The Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter 6th August 2003 Part 2
eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971
In this issue of the Project Gutenberg Monthly newsletter:
1) Editorial
2) News
3) Radio Gutenberg update
4) Mailing list information
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1) Editorial
Hello,
A small change this month, as the PG Newsletter goes to two parts. I
have done this (executive decision) as one long one was just too
long, knowing that ISPs tend to drop huge mails in the trash this
seems to be the best solution.
Happy reading,
Alice
(news@pglaf.org - Please note new address, although if you hit reply, the mail you
send does not reach me and disappears into the ether.)
We welcome feedback, critisism (of any kind), ebook reviews, featured
author suggestions, writings and awkward questions at the address above.
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2) News
"The Future Of Project Gutenberg After Our 10,000th eBook"
People have been asking me about the future of Project Gutenberg
this week of our 32nd anniversary: how long we could keep up in
our efforts to continue at Moore's Law growth rates; grand total
of books we could expect to do if nothing after the Mickey Mouse
birthday in 1926 has a copyright expiration date, and our effort
to do books in more and more languages and cultures, etc., etc.
As for Moore's Law, this is a very difficult growth rate to keep
up with these days, requiring that we continue to keep up with a
growth rate approximately doubling every 18 months. I make that
"approximately" because since 1990, we are somewhat ahead of the
Moore's Law growth curve, but just barely keeping up since 1993,
when we ended with 100 eBooks in December. The "official" date,
given that we were a month ahead of schedule, was January, but I
recall that eBook #100, the Complete Works of Shakespeare, would
have been online overnight from December 10th to 11th, depending
on what time zone you were in. [Some people worked on it from a
location in Hawaii, so we got a few extra hours.]
Given that we were on a monthly production rate back then, exact
dates weren't relevant, we only reported production on the first
Wednesday of each month, so comparisons from today to then would
not be terribly exact, other than on a monthly basis.
However, _I_ still try to keep up with that December 10th date--
it is an anniversary of my father's death--and he was an English
professor who specialized in Shakespeare.
My recollection is that Moore's Law would require something like
10,700 and something by December 10, 2003, so I announced 10,000
as our goal for that date, and figured we might get that 700 and
some by the end of the year, but it's going to be close, on both
counts, if you'll pardon the pun.
The real questions for the future are about getting to a million
by December 10, 2013, which is what it would take to keep up the
growth rate for the next decade at the same rate as for the last
decade of 1993 to 2003. . .100 times as many books each decade.
Personally, I am hoping we could get enough funding and exposure
after we get to 10,000 that we could actually DO 1,000,000 books
in the next decade, but obviously another decade would mean that
we would have to do 100,000,000 books, and that is probably more
books than will exist 20 years from now.
The solution is to tackle translating the one million books that
are already done into one hundred languages. . .something I fear
will put the Babelfish and Golden Bow projects to severe testing
to see if they can provide anything as useful as scanners became
10 years ago. I should add here, that the first scanner I used,
huge and expensive as it was, was NOT worth the time it took and
I ended up coming back down here to my basement and typing books
in from scratch. Translation is MUCH harder!!! I would HOPE it
will be made a LOT easier by then!!!
So, in a nutshell, there it is. . .my plans for two more decades
of Project Gutenberg growing at Moore's Law growth rates. Don't
expect a simple crossover between doing new books and languages,
I expect we will continue to encourage translations, to and from
all 100 languages we eventually hope to work in, and that public
domain legal standing may not quite suffer the complete disaster
planned for it by the copyright authorities of today, and, thus,
we might get to do some, or even most, of the publications after
1923, including music, various kinds of artwork and perhaps even
things we have not yet even considered for Project Gutenberg.
Hollywood, RIAA, and Network Television notwithstanding, and not
to leave out the paper tigers.
***
Here it is in numbers:
December 10, 1990 10 Ten
December 10, 1993 100 One Hundred
December 10, 2003* 10,000 Ten Thousand
December 10, 2013* 1,000,000 One Million
December 10, 2023* 100,000,000 One Hundred Million
*estimated
The 100,000,000 for December 10, 2023 could be any mixtures made
up of the following examples, or even include more options:
1,000,000 eBooks, each in 100 languages
2,000,000 eBooks, each in 50 languages
4,000,000 eBooks, each in 25 languages
5,000,000 eBooks, each in 20 languages
I would like to see the core of our collection translated into 5
languages in the next decade to gain some experience, perhaps:
[Alphabetically]
Chinese
French
German
Spanish
etc. . .
Doesn't have to be the same 5 languages for each book we try.
***
When considering the future of Project Gutenberg, one should not
only consider the number of books in our collection, but also an
approximation of how many people we expect to get them.
The original goal of Project Gutenberg was a multiple one:
1. To Encourage The Creation And Distribution Of eBooks.
2. To Create A Collection of 10,000 Project Gutenberg eBooks.
3. To Get Those 10,000 eBooks To 100,000,000 Readers On The Average,
TO GIVE AWAY A TOTAL OF ONE TRILLION = 1,000,000,000,000 eBooks.
[100,000,000 readers is about 1.5% of the world population today]
When we accomplish this goal in about 5 months our goal will shift to
creating a collection totalling 1,000,000 and getting them to readers
totalling 1,000,000,000 = ONE BILLION READERS to give away a total of
1,000,000,000,000,000 = ONE QUADRILLION eBOOKS TO BE GIVEN AWAY. . .!
