passages-from-the-life-of-a-philosopher)

It covers a plethora of subjects, but devotes a few chapters to the Difference Engine and the political difficulties in getting it funded. Bonus MathML (rendered to PNGs in most readers but real for the Kobo), and all diagrams support both normal and white-on-black dark mode if you're got your reader set up like that.

</comment><comment><USER12> Discussed in 2017: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035)

<comment><USER13> Dang, could you lift vvillyd's rate limit as new user in case this still exists?

<comment><USER14> We removed it a little while ago, in fact. Thanks for the heads up! (Emailing firstname.lastname@example.com is quicker and more reliable for next time.)

<comment><USER13> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's always great to see public domain books being made available, and standardebooks is certainly worth a visit. However, while I read quite a lot and in particular the sort of books that are available there, I mostly give the site a miss purely because of its design. I don't want to seem too sarcastic, but having huge images as a listing for books is odd when most of the users can read quite well. I'm probably a bit sensitive about this, since our local library does the same thing - it almost looks like there is something about uncompromisingly textual information that provokes a reaction from web designers.

</comment><comment><USER16> I just want to say that I appreciate all the effort.

I've finally gotten around to reading many of the classics using your ePub files.

</comment><comment><USER17> Is there any way to download them all? Ebooks are very small so it shouldn't be a problem to make an archive, or at least have a way to use curl/wget to download them all from a directory.

<comment><USER18> There's something called opds. Sort of like a file that defines a library and its contents.

[https://standardebooks.org/opds/](https://standardebooks.org/opds/)

I've never really been able to get it to work with calibre, pretty much the standard go to piece of software for all things ebooks.

I would be interested in hearing about any tips for getting an opds working.

<comment><USER19> I ended up using this to download all the azw3 files for my kindle, it's probably not the best you could do, so feel free to use it as _reference_ for yourself if you might do something similar.

      curl -s https://standardebooks.org/opds/all | grep -oE "/(.*).azw3" | sed -e"s/^/https:\/\/standardebooks.org/" | xargs -n 1 curl -O

P.S. Calibre seems to only work with them and the kindle when you send over USB (I keep my paperwhite in airplane mode, signed out, ads disabled)[0]

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20596300](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20596300)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Not only is this an excellent project, I think this is also an incredible collection of books you've chosen to feature. I also really appreciate the art choices that have been made for the covers.

I have many of these in epub from Gutenberg, but plan to replace them with your versions when I have some time.

I know others have already asked about bulk download--have you considered offering a torrent of the full library or possibly one for each file format?

</comment><comment><USER21> This is fantastic, and immediately I want to try and contribute engineering time to it. I've tried reading Gutenberg ebooks before and gave up because of how inconsistent and unreadable they could be.

Is there a wishlist of tools/software out there that someone could contribute to?

</comment><comment><USER22> I must admire beautiful cover art selected for ebooks.

<comment><USER9> Thanks, it's honestly the hardest part of the production process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there any plans to support languages beyond English?

<comment><USER24> It looks like they've decided not to publish any non-English books [1]. It's a pity – I much prefer reading books in their original language if I'm able to understand it, and I was even considering contributing some German books to their collection. Maybe it would complicate the publishing process a bit though since different languages have different practices for things like punctuation.

[1]: [https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted- ebooks](https://standardebooks.org/contribute/accepted-ebooks)

<comment><USER25> The tools are available. Maybe someone would be willing to make a similar project for other languages.

<comment><USER26> The only one I know of is [http://projectoadamastor.org](http://projectoadamastor.org) in Portuguese. I can't tell whether it uses the same tooling, but the project generally predates Standard Ebooks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Guess "printing by demand" will be a good source for funding such projects.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm really curious why a book ([https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-w- chesnutt/the-con...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/charles-w-chesnutt/the- conjure-woman)) originally published in the US would need to include this:

"This ebook is only thought to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. It may still be under copyright in other countries. If you're not located in the United States, you must check your local laws to verify that the contents of this ebook are free of copyright restrictions in the country you're located in before downloading or using this ebook."

Can anyone speak to this?

<comment><USER29> A few countries had copyright terms longer than the US. For example Mexico is life of author + 100 years while US is life + 70 years.

<comment><USER9> Most of the work is life of the author + 70 years, but the US is anything published in 1924 or later (with a few exceptions, for example if copyright wasn't renewed in the 60s).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder if the azw3 files work with the Kindle's latest display engine? Specifically, can ragged-right be turned on? Are hyphenation hints embedded?

<comment><USER9> I don't have a Kindle so haven't tested, but I believe we build the AZW3 files from the epub2 ones, which have hyphenation baked in using the Python hyphenation library.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> For the Amazon-compatible "azw3" files that I'm seeing, I'm curious why the book cover thumbnail images are a separate download from the ebook file itself?

Unless I'm missing a trick, it seems like you have to use Calibre (or some other application) to re-build the "azw3" file with the cover thumbnail properly embedded. Why not just ship the ebook files like that to begin with?

<comment><USER32> Kobo is far easier just download the epub on to your mobile and use the import button from the app and it will automatically get downloaded

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I applaud this idea & hope it goes well. I'm always a little disappointed when I download a book from Gutenberg and the formatting makes it virtually unreadable.

