Not a Team Player

In 2011, I wanted to contribute a transcription of Ivan Krylov's fables to Project Gutenberg. For the text, I chose a Google Books scan of a University of California Berkeley copy that no longer seems available online. Here's a link to a Stanford University scan of the same edition (however, it is missing pages):

http://books.google.com/books?id=AfANAAAAIAAJ

A complete scan from the University of Toronto is currently available at the Internet Archive:

http://archive.org/details/krilofhisfables00kryluoft

Although I have downloaded numerous books from Project Gutenberg (and donated money to them), after actually subjecting myself to the submission and review process, I came to the conclusion that I just could not work with them. Over four years have passed since that effort, and it's obvious that nobody else has been willing to take over the project. Therefore, I have decided to review my transcription one more time and publish it here. May all blessings rightfully be bestowed upon Project Gutenberg, but I'll never try to work with them again.

BTW, since the mid-1990's, I've always hand-coded my HTML, rather than allow some editor application to do it and fill it full of unnecessary crap. And for the master HTML document for this project, I put out full effort to make sure it was well-formed. Normally, I don't bother to close <li> or <p> elements, and I usually place <p> elements at the end of a paragraph as I would a "¶" mark. It's a deprecated practice, I know, but as the fable of "The Cask" points out, bad habits learned early can be difficult to unlearn.

Here are links to the master HTML document, as well as a printable PDF version. I have also published it in Kindle form through Amazon: I did not want to charge for it, but a $0.99 minimum appears to be a requirement.

January 1, 2016


ffred's nearly-forgotten treasures