Category: Information access

Using Lulu.com to get copies of books

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Once I got interested in Arabic Christian Literature, I quickly found that the only book of use was Georg Graf’s 5 volume Geschichte der arabischen christlichen Literatur, published 50 years ago by the Vatican library.  I was able to buy volumes 2-5 online, but not volume 1.  The first two volumes deal with literature up to 1500, so are really the only part that would interest readers of this blog.

In this post, I mentioned that I intended to try using the print-on-demand service, lulu.com, to make a personal copy of volume 1.  Indeed I did so, and perhaps my experience will be of use to others.

My first step was to borrow the book from the library, and run it through a scanner to create a directory of images, one per page.  This took quite a while, because it’s 700-odd pages!  I used Finereader 8.0 OCR software, not to do OCR but simply to manage the scanning.  I used an OpticBook 3600 book scanner (very cheap and very fast) to scan each page. 

In FineReader you can crop the pages to the same size, and erase dots etc.  I did this, producing images with only small margins.  You can also export all the pages to create an image-only PDF, and so I did, getting a 50mb PDF.

At this point I got rather ahead of myself, and omitted a crucial step, but I found this out later. 

I opened an account on lulu.com (which is free), and started to create a book.  To do this, you choose a paper size and binding.  In my case this was 7.44″ x 9.68″, perfect binding.  The site prompts you to upload a PDF, which is pretty awkward and fails a lot.  I found that I had to follow the alternative path given on the site ‘for large files’ and upload my PDF using FTP.

When I had uploaded it, the site warned me that my PDF pages were smaller than the paper size.  This meant that it would resize them.  Foolish chap that I was, I presumed they would add white space.  But this was wrong… they stretched the pages.  They were still readable, but looked a bit odd.

You’re also asked whether your book should be made available to the public for sale (with whatever markup on cost you choose); only available on a private URL; or only available to you.  I chose the latter, in case there were copyright issues.

The site allows you to design your own cover — I did this in a basic way.  You then get to see the PDF that results from all of this, which they send to a printer.  You save, and that’s it.  A link appears, offering you the chance to buy a copy yourself, which I did.  For this volume the cost price was about $22, and the postage was extra of course.  Manufacture of the book takes 3-5 days, and then the post office do their thing for however long they like.

In my case it was three weeks before it arrived.  It looked perfectly acceptable; except for the slightly stretched letters.

What I should have done, after scanning the images and cleaning and cropping them, was to pad them with whitespace myself before making the PDF.  This is something that Finereader doesn’t let you do.  But it stores the images in .tif format, so you can use other tools on them. 

Since there were 700-odd files, I wasn’t going to do this by hand!  I used a free command-line tool called ImageMagick.  I don’t know it well, but it did the trick.  I found that I needed an up-to-date version.

Now the TIF files from Finereader all include a thumbnail.  This makes them hard to work with.  What I did was write a little .com file containing a series of commands:

convert 0001.tif 0001.png

convert 0002.tif 0002.png

convert 0003.tif 0003.png

...

This gave errors, but converted all the pages to png format.  I had to do this, because the next step wouldn’t work if I did it on the TIF files directly.

I then wrote another batch file:

convert 0001-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872   0001-ok.png

convert 0002-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872   0002-ok.png

convert 0003-0.png -background white -gravity center -extent 2978x3872   0003-ok.png

...

This took all the pages and plonked each of them in the middle of a white background sized 2978 by 3872 pixels.  I knew that this was the size of the pages in the ‘print ready’ PDF that lulu.com had generated (because I downloaded it, opened it in Finereader, and got the size of the image of page 1 in pixels).

Then I created a new Finereader project, read in all those PNG’s at one go, saved them as a PDF, and this time had a PDF which was of the correct dimensions.

I’ve just finished uploading that, and bought a new copy of it.  It ought to be perfect.

The PDF’s that we find on archive.org and the like are generally of low resolution, so I don’t know if they could be used for this.  I scanned Graf at 400 dpi; the PDF of Agapius that I have been looking at on archive.org was 200 dpi.  So we may all have to scan our own books.

But this clearly works.  If you need a copy of an out-of-print and unobtainable book for private research purposes, you don’t have to rely on a pile of photocopies.  We all have piles and piles of those, I know!  But no; scan them instead, save your floor space, and print them at lulu.com.  You could even produce compilations in this way.  You could print extracts, ring bound, with blank pages between each opening.  All sorts of things are possible.

Of course if you made them available to anyone else, you would need to be sure that they were out of copyright.  If it is in print, buy a proper copy.  But if it’s a 19th century library catalogue, this is probably a nice way to get your own copy.

8th August 2008: the printed copy arrived, and it’s perfect!

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Ho ho ho, it’s summer

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I had an email yesterday from someone at a German periodical, Antike Welt.  Nothing wrong with that; indeed somewhat flattering. 

Apparently they’re doing a Christmas article.  As we all know, the only reference to a pagan festival on 25 December is in the Philocalian calendar, part 6 of the Chronography of 354, which I have online here. 

