Project Gutenberg: Timeline Events
Michael Hart on Aug 31st 2010
The latest Project Gutenberg Grand Total figures have just passed 37,500 titles this past month and will have 40,000 eBooks during our 40th year celebration, 1,000 a month over 40 years doesn’t sound like much, but we are on track right now to do 5,000 this year.
We are currently giving away about 100,000 books a day, just through the one single site: http://gutenberg.org. About 3 million eBooks per month or 36 million per year.
In 2000 USB flash drives were just getting started with 8M “IBM Memory Sticks” available for about $60 and also 16M and 32M size were available.
Today 1,000 times as much memory, 8G, is available from over the counter stores for $20.
I just bought a somewhat larger “terabyte pocket drive” for $75 over the counter. Larger is a relative term in this case, it’s still pocket-sized, but just requires a doubly larger pocket and the weight is noticeable and a “wall wart” power supply is required, so I should NOT think the term “pocket-sized would be appropriate but I bought it anyway, sight unseen, due to misunderstanding
or being misled by the advertizing.
Still, it’s no larger and not much heavier than a book, and it will hold 2.5 million such books in .zip format.
Think for just a moment about how much a terabyte would cost you back in the year 2000, how much power it took, and how hard it would be to fill it up.
Google wouldn’t even announce its “invention” of eBooks for about 5 more years, Project Gutenberg wouldn’t have 10,000 titles for another 2 3/4 years, so just think of the changes we have in store by 2020, the next decade.
We should all be considering getting petabytes if we do have them already by then, and all of the findable book titles that are public domain should have been put into at least some eReadable formats, if not most or all.
It should be simple to hold each word ever published, a billion books of a million pages each, uncompressed and 2.5 billion such titles, using compressed formats which should be the default by then.
However, the rules will likely have been changed again, and perhaps yet again, to stop the public domain and to insure that copyright is more and permanent not so much for the additional few percent in sales, but mostly for the purpose of preserving and protecting:
“The Digital Divide.”
[A minor edit to the opening paragraph has been made by the PG News Editor]
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One of our newest projects is to solicit suggestions as to where Project Gutenberg should be in it’s 50th year. The current suggestions are:
The 5th Annual World eBook Fair hopes to hand out 1 million to 2 million eBooks every day from July 4 to August 4 for a total of 50 million eBooks in a single month.
Although the iPad has been out in the U.S. for several weeks, today finally sees the day when it’s released in Europe and Australia. Taking a looking over the news sites it seems there’s been a lot of people queuing up to get hold of their own iPad which I guess now makes it big hit everywhere.
I spent a lot of time working on the conversion tools so the book coding is very clean and tidy, which means they render very nicely under the iPad iBooks application as well as any other E-Ink reader (Sony Reader, Cybook OPUS, BeBook, etc.) and Apple apps such as Stanza.
[Posted on behalf of Marc D'Hooge as requested in the PG Newsletter]
ONGOING U.S. COPYRIGHT EXTENSIONS
PG founder Michael Hart and PGLAF CEO Greg Newby will be on the panel for the upcoming symposium,