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Subject: [gweekly] Birthday Report
From: Michael Hart <hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu>
To: "Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter" <gweekly@listserv.unc.edu>
Date: Fri, 8 Mar 2002 13:17:41 -0500 (EST)
As many of you are aware, I often send out reports on New Year's,
Project Gutenberg anniversaries, and even sometimes on birthdays.
As it happens, we are in the middle of a period of calendar events
worthy of mention, besides that today is the day I am officially
entering senior citizenship.
Just last week we had the honor and pleasure of announcing:
Project Gutenberg of Australia's 50th eBook: Gone With The Wind
Next month we hope to be announcing:
Project Gutenberg's 5,000th eBook: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci
And about this same time we hope The Notebooks of Leonardo will also
be announced as the 20,000th entry in the Internet Public Library.
20,000 eBooks available free of charge in a single catalogue. . . !
At the 1990 Midwinter ALA meeting in Chicago, people stared at me in
total disbelief when I predicted that there would be 10,000 eBooks
by the beginning of 2002. . .and here we are only 7 weeks into 2002,
and there are likely already 20,000 eBooks on the Internet, it just
takes a while for the IPL to find them all and catalog them.
10 years ago today, there were approximately 20 eBooks available on
the Internet. . .FOR EACH ONE OF THOSE THERE ARE NOW A THOUSAND!!!
In addition to these remarkable achievements, I have asked the Project
Gutenberg Volunteers to make sure that today we publish 15 of the 47
eBooks they will likely produce this week, so I may have the great
pleasure of announcing:
!!!Project Gutenberg Has Published 1500 eBooks Since March 8, 2001!!!
The is truly remarkable, as our first 1500 took us from 1971 to 1998!
******* I CAN NEVER THANK OUR VOLUNTEERS ENOUGH! *******
In November of 2000, I was honored to announce Project Gutenberg's
3,000th eBook at the annual conference of the Hawaii Library Assn.
In November of 2001, I was *amazed* to announce Project Gutenberg's
4,000th eBook at the annual conference of the Hawaii Library Assn.
I have been invited back to an even larger conference there this year,
where it appears I may have the *incredible* honor to announce #6,000!
Last year Project Gutenberg completed 1,240 new eBooks!
This year we are averaging over 200 eBooks per month!!!
That means we could possibly do TWICE as many this year!!!
It is truly a remarkable honor for me to be able to speak of doing
THOUSANDS of new eBooks per year from our Project Gutenberg Volunteers.
It means:
THE FUTURE IS NOW!
10 years ago no one believed my dream that 100 million people would
each have free access to 10,000 eBooks today, BUT THEY DO!!!
If that rate of growth continues, even without anticipating any new
technological breakthroughs in the rate of increase, that means that
just by sticking to the growth pattern of the last 10 years that in
just 10 more years we will have a thousand eBooks for every single
eBook we have today. . .
20 MILLION eBOOKS!
This is going to require more than just the basement operations we
have seen in the past, if we are going to coordinate efforts to get
this much work done and make it easily available to the world.
As many of you are aware, I have bushels and bushels of copyright
research stored in my house, probably approaching 10,000 researches,
since we have to do about twice as many copyright researches as we
actually manage to get successfully completed and into publication.
My house cannot possibly hold paperwork for 20-40 million of these!
Therefore we have introduced electronic copyright research and have
been testing this for the last month or two, with the help of Dianne
Bean and Greg Newby, who deserve HUGE thanks!
Obviously we will need even more volunteers to work on copyright,
but at least we may have solved the physical storage problem. . . .
You may also be aware of the wonderful work of our Chief Cataloguer,
Alev Akman, who somehow manages to enter each of our 200+ new eBooks
per month into our catalogue, usually by within 48 hours of the time
they are announced in our Newsletter. I don't know how she does it!
Our GREAT thanks!
We will also need more help with cataloguing if we are to reach into
the millions of eBooks.
