Permission received to reproduce Compute! publications

[nikoniko]

Just a quick update:

Several non-Compute! programming books for Commodore 64 and 128 computers will be making their way online thanks to a very kind author who is converting his original files to PDF format. In exchange, he'll ask readers to make a small charitable donation to one of several do-good-stuff groups, which I think is a great idea. I won't announce his name just yet as I want to honor his privacy until he's ready to make an announcement himself.

I really appreciate his openness to sharing his hard work with others, and even more than that to use his books to further other good causes as well. It's people like him that really make me glad I started this project, and I hope I can look forward to working with many more authors to liberate their books from the dusty shelves of used bookstores and give them life again, in the process helping to preserve history, to educate, and even to contribute in ways that extend far beyond our computer screens.

[Stephane Richard]

Quite excellent news indeed.  I almost wish I wrote that much so that I could do the same :-).  Alast, I was busying reading books back then ;-).

[commodor]

I'm torn between two metaphors. Ideally what I'd like to have is something that combines your typical CMS portal with wiki-like editing features, whereas most of what I've seen so far aims to be one or the other but not both. I'll spend some more time this evening checking out various projects to see if I can find something that's a decent fit. I don't mind doing some customizing, but if I can start with something that's already close to what I want, that would be great.

Would a wiki be open to abuse though ? I can see people editing your articles and I'm not certain that that is what you'd want as it'd be best to keep this stuff in it's original form (spelling errors, grammar errors and all).

A CMS document archive would perhaps be better to protect the integrity of the archive ?

~commodor~

[nikoniko]

I think I've decided not to go with a wiki initially. Right now I just want to get stuff online, and wikifying everything will make the process more involved and consume more time. Plus, I have to admit I'm feeling a little drained after a recent editing battle I got into on Wikipedia. However, I wouldn't mind and would encourage people to correct errors in the OCRed articles I make available, so I'll make sure people can contact me easily about problems they find. I don't want people nitpicking about an author's grammar, but spelling, technical or OCR conversion issues would be fine. The original scans will remain as they were, preserving the historical record, but if there are errors that Compute! would have fixed themselves had they been caught before publication, then by all means I think they should be corrected in the derived text. I know that sometimes corrections were posted in subsequent magazine issues or book editions when serious errors were made. For instance, in 1987 Compute! put out a list of about a dozen corrections for the first edition of Mapping the 128. I'm all for incorporating those into a revised text so long as one also has access to the original as well.

I'm currently working on a non-Compute! book, the Commodore 128 Programmer's Reference Guide, which was generously scanned by Payton Byrd a while ago. The copyright holder was Commodore Capital, Inc., and I haven't been able to track down where the rights went after Commodore went bankrupt. None of the various companies I could identify as receiving pieces of Commodore claimed the book as theirs when I contacted them, so I'm going to take a chance that whoever does own the rights either doesn't know that they do or doesn't care what happens with the book. If I were they, I sure wouldn't give a darn. Anyway, as always, copyright holders are welcome to get in touch with me if they have any concerns.

[Stephane Richard]

Probably the best policy to follow yes. :-).  I can't wait to get a URL on this project of yours :-).  keep up the awesome work :-)

[nikoniko]

I'm pretty much finished OCR on three books: Mapping the 128 (Compute), the 128 Programmer's Guide (Compute), and the Commodore 128 Programmer's Reference Guide (Commodore). Now I just need to finish putting together a site for them, then I'll move on to converting some more books.

I'm also pondering the idea of converting these particular 3 titles for display on the C128. Perhaps portion of a book could be loaded in compressed form to unused memory (or probably the entire text to REU), then the press of a function key would pop up the text and allow one to browse through it. However, maybe that sort of thing is a couple decades too late to be useful to anyone. It would have been pretty nifty with a two monitor setup, where you could keep your reference on one monitor while programming on the other.

[Moloch]

Excellent, can't wait to check these scanned books out.

About two years ago I donated a copy of Machine Language Routines for 64/128 to a friend for scanning and he came up with the zipped archive you'll find here -> http://www.ntscene.com/books/

Not OCR'd, all images and 25mb in size zipped.