Bookish. it's like redactle but for books. beta testing / bugs etc

My first time playing! Got it in 46 but totally used the title, am I not supposed to?

For insert, could you not include stopwords up to some cutoff or would that make it too easy? I am wondering how people do this!

(with lower counts for insertion)

> For insert, could you not include stopwords up to some cutoff or would that make it too easy?

you have a choice of inserting 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 of the most common words using the drop-down in the top bar. i need to write some instructions.

eephus, i think ledge thinks the title makes it too easy and i think he has a point so I'll look to making it an option.

But could you exclude words like 'the', 'and', 'to', 'by', etc. from the most common words inserted, with lower counts as options in the dropdown, so that the clues given are more meaningful?

(If after stopword removal, the differences in frequency counts are low, then insertions could be all occurrences of randomly selected unique words in the text and guesses could continue to be for all occurrences.)

not sure i agree with removing the *most* common words from the list of common words. and that was what the 0 option was for.

i could let people get 10, 20, 30 *random* words from the top 50, so they aren't guaranteed to get 'the' and 'and' or whatever but that moves away from everybody getting the same game.

The text could be generated once for each insertion count offered in the dropdown. The words selected could be randomized or not. If not, another option would be most frequently occurring after stopword removal. It's just that it is hard to guess from stopwords.

I've been having remarkable success recently guessing sea, boat, ship, sails, etc. Though it hasn't worked so well today, lots of hits and I've eventually got the author but I guess I'm not familiar enough with his work.

it's an earlier novel (n fact his only novel), and not his usual genre. this was from the observer / guardian 1000 book list, so probably not as 'popular' as those from the top downloads list. i read it a couple of years ago. it goes a bit lovecraft in the last few chapters iirc

i should hope it does!

i'm consistently amazed at the nautical knowledge expected of pre 20th c readers. "At length I summoned up the resolution of despair, and rushing to the mainsail let it go by the run. As might have been expected, it flew over the bows" - of course!

Well, I managed to get the author, but as the entire text is in French I'm not sure I can get the correct title without cheating. (Assuming it's even one of his better-known works that I theoretically could get!)

happy bastile day!

unfortunately, due to terrible planning on my part, i'd already posted A Tale Of Two Cities and Les Miserables or i'd've made this the relevant sections of one of those. i went with this instead, which is well known in english, at least, but is a bit of a bastard because of the apostrophe in the title that you can't see but must enter

I thought it was something very experimental and Oulipo when only two of the top 30 words had any results, but on noticing they were "on" and "a" and spotting some suspicious hyphens scattered around before question marks I managed to work out what was going on and quite enjoyed typing words from my mostly forgotten GCSE French into it. (Eventually got the author purely by name length and then the title from the prepositions therein rather than any half-deciphered content, though!)

(Those elided clitic pronouns make French a bit annoying to guess - j'ai, l'ai, j'en, m'en, n'en, etc, are all separate single "words". Feels like good, fun exercise for one's language skills but it's already hard enough to piece together enough context to guess in English without resorting to title/author length a lot of the time and limited language skills definitely don't help there.)

PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too

> PS it also appears to be chapter 207 and not the traditional first chapter, too

yeah, nobody said it was always going to be chapter 1! i think there's one soon / recently that's chapter 3 because the first two are preamble that are imo unguessable. i've also skipped some prefaces at times.

the numbering of the d'Artagnan Romances, of which this is part, is a book in itself. it was three or four volumes depending on the edition and modern copies split the 3rd (or 4th?) part into 3 parts themselves. but the chapter numbers aren't reset - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vicomte_of_Bragelonne:_Ten_Years_Later . specifically this chapter was chosen as it was the one that mentioned the prisoner's history in the bastille

Aha! Thank you, koogs! I thought it was a bug but I should not have doubted you; good to hear the explanation!

hidden tag more to assuage my paranoia than because of Bookish spoilers: I work in a library as a data/helpdesk monkey and some of the multi-volume works of this era have very nutty numbering, where things end up with three different numbering systems and flit between which one they feel like displaying on the title page, and then someone emails me to ask if there's a scan for an apparently undigitised volume, or that the scans don't match the right volumes, and it turns into a bit of a nightmare going through them all filling in an Excel spreadsheet of every number you might conceivably refer to them by and trying to label them on the system in a way which will make sense to readers...

btw, this'll be the first and last time i do this even though it went smoother than expected (people did try, did complete it even, no insults were hurled)

i do have vague plans for theme weeks though, mainly to give myself ideas of books to include. sci fi week, say, or grouped by decade. I'm about a fifth of the way through having a year's worth.

(i can do repeats, i guess, of i choose other chapters)

um, maybe a week of final chapters...