Project Gutenberg has always been all volunteers. I have paid for
most of Project Gutenberg's history out of pocket, and we hired our
first paid employee only months ago, when we needed someone to work
on all the paperwork required since Project Gutenberg became a non-
profit corporation. Since Project Gutenberg really has no money,
we are each working for about $1,000 a month at the moment.
Paying people to work for Project Gutenberg has always been a serious
question we needed to address. I, myself, may have averaged earning
some $1,000 per month during the history of Project Gutenberg, but I
knew it would be hard to find someone as crazy as myself to take over.
I started mentioning this over 10 years ago, and have only found one
single person willing to run Project Gutenberg, that is Greg Newby.
Greg has been the unpaid CEO of Project Gutenberg since incorporation,
and we have two unpaid Board Members. . .but Greg will not be able to
continue at this growing level of responsibility for long without some
compensation. . .especially as Project Gutenberg can literally take
every single moment you can give it. . .and use every moment well.
Therefore, my job description is changing. . .I would LIKE to have
been able to change it on a dime, but that is much harder than it looks,
even for someone such as myself. Yet we are in the process of automating
much of the work I have done by hand for the last 30 years, so we can do
even more remarkable work in the next 30 years.
My job is now going to be to raise enough money and public awareness for
Project Gutenberg to be able to give away 100 times as many eBooks as we
are going in the first stage of our planning, and to get those eBooks to
10 times as many people.
THIS IS GOING TO TAKE SOME SERIOUS PUBLIC RELATIONS AND FUNDRAISING!!!
Project Gutenberg's first stage was to give 10,000 eBooks to 100,000,000
people, for a total of giving away 1,000,000,000,000 [1 Trillion] eBooks.
We are now crossing the half-way point towards accomplishing that goal!
Giving ten thousands eBooks to a hundred million people was certainly
within the realm of possibility for a basement operation. . .yes, I am
still writing you from the same desk in the same basement I was writing
from when you first started receiving the Project Gutenberg Newsletter
back in the 1980's. . .same kind of keyboard, monitor, and somewhat
bigger and faster hardware behind them.
If we are to give away 100 times as many books in the next 30 years,
and give them to 10 times as many people, that will mean we are going
to give away 1,000,000,000,000,000 [1 Quadrillion] eBooks. . .and that
will mean we need to get somewhat more organized, and not so dependent
on a single person. . .which we are doing right now. . .I have great
faith that Project Gutenberg would/could/should be able to survive if
something happens to me. . .and that is a GREAT feeling.
Giving away a million books to a billion people each is as great an
undertaking today as giving away a ten thousand books to one hundred
million people was when we started.
But at least we now have the track record to prove it can be done,
if we just keep on growing at the same rate as we have been for the
next 10 years. . .perhaps even giving away 20 million titles. . . .
However, when I started doing this 30 years ago, I had a reasonable
life expectancy to be relatively certainly I would live the 30 years
required to do 10,000 eBooks.
But today it is unreasonable to expect that I will live another such
period of existence and hard work. It's possible. . .but we cannot
count on it. . .OK?
That's where the public relations and fundraising comes in. . . .
We can only expect to continue to reach about 1.6% of the population
of the world if we don't get more publicity, and to reach a billion
readers, we need to reach 16% of the world population. . .it's hard
to DO that without any public relations.
So, to accomplish these goals, we NEED to get on Letterman, Leno,
Oprah, Regis, Rosie, etc. . .and it takes thousands of letters and
emails and phone calls to do that. . .according to Oprah, last week,
when she did her annual show to reply to all those.
We have obviously never managed to get on ONE of those shows, even
though we could give away a million eBooks to each audience. . . .
WE NEED ***YOU*** TO HELP BREAK THROUGH THE PUBLICITY BARRIER!!!!!!!
Or else we will continual to be confined to reaching the 1.6% of the
population that more or less finds Project Gutenberg on their own.