This work was published in bits; some bits in the CIL, some in Monumenta Germanica, some images in yet another publication, and so on.  So my edition was quite a bit of work, to reassemble a load of obscure publications.

Anyway, Antike Welt want to use some of it, which is very flattering indeed.   They’d like to use the photography of the illustration of ‘December’, and the page of the calendar for the same month.

Mind you, it then gets a bit weird.  They’d like me to rescan the image at a higher resolution, and could I type the calendar page into Illustrator for them?  I don’t know that I have any higher resolution images, and I certainly have other things to do than do free typing for people!  I’ve suggested that they get a nice, new, colour image of the illustration from the Vatican manuscript, and do their own typing.

PS, two days later: They never replied to my email.  Hum.

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The Times and the Codex Sinaiticus

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I was interested to see that Codex Sinaiticus of the bible is to be digitised.  Articles in the Times here, and an opinion piece by Ruth Gledhill here are very welcome.

The article has a facility for comments on it, which I used to express support for the digitisation and to query when the remaining 50,000-odd manuscripts will be digitised.  Amusingly the Times chose not to publish my comment.

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Agapius and Archive.org scanned book quality

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I was interested to find many volumes of the Patrologia Orientalis online at Archive.org.  Three of the four volumes that contain Agapius are among these.  So I downloaded PO7, which contains the section of Agapius from the birth of Christ (part 3 of 4), and printed a few pages. 

Now I’ve been doing some business trips lately. There isn’t a lot to do in a hotel during the evening, so I found myself scribbling an English translation in the margins.  I’ve decided to buy a PDA, in fact, to save myself the trouble of retyping.

However I began to get concerned at the quality of these (colour) prints.  In some cases the letters were not too clear.  At a couple of points, Agapius starts quoting Greek; and I couldn’t make out the letters!  The actual resolution seems to be 120 dpi at best.  This is way below the 400 dpi at which I scan everything myself, and isn’t really enough.

Perhaps I am missing something here, but if not, we have a problem, especially with texts in exotic alphabets.

We all know Agapius as containing an odd version of the Testimonium Flavianum.  This became widely known from an article by Shlomo Pines.  The version contained in the PO did not agree with my memory, so I went and looked up the Pines article.  It seems that Pines supplemented the PO text with quotations of Agapius in the later Arabic Christian historian, Al-Makin.  The version in Al-Makin is longer than that in the Florence ms, which alone contains this part of Agapius, and contains extra sentences.  Strictly we should refer to this as the Al-Makin version of Agapius, perhaps.

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Microsoft live books to close?

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I’ve been reading some reports that Microsoft is to dump this initiative, to stop scanning and just merge the results into its general (useless) search engine.  The site was blocked from access outside the US until a few weeks ago, but is now accessible — while it lasts.

It’s quite a triumph for the British Library, isn’t it?  They signed an agreement whereby their books would only appear on this site — inaccessible to the British taxpayers, who pay their salaries.  Now it seems as if the books won’t really be accessible at all.  If they had appeared on archive.org, we would all be able to use them.

Nearly 10 years after the world-wide web became available, the British Library remains dedicated to keeping its collection offline and inaccessible to anyone.  It’s difficult for me, as a British taxpayer, not to feel deep anger at this.  The BL seems to be run by a group of self-satisfied and corrupt bureaucrats, running their little gravy train for themselves and ignoring the public welfare.  But when will politicians bring these people to justice?

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Nestorius, 2nd and 3rd letters to Pope Celestine — now online in English

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

Mark DelCogliano translated into English the second and third letters that Nestorius wrote to Pope Celestine (published in the original in Loofs, “Nestoriana”) a couple of years ago.  As far as I know no other translation in English exists.

He has very kindly sent them to me, for upload onto the web, and has also kindly placed them in the public domain so everyone can use them freely.

The translations are here.

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British Library copyright consultation

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

The British Library is seeking the opinions of those who use it or borrow books in the UK from libraries on new proposals about copyright. If you live in the UK, stick it to them here.

We can be sure that publishers will be greedily lobbying. Make sure you do too!

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Al-Majdalus, “Commentary on the Nicene Creed”; the Bibliotheque orientale in Beirut, etc

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

I’ve mentioned before my investigation into Arabic witnesses to the idea that Zoroaster said “Whoever does not eat my body and drink my blood…”.  One of these may be the 9th century Melkite “Commentary on the Nicene creed” by the otherwise unknown Al-Majdalus. 

A little while ago, I experimented with getting a commercial translator in Beirut to have a go at this.  The text is unpublished, so I obtained monochrome images of the pages of two manuscripts from the Bibliotheque Orientale at Saint-Joseph’s University, and passed them to him.  Of course I asked for a sample, of the first page.  This has now arrived, and looks a bit inadequate.  But I’m passing it to a gentleman who has helped me in the past, and we’ll see.