Today's is a game of guess the title even when you've guessed the title.

Well ok it wasn't that hard.

yeah, again made harder by hidden punctuation (c/f redactle unlimited where often 's' is a word because it splits on apostrophes). damned if you do, damned if you don't, really

and this way i can maybe use the later books as more games. or are they too obscure?

2.1 Volume One: Swann's Way
2.2 Volume Two: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower
2.3 Volume Three: The Guermantes Way
2.4 Volume Four: Sodom and Gomorrah
2.5 Volume Five: The Prisoner
2.6 Volume Six: The Fugitive
2.7 Volume Seven: Time Regained

not gonna happen...

yeah I only got it because of the famous opening line.

tbh, it is the only part i've downloaded. and three years later i haven't started it...

I never knew that book had that subtitle (or was written like that) so I didn't get today's. Though I've just realised the first word is one of the words I usually always guess, and didn't today. Is it children's book week or something? Two E Nesbitts then this.

children's book 12-days iirc, in honour of school holidays (and because it gives me ideas of books to convert - after 2.5 months i'm struggling to think of suitably well-known things). pity about the nesbitts though, i'd've spread them out a bit if i'd noticed

i think there's some leeway on sub-titles because wikipedia has an even longer one

wait... autobiography? that'd need a large keyboard...

quill pen stuck in hoof surely

the first editon cover page on wikipedia included another revelation that didn't make it into the PG version

new theme starts today. there's a curious part of project gutenberg that is a bit more contemporary and so this is taken from those.

i think that's > 100 i've done now and i'm really struggling for new ideas. that said, i can always revisit the old ones and choose different excerpts.

it also looks like i missed an hr tag 8(

How do you put possessive nouns in e.g. David's struggling to work out how to do that.

Haven't played in a while, holidays etc. Never heard of todays, nevertheless had no clue after 400 guesses that is wasSF.

> David's

apostrophe's were a problem because where they are used 'for quoted speech' they should appear unredacted but if i do that for "they're" or "david's" or whatever then it would split the word into two, meaning that "re" and "s" would be words. (redactle-unlimited does this, i don't like it)

the compromise was to use smart quotes, 6s / 9s, lsquo / rsquo, ‘ / ’ for quotes that i wanted in the text, straight quotes for the others. meaning you need to include the ' in your guess for things like "David's" and "they're"

but this is something that i have to do manually and i make mistakes. is there a specific example you are struggling with?

re the theme yeah, there seems to be a copyright loophole in that a lot of short stories previous published in Astounding or other pulpy mags from the 40s and 50s are public domain, wheras normally you'd see nothing after 1924. search for SF in gutenberg and you see *lots* of these, incl some very big names, alongside the hg wells and stuff. i've basically picked the most obvious of these for 10 or so authors, avoiding stuff that had unguessable stuff in the title, like "Thuvia, Maid of Mars"

It was the one a few days ago, got the title but couldn't input it. Forgotten what it was called.

https://acdean.github.io/bookish/index.html?0902 has an apostrophe in the title and seems to work ok. it's lady audley's secret

That's the one I couldn't complete, odd.

text seems small today. i don't know why

Haven't got any of these batch, have scarcely heard of them let alone read them. Wonder if I'll have some luck with today's after revealing 12 Rocket ____! ___ __ Rocket _____! Rocket ________! Rocket ____! Rocket ________ for the ____-___! Rocket, Rocket, Rocket! ___!”

https://www.ebooknetworking.net/books_detail-084873646X.html

(^ jokes)

turns out it's not the one in martian chronicles, just shares a name with it

(^ spoiler)

i've read a few of these. i think the first thing i did when i got the kobo was to look for free SF on PG

I cheated. And then read it - not one for the ages.

first non-gutenberg book tomorrow. am surprised they didn't have a copy, but i found one somewhere else.

prompted me to make some more changes to index.html - minimal instructions.

I’ve got the title today I think, The Death of Ivan Ilyich but won’t take the last word. Any idea what I’m doing wrong.

i did notice variations in the spelling when i was trying to find a copy, mine has an extra t in it (the letter count would be a clue)

That makes sense, I did wonder if the spelling was wrong. Interestingly Wikipedia doesn’t suggest an alternative spelling.

it's the public domain translation from 1900 or so by Constance Barnett so it might be that. it's all over archive.org (albeit as scans)

got todays in three, (typed the title as one word instead of two), very memorable opening line.

i was surprised but that's how it is.

https://github.com/acdean/all_the_year_round/blob/master/atyr_1866_mugby_junction/1866_mugby_junction.txt

line 3109... that said, the toc has it as one word

oh, that's more spoiler-y than i imagined