I am continually amazed at how many emails I receive from people who
tell me they have been looking for something like eBooks for years,
and just now found Project Gutenberg by accident.
This means we are NOT getting the word out. . . .
In many respects it is just as important to reach an audience of
twice as many people as it is for us to publish twice as many books.
[Though I personally believe that nearly all the books posted on the
Internet are destined for immortality and easy reference, it would be
nice to get them to the widest possible audience as soon as possible.]
***
In addition to planning all the WORK we have laid out for the coming
years, decades, and hopefully more, we must plan for the ways we can
SUPPORT THE WORK DONE BY ALL OUR VOLUNTEERS.
This means creating institutions that will carry Project Gutenberg
into the future, even as each of our individuals comes and goes,
including myself.
We are VERY lucky to have Prof. Greg Newby at the helm as our CEO,
and we need to raise the money required to pay him at least the
average professor's salary if we are to keep him for the future.
At the moment he is doing all this work free of charge, but this
will likely have to change next year, so we have to be aware that
we are going have to support him if he is going to support us.
This, plus all the copyright research, computers, phone lines,
and paperwork required just to keep Project Gutenberg legally in
existence, as well as to do our actual work, means we are going
to have to change from being a "basement operation" to becoming
what I hope will be am interconnected federations of Project
Gutenberg institutions around the world, and hopefully several
support agencies as insurance against inevitable hardships.
To that end, we are trying to change my role in Project Gutenberg
and to make Project Gutenberg more independent from myself, so it
will continue when I cannot.
Thus I will be changing my priorities from just making sure all
the eBooks get out on time, to fundraising and public relations.
Many of you might not be aware just how difficult this is, I know
that _I_ had no idea when I first started testing the waters, but
it's VERY hard to even get to communicate with each of the people
we have on our lists, from the rich and famous in computers, to a
chance to give away our CDROMs in various public settings such as
television shows and public events.
HELP!!!
HELP US GET THE PUBLICITY WE NEED TO GIVE AWAY A QUADRILLION eBOOKS!
Ask everyone you know if they know anyone who can help with this!!!
It's harder to get the attention of these people than you may think!
But it's the only way to get the word to a billion people. . . .
Thank you so much!
***
On a more personal note, I must admit that I feel I have aged some
ten years in each of the last five years. . .I was doing a pretty
good imitation of being Twenty-Something until I hit fifty. . .and
many times since then I have felt I was doing a good imitation of
being Seventy-Something as the workload of Project Gutenberg went
from doing two books per month ten years ago to two hundred books
per month for the first two months of 2002.
Don't think I would trade this for anything else. . .there is NO
life ever lived that I would trade mine for. . .no satisfaction
I can imagine greater than doing Project Gutenberg. . .no legacy
I could leave greater than a group of people around the world who
publish thousands of free eBooks per year in an ever wider variety
of languages and give them to an ever wider variety of people.
As I write this, contemplating my life from the new vantage point
of being 55 years old, I feel very much a mirror image of how I was
feeling when I was ending my teenage years, when I had about as many
years under my belt as I now have in my statistical life expectancy,
only now I am looking toward the last two decades of my life rather
than looking from the first two decades of my life.
My only real regrets, and I DO have them, of course, are the people
I didn't get to know better. . . .
[and a few things I did that I probably shouldn't have done.]
I can't go back an undo any of those things, and perhaps they made
me stronger in my regrets for doing them, but I still hope to get
to know people better, even though it appears to be more difficult
these days than it did in the 60's. . . .
I also still have dreams of finding Princess Charming, and my offer
of a $1,000 reward to whomever introduces us still stands, and may
actually be increased as time goes on, especially if I want to have
kids and see them finish high school.
So there it is, a message from my 55th birthday, hopefully covering
all that needs to be covered, and encouraging you enough to act, to
live, perchance to dream. . .as I do.
THANK YOU ALL SOOOOOOO MUCH!!!
Michael
other_2002_03_08_birthday_report.txt
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