Chantemerle on Project Gutenberg

[regshoe]

Here it is, at last!

Many thanks to garonne for proofreading, and especially for your help with the French.

Chantemerle: A Romance of the Vendean War is D. K. Broster's first novel, co-written with G. W. Taylor and published in 1911. It tells the story of stolid Liberal landowner Gilbert de Chantemerle; his merrily irresponsible cousin Louis de Saint-Ermay; Gilbert's fiancée Lucienne d'Aucourt, who falls in love with Louis; the local priest and close friend of Gilbert and Louis, M. des Graves; and various others, as the Vendean War—a counter-revolutionary uprising of the early 1790s—first threatens and then starts in earnest. It's a weird book! A lot of the elements that will become familiar in Broster's later books are already in place—a post-French Revolution setting with Royalist characters; an intense and complicated relationship between two men; emotionally fraught hurt/comfort—but in other ways it's not much like Flight of the Heron. The plot is somewhat meandering, and the political ideas of Royalism (and also the religious ideas) are much more prominent than they tend to be later on; and the portrayal of war is far more direct and detailed than in any of Broster's later work.

It was a particularly challenging ebook: it's long, to start with; there are epigraphs on most of the individual chapters, in a wide and fascinating range of formats that all needed their own HTML; and, as I alluded to above, many of these epigraphs and some other bits and pieces are in French, which language I do not read and which also get their own special HTML bits. It's taken a while, and I'm pleased to have finished it!

Comments

[muccamukk]

Probably something you've already answered, but are you planning to do flight of the heron for this project, too? I see it's on Archive.org, but not on Gutenberg with its lovely variety of formats.

[regshoe]

Funnily enough I was just thinking of doing FotH next. It is already on Faded Page (the Canadian equivalent of Gutenberg), in a nice variety of ebook formats, and so it might feel a bit of a needless duplication of effort. But due to differences between US and Canadian copyright law it's not currently possible to transfer the Faded Page ebook to Gutenberg, and since Faded Page is less widely used/known about it may be missing out on readers as a result, so I think it would be worth doing!

[muccamukk]

Oh that's interesting. There's a Gutenberg Canada that had a bunch of stuff like the Hornblower books that isn't out of copyright in the US, but is here. I hadn't run into Faded Page before.

[regshoe]

Huh, and I hadn't run into Project Gutenberg Canada! That is interesting and useful. *adds to bookmark collection of ebook sites* I wonder what the connections are—the main gutenberg.org site links to Gutenberg Canada as an affiliate, but I'd always assumed Faded Page was connected because it's run by the Canadian branch of Distributed Proofreaders, the main volunteer organisation for PG.

(I have come across Project Gutenberg Australia, which is the only online source for a couple of the rarer E. W. Hornungs–I'm glad he's appreciated there...)

[sanguinity]

Hurrah, and thank you!

[regshoe]

:D

[sovay]

Here it is, at last!

Mazel tov!

[regshoe]

Thank you :D

[hyarrowen]

Ooh, hooray, and thank-you to you both! :D

[regshoe]

:D

[adore]

Thank you for doing this!

It was a particularly challenging ebook

I'd love to know more about how old books are digitised. Do you look at the page and type it out and format it, or is it more complicated than that?

[regshoe]

Hmm, well...

You start by scanning the pages onto a computer (or using a set of publicly available scans from somewhere like archive.org), then use Optical Character Recognition, which is software that converts images of printed words into text. Then you correct the OCR output, which takes some effort. The OCR is decent at identifying letters as long as the printing and scans are good quality and there are no unusual words, non-English letters or diacritics, but if any of those things are present then there will be more errors, and it's very unreliable with punctuation. Then you format it into a nice text file with paragraphs, chapters and so on spaced evenly, lines the right length, etc.

Then you format as HTML, which is often the most fun bit! As well as all the usual basic text HTML, this includes things like the table of contents, chapter titles as headers, epigraphs and poetry/songs and letters and anything else within the text that's formatted with different font size/spacing/line breaks/etc., any text in a language other than the main one, the cover image and various other things. Apparently many people start with HTML and then make the text file from that, which I've always found a bit puzzling, but I suppose it works? Anyway, Gutenberg then has a tool to convert from HTML to all the various ebook formats it uses—and those, together with the original text and HTML files, are what you see when you click the link above. :)

[adore]

Thank you for explaining it so clearly to me! I'm going to practise the process now. I've been wanting to digitise a few books, starting with Ownself by Mary Calhoun. I'll keep my digitised versions with me until I'm sure the copyright has run out, because these books are old, sometimes falling apart, and I want to save them for myself first. And then when I'm sure that they're in the public domain I'll release them. I wish I could republish the OOP books I want everyone else to read, but I don't know how it works when it's OOP and the publisher has shut shop. I know that it's possible to reprint those books because I see presses doing it; I just don't know what I need to know to plan to do it myself, yet.

[regshoe]

Oh, cool, that sounds like a good project! Well, let me know if you want any more advice, I'm happy to help. :) I suppose if you're doing it just for yourself then you don't need to follow Project Gutenberg's or anyone else's particular standards, but the Distributed Proofreaders Wiki (run by PG's main volunteer group) may be useful, especially section 10 of this page.

I'm not sure about out-of-print-but-still-in-copyright books either! I suppose you'd have to get permission from whoever owns the rights (the author or their estate, I guess?). Some of them are available as borrowable scanned copies on the Internet Archive (including Ownself, I see!), but of course those are much more restricted than 'proper' public domain ebooks.

[garonne]

Yay, so cool to see this online!

[regshoe]

:D Thank you!

[luzula]

Yay, well done! : D What a service to fandom (and anyone else who wants to read it, of course).

[regshoe]

I hope it—along with the other Broster books already there—does get more readers! And if anyone wants to write fic, well, this might make it easier... :D