Today at #Charleston2025 @nielsstern.bsky.social will be participating in a panel about AI bots alongside Tim Lloyd @liblynxllc.bsky.social, Tim McGeary @duke-university.bsky.social & Eric Hellman, Free Ebook Foundation @gluejar.com We're looking forward to this timely discussion!

Starting now at the Charleston Conference @nielsstern.bsky.social participating in the ‘Bot war’ panel #Chs2025 #Charleston2025 @gluejar.com

Great article about Greg Newby www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/6a7a103...

The Project Gutenberg community mourns the passing of our CEO, Dr. Greg Newby (@gbnewby). Without his years of leadership, Project Gutenberg wouldn't be what it is today. Learn more about him and his contributions at www.gutenberg.org/about/newby....

This morning my ChatGPT quota was inexplicably exhausted. It took a while but I pieced it together. Voice mode somehow got activated when I went to bed. The bot then engaged in a 10 hour conversation with my snoring dog, answering questions the pup wasn’t asking and praising him for his insight.

I was there. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/n...

Join us for the Open Heritage Statement Launch Webinar | 14 October at 14:00 UTC. openheritagestatement.org/signatories Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has already signed the list of signatories to the Open Heritage Statement. #CulturalHeritage #CreativeCommons #PublicDomain

TAROCH Coalition, led by Creative Commons, promotes equitable access to public domain heritage. Its Open Heritage Statement affirms shared values, removes barriers & urges a UNESCO framework to secure global cultural access & participation for a sustainable creative future openheritagestatement.org

Personal Note: As of today, I am officially "Acting Executive Director" of Project Gutenberg. PG's President and CEO, Greg Newby, is very ill and does not have the energy to do all the things that keep Project Gutenberg running. This is a big responsibility for me and it's going to be a lot of work.

It is so important that we stay engaged and get people ready to vote this November. New Jersey needs a leader like Mikie Sherrill who will stand up to Trump and fight for working families. Be sure to tune in to tonight’s debate! mikiesherrill.com/debate

Do you love public transit and science fiction? Of course you do! Now you can have them at the same time! Next Tues, 9/16, at 6pm, an astonishing panel of activists and creators are coming together to talk about the future of transit. Seriously do not miss this one-of-a-kind event. luma.com/0olo6szj

On Wednesday, I finished a 110km trek, the Fjällräven Classic Sweden, along with 500 others, many of whom are now good friends!

holy shit lmao

The intersection of my interests: libraries, books, and whackadoo sports mascots.

Project Gutenberg (@gutenberg.org) had its 2nd day ever with over 1M book downloads: www.gutenberg.org/browse/score... Probably lots of AI bots, but regardless, the folks at ibiblio.org deserve a lot of credit for a hosting infrastructure that serves that load without a glitch!

Here’s a project that someone out there will think is fun - do a census of unicode characters used in Project Gutenberg texts. In addition to helping PG code development, it might be interesting from a ddigital humanities/data science angle. github.com/gutenbergtoo... @gutenberg.org

Earth shaking events 65 years ago. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Va...

So Journalism falls short, the world needs to respect Sovereignty.

Another edition of Eric's stravaverse. Today: The Boston Marathon and Paul Revere's ride. go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/04/bost...

Tonight is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride. May his memory remind us all to resist the tyranny forming in our government.

#AI Bots are Overwhelming Some #Journals (via @cenmag.bsky.social) cen.acs.org/policy/publi... #scholcomm #publishing

Tariffs xkcd.com/3073

#handsoff the sign is weeping.

#handsoff Essex County, with Cory Booker

Aggressive AI scraping bots have been periodically making it very difficult to access Unglue.it. The image shows the traffic pattern we've been dealing with. We will outlast this evil scourge.

BTW if anyone wants training data from Project Gutenberg to do WHATEVER, there's a one click file you can download containing ALL the cleaned utf-8 .txt files at Project Gutenberg, updated weekly. No scraping necessary! gutenberg.org/cache/epub/f... (9.9GB)

One way for Open Access site to encourage good bot behavior is to provide carrots to good robots. For this reason, they would do well to add Common Crawl to greenlists: commoncrawl.org/ccbot

Bloop bloop beep beep - bot problems.

“It's clear AI can help with writing text descriptions, but it’s not a perfect solution. If you're going to use AI, we think right now, the best approach is human-AI collaboration.” tetralogical.com/blog/2025/03...

Somebody had to write this, so I did. “AI #bots are destroying #OpenAccess”. go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-b...

#openaccess #bots go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/03/ai-b...

Working with Ray Schwartz, (who supplied his cataloging wisdom and library know-how), we've helped Project Gutenberg revive its export of MARC records, see ebookfoundation.org/pgmarc.htm… Almost 75,000 free ebooks.

🗣️ @aoc.bsky.social out fighting for the people & federal workers: “Every day our job is to wake up and say ‘what can I do today?’ — There is no act too small. Every action matters.” 🇺🇸

Top cryptography experts join calls for UK to drop plans to snoop on Apple’s encrypted data | Computer Weekly https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366619260/Top-cryptography-experts-join-calls-for-UK-to-drop-plans-to-snoop-on-Apples-encrypted-data

Content warning: Silly, bad poetry. go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2025/02/stra...

There's lots to worry about these days but this is what worries me most acutely: "it’s only a matter of time until DOGE’s meddling inadvertently triggers a catastrophic failure" thebulletin.org/2025/02/why-...

Updating this thread with the additional arguments contained in the new brief regarding the birthright citizenship preliminary injunction. The new, slightly longer, brief is here. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Project Gutenberg in the news: www.404media.co/declassified...

Honestly this is so embarrassing. How many people in the White House don’t know how to spell Colombia?

New #ebook at Project Gutenberg: The Sound and the Fury by William Thomas Faulkner https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75170

The FTC just announced a settlement with General Motors, banning the sale of consumers' driving behavior and locations for the next 5 years. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/t...

Anyone who is surprised at the way Bezos is steering the Washington Post has never tried to get ebooks with embedded audio onto a kindle.

Twice in the last two days I overheard people talk about desalination as the solution to wildfires. So I read about it and the LA problem is really storage. Completely unrelated!

Are Open Access Ebooks Accessible? | Septentrio Conference Series https://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/SCS/article/view/7807

The automated feed of newly posted books at @gutenberg.org is now live: @new.gutenberg.org on Bluesky!

I’m considering doing the Fjällräven Classic Sweden this summer. Problem: I haven’t trekked since grad school.

Thanks to @design-law.bsky.social for the reminder

Remember everyone, things don’t “fall” into the Public Domain! go-to-hellman.blogspot.com/2017/07/crea...