Awesome Books (in Markdown)

[bowerbird]

gerald said:
>   Again thanks for the great comments.

sure thing. thanks for creating the resource.

one thing i forgot. the most interesting thing
about project gutenberg these days comes
not from that project itself, but from an effort
that calls itself "project gitenberg", which is
putting the p.g. e-texts into github, or rather
a customized iteration of github that had to
be created when the number of repositories
(one/book) overwhelmed the regular system.

of course, the entire github infrastructure is
ridiculously complicated overkill for a task
as simple as managing the very small edits
that are typical of a finished p.g. e-text, but
someone had a hammer they wanted to use.

and sure enough, someone else had money
to fund grants for people to use hammers, so
-- you know -- the effort now has some legs.

the reason it's interesting, however, is that
one of the first goals gitenberg set out was
to transform the e-texts into .html and then
e-book formats, which is the very thing that
was my intent when i focused on p.g. in 1999.

(what i've learned, over the last 35 years, is
that i'm exactly 16 years "ahead of my time".)

anyway...

last i heard, gitenberg is leaning to asciidoc.

that's a good plan, but they'll need to mod it.

so, in the end, they'll have something that is
exactly like z.m.l., light-markup for long-form.

>   https://github.com/GITenberg/gitenberg.github.com
>   https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/gitenberg-project
>   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214564

-bowerbird

p.s. gitenberg could also be using "markua",
which is scheduled to release an update on
the alpha version of itself sometime _today._
markua is to be a markdown-inspired flavor
that will be specially modified for long-form.
so i guess you can say we have a trend now.
for the record, asciidoc predated markdown,
and it always had some focus on long-form.
so did restructured-text, per its status as the
light-markup used for python documentation.
thus, once you start talking about _books_,
markdown is lagging the field, considerably.
but hey, it's never to late to muddy the waters!