[bksvol-discuss] Uploading public domain books from Project Gutenberg

Hello,
As you probably are aware, Project Gutenberg in the US currently has almost 23,000 public domain books. These books have been confirmed as public domain in the United States and all either were published before 1923, are reprints of works published before 1923, or were published between 1949 and 1963 but haven't had their copyrights renewed in the US. Many of the earlier postings lack page breaks and copyright information but almost all of the new titles do contain this information. All are available in plain text with many in html. The html files do have page markers so they could easily be converted to .rtf or DAISY.
I would be willing to work on and process these books myself if I could get cooperation from the Bookshare staff. My understanding is that public domain books currently aren't allowed to be uploaded and only people who scanned the original paper editions may upload their scans to Bookshare. I would remove the standard PG header and footer information and I would convert the page markers to actual page breaks. The problem I see is that technically no copyright year should be listed on the upload form because they are in the public domain and there is no way to specify their public domain status. What do I need to do to get these books added to the Bookshare collection? I am not asking the staff to do anything except allow public domain book uploads. I could either upload them as rtf, email them, or upload them with ftp. I could put them on my own web space if necessary. I would really like to see this large body of work added somehow. Many books that have been requested by users are already available from Project Gutenberg in almost perfect quality with minimal errors. I think it would be a useful service to the users to get these added.
Please let me know how to proceed with this. I can create a sample conversion for you. I don't currently have DAISY creation tools but I can try to directly create DAISY or xml files for you. I think some files are already in xml or xhtml but I'm not positive on this. Please let me know how my goal of getting more public domain books added can be accomplished. Obviously, not all public domain books in the US would be public domain in other countries but something would be better than nothing. There are already many PG books on Bookshare but they are old editions. Better editions have been produced. 

Thank you for your consideration in this matter.

Sincerely,
Tony Baechler
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Tony Baechler
Baechler Productions

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