I'd also like to mention feedbooks which have a very nicely set of curated ebooks: [http://m.feedbooks.com/publicdomain](http://m.feedbooks.com/publicdomain)

(I have no affiliation with them)

</comment><comment><USER34> I got really excited, but then I noticed that there was no PDF option. I hate epubs with a passion, because all epub programs suck.

<comment><USER35> Have you tried FBReader ([https://fbreader.org/](https://fbreader.org/)). The Android version has so far met my needs, and the Linux version works well (in my opinion).

<comment><USER34> For reference, this is what a document viewer should look like, in my opinion: [https://i.imgur.com/kkhk2dX.png](https://i.imgur.com/kkhk2dX.png) [#]

Notice the gray margin outside the sheet, and the padding inside the sheet. The first one gives you a general frame of view, and also you don't want the document to use the whole screen width when using a 16:9 monitor or similar screen.

The padding is necessary because you don't want characters too close to a margin, else they look like they're _escaping_ the sheet.

I haven't been able to replicate this setup with Calibre, FBReader or any other epub reader.

Fonts are another issue. Default fonts always suck. FBReader uses Dejavu Serif, that, in my opinion looks just bad. I changed it to Bitstream Charter, which looks decent, but then the line justification looked wrong, I changed that, and then paragraph margin looked wrong. There's a million little things that look horrible by default and you have to spend an hour per book setting up your reader so that it looks right.

I've tried generating PDFs with Calibre, the result: giant ugly fonts, zero sheet padding, nonsensical spacing, etc.

At some point you just give up and avoid epubs like the plague.

[#] The book is called Crypto 101, by lvh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> [https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/](https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/)

</comment><comment><USER37> This is a great idea.

Another ebook non-profit I'd like to see is one that shepherds books through the copyright maze. No doubt there are scads of books in the public domain that no one has proven are actually there. Perhaps this exists already but it strikes me as a good separate, and highly targeted, kind of effort.

</comment><comment><USER11> BTW does Kindle let you load your own DRM-free ebook files instead of buying books on Amazon? I use a PocketBook (pocketbook-int.com) which emulates a mass storage device and lets me read everything. I once considered buying a Kindle but heard it won't let me load bare files this way. Is this true?

<comment><USER38> You can sideload the files via USB, just copy the files over to its internal storage and it will appear on the home screen.

You can also associate a Kindle with an email address, and email files to that address. The file appears as part of your cloud collection.

For sideloading, the books need to be azw3 or mobi. For emailing the book needs to be mobi. In either case epub is not accepted.

<comment><USER39> Calibre is a great way to manage syncronisation and reformatting to Kindle- supported file types, it even allows you to select your Kindle model to make sure it looks well:

[https://calibre-ebook.com/](https://calibre-ebook.com/)

[https://www.howtogeek.com/73979/how-to-organize-your- ebook-c...](https://www.howtogeek.com/73979/how-to-organize-your-ebook- collection-with-calibre/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm a fan of Standard Ebooks for my Kobo Aura One reader. Their EPUB versions look great.

</comment><comment><USER41> Great project, following your progress and will be getting books from here since the formatting is so much nicer than some other places.

Question: how is Philip K Dick in public domain already?

<comment><USER42> Several of his works were published before 1964 and the copyright was not renewed.

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Philip_Kindred_Dick](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Philip_Kindred_Dick)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Is there any way to browse by genre and year published?

<comment><USER44> You can search by genre, but the only way I noticed to do it is to click on a book with the genre you want, then there'll be a link to browse other books with the same genre tags.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Are there any good, open source e-readers out there?

<comment><USER46> There's [Foliate]([https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/](https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/)) for reading epub files on Linux.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Any chance to provide mobi format? The azw3 files do not work on my Kindle Paperwhite.

<comment><USER7> How are you sending the file to your Kindle? AZW3 should work if you're connected to your computer via USB and dragging over manually or sending over via Calibre, but I've seen it not work if you're trying to send it to the email addy associated with the kindle. For that, you are correct, MOBI is usually the preferred option.

<comment><USER47> Yup, I am trying to email it.

<comment><USER7> Won't work, I'm afraid! And the project leader has already shot down that request in the past. See here:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/standardebooks/mo...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/standardebooks/mobi|sort:date/standardebooks/GyjQL1s9rAA/BsGpOnvSBgAJ)

It should still work if you transfer it over USB, but if you're trying to do it all wirelessly, simply download the EPUB and convert it to MOBI, and you should be good to go.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is absolutely amazing!

</comment><comment><USER49> How many books have been produced? What is the goal/hope?

</comment><comment><USER50> This made me smile: (from the style guide)

> Do convert from logical punctuation to American punctuation where possible.

</comment><comment><USER51> Great idea.

Now consider something similar for Audiobooks.

<comment><USER52> Are you familiar with LibriVox? [https://librivox.org/](https://librivox.org/)

<comment><USER51> Yes but the audiobook, voice, and reader quality has been very hit and miss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Unfortunately none of the formats given work with Amazon's "email to kindle" system, which is the most convenient way to load books-- it allows you to download a PDF on your phone and send it to a special email address associated with your Kindle device. Considering all the work this site has already done preparing the book files, it seems like they might as well ought to generate PDF files using a page size roughly equal to that of the most common Kindle readers.

<comment><USER54> Amazon's "email to kindle" system also accepts books in the mobi format which would be a preferable to mapping pdf page sizes to Kindle reader screen sizes.</comment></comment>