The BO managed to put my images on a dodgy CDROM.  Two of the jpg files arrived being zero bytes long.  However there are other unpublished Arabic texts which might be relevant, so I’ve asked them for some of these.  This time they’ve invented some bureaucracy — a form full of talk about rights etc.  Quite how many people can read these mss, or care, I do not know — it seems to be a very small number! How they would enforce this does not seem to have occurred to them either.  I fear that this is merely officialdom protecting itself against criticism.  It’s a bit sad to see, really. 

But I’m looking forward to the images.  All I need now is someone who is competent in Christian Arabic of the medieval period, and willing to work for 10 cents a word.  There must be someone!  I can’t even find any email lists dedicated to scholars in this field; which is rather curious.

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Greed that laughed not, nor with mouth smiled

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

The Gospel problems and solutions of Eusebius Pamphili is extant only in fragments.  Not all of these have been edited.  A century ago Harnack noted a list of manuscripts which contained excerpts, but nothing has been done to collect these.  Since we are producing a translation, and perhaps an edition, I thought that I would make an effort and seek these out.

Most of the manuscripts are in the Bibliothéque Nationale Français in Paris.  Unfortunately they are spread over 8 manuscripts, a few pages in each.  The total number of pages adds up to 42.

The BNF want a staggering 10 euros ($12) each for a 1.8mb image (i.e. the output of a consumer digital camera).  This means the appalling sum of 420 euros or $500, for something that can be done in half an hour by any half-trained assistant by simply pressing a shutter 42 times.  Nor would the situation be better if I asked for a microfilm; they won’t sell these at less than 50 euros each, nor sell part of a manuscript, so the price is about the same.  It would actually be five times cheaper to fly my whole translation team to Paris for the day and hand-copy them!

It now becomes clear just why no-one has edited these.  It is entirely the fault of the BNF and their prohibitive charges.  I’ve written to ask for a formal quotation, and pleaded for mercy in it. 

Of course it could be worse.  Another fragment is on two pages in a manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice, famous for locking away from everyone for half a century the books left to it by Bessarion.  (Bessarion, of course, had intended scholars to be able to access them, but the library staff thought otherwise). On their web site, they seem to require you to get permission first to have copies, and then want 50 euros per photograph.  They’ve subcontracted the job to some local firm; kickbacks all round, eh?

But change is happening.  On Wednesday I was at Cambridge University Library to collect an inch-thick wodge of A3 photocopies of the Quaestiones by Angelo Mai.  Naturally I wondered why I couldn’t just get the copies in PDF, so popped down to talk to Don Manning, the new manager in charge of imaging.  The previous manager had just left everything drift.  But Don had already got plans for this, and also to take orders for copies over the web. 

One problem that manuscript researchers have is that libraries mostly offer microfilms at a steep but possible price, or else colour photographs suitable for publication at $100 each; but nothing in between.  Manuscripts often have bits in red, which are invisible in the microfilms.  Often these bits are the headings, or nomina sacra, i.e. the most important bits!  So there is a real need for a cheap product in between.  What we need is for libraries to sell simple, non-publication digital colour images at $1 each, so that poor scholars can just get on with studying the text. 

 Any consumer digital camera will do for these.  You don’t need flash.  You may not even need a tripod!  These can be taken by any library assistant, and don’t need to have accurate colours.  They don’t need to have the pages aligned evenly, etc.  All they need is to convey the text sharply and in colour, and to do so at a price that is within the reach of everyone for a dozen or two images.

After all, it does no good for a business to offer the most wonderful service, if the price is so high that no-one ever buys any. What then happens is that discount rates for staff only tend to creep in.  But libraries need to serve their users, and they need to make money.  I hope more of them will start to offer this intermediate idea.

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Eusebius – the feeding frenzy

Posted on by Roger Pearse at ToA

You never know who is planning to translate something.  Scholars don’t talk as much as they might, either, which leads to silly situations, such as three English translations of Eusebius Onomasticon being released in a period of a couple of years (including the long forgotten Wolf translation which appears online).

I enquired a couple of weeks ago whether anyone fancied translating the Commentary on Isaiah for money.  I quickly found that one gentleman was already doing so, and had a publisher lined up.  Today I learn of another who has a proposal with another publisher to do the same.  Neither knows of the other, I think.

After I decided to commission the Quaestiones I quickly learned that a scholar was doing the Eclogae Propheticae.  His initial reply made it sound like a side-project, but it turns out otherwise.

I then enquired about the other obvious untranslated works, the Against Marcellus and Ecclesiastical Theology (which form a pair of works against Marcellus of Ancyra).  I’ve been told so far of two people who ‘might be doing these’, plus a reference to a book which also refers vaguely to ‘someone’.  One of these two is actually NOT doing so; I look forward to an email from the other.

I’ve not asked about the Commentary on the Psalms.  Not yet, anyway.

Apparently there is a conference in Brussells in March on Eusebius, about which I can find no details.  If anyone does know, I’d be interested to learn more.  I might even be able to go.

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