***
We also have to consider movies, television, music, photography,
etc., and we must therefore fine experts in the copyrights these
have as they are NOT the same as for written texts.
In addition, we will be moving into the area of doing more books
from before 1923, and thus doing research on copyright renewals.
***
In addition, I have been asked to address the question of formats:
Project Gutenberg always has promoted plain text eBooks to make books
available in the widest possible combinations of hardware & software,
and we will continue to do so. We ARE considering various formats in
addition to plain text, and also considering doing something XMLish--
that may allow the creation of a wide variety of formats "on the fly"
if we can manage it. Yes, we do have ONE eBooks that we posted ONLY!
in 8 bit format, as the volunteer did not want the French without the
proper accents. Eventually that book will probably also appear in an
ordinary plain text format, but I promised it would have to come from
an outside source, as we promised we would abide by his wishes. This
is just one mark of dedication to the Project Gutenberg volunteers, I
try not to be very bossy, as I think our volunteer should enjoy eBook
creation and distribution from start to finish.
!!!!!!!My HUGE Thanks To ALL Our Volunteers!!!!!!!
Michael
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Amazon Says They Want To "Partner" With Project Gutenberg
Amazon Has Asked For Our Help With This, What Do YOU Think We Should Do?
AMAZON TO ADD TEXT-SEARCHING FEATURE
Amazon.com is working on a new program to offer users the ability to
search thousands of nonfiction books. In the Look Inside the Book II
program, users would not be able to view the entirety of any text but
could search for words or phrases across many thousands of texts. The
results would show the sentence where the term appears, and users could
expand that sentence to see several pages before and after the term.
Amazon is currently negotiating with many large publishing houses to
make content available in the program, which Amazon argues will be an
incentive for customers to buy more books. Most of the publishers
Amazon has talked to have reportedly been interested in the program,
though they are concerned about exposing too much of their material.
Users who were able to see just a few pages of reference books and
cookbooks, for example, might see all they need to see and not buy the
book.
New York Times, 21 July 2003 (registration req'd)
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21AMAZ.html
This is an article run in Edupage. Project Gutenberg has
been invited to join in with this project, and we would like to know
what YOU think. You can mail us either here at the newsletter
news@pglaf.org, or you can mail Michael Hart directly at
hart@beryl.ils.unc.edu with the subject Amazon (this makes sorting the
mail simpler, thanks)
-------------------
Innovations for PG Newsletter
So you missed last months newsletter, it is holiday season after
all. Your inbox is full to overflowing and due to it's huge size your
ISP drops the PG newsletter straight in the trashcan. Whaaa!!!
Help is at hand, with the all new Project Gutenberg Newsletter
Website. Yes finally! Check out that review you missed three weeks
ago, find out what's on at RG and get last months booklist along with
the latest news from PG. All available at
http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/newsletter/index.html
Snappy eh?
Also, (and this is nothing to do with me, but it really looks
interesting), if you have a PDA you may be interested in
http://www.xecu.net/bcollins/PGEZINE.HTM
-------------------
The Beagle has landed
"Fancy a trip to Milton Keynes*?"
"Why?"
"To go and see a man about a log"
"Plenty of trees in the park, don't need to go there"
"Wrong sort of log"
"What other sort is there?"
Well, how about a ships log, in this case, the spacecraft type. Thanks
to Radio Gutenberg, the team at Milton Keynes has granted the use and
broadcast of the log of the Beagle Lander. Beagle is just part of the
Mars Express mission to Mars that took off from Kazakstan in
June. Beagle is due to land on Mars on December 25th, so hopefully,
shortly afterwards we will be off to collect the first instalment.
* After many surveys, we believe this to be the equivalent of taking a
trip to any one of the following places:
Adelaide, Australia
Etal, Germany (summer only)
Hanover, Germany
Northampton, UK
Waterloo, Ontario
Sackville, New Brunswick
St. Johns, Newfoundland
Enid, Oklahoma
Boring, Oregon
Rockford, Illinois
Newark, New Jersey (the UK version also counts)
Springflake, New Jersey
Akron, Ohio (although we disagree with this one, but we've never been
there)
Oracle, Arizona
Des Moines (possibly)
New York City
Hawaii (Yes, really)
and the entire state of Pennsylvannia
Our advice - take a book.
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3) Radio Gutenberg Update
http://www.radio-gutenberg.com
Radio Gutenberg has moved!
This week RG is running AEsop's Fables on channel 1 and The Lion, the
Witch and the Wardrobe on channel 2.
If you are interested in creating a slide-show with a soundtrack
from your favourite book, or piece of literature please mail us here
at news@pglaf.org and we will pass your message on.
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Improved Service
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a different format to make your life a little easier. An example of
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or weekly version of this list please email news@pglaf.org, and state
which version you require.
{Note to the unwary: this is an example.}
34 NEW ETEXTS FROM PROJECT GUTENBERG US
A Complete Grammar of Esperanto, by Ivy Kellerman Mar 2005[esperxxx.xxx]7787
The Female Gamester, by Gorges Edmond Howard Apr 2005[fmgstxxx.xxx]7840
[Subtitle: A Tragedy]
A Primary Reader, by E. Louise Smythe Apr 2005[preadxxx.xxx]7841
[Also posted: illustrated HTML, zipped only - pread10h.zip]
The Rise of Iskander, by Benjamin Disraeli Apr 2005[?riskxxx.xxx]7842
[7-bit version with non-accented characters in 7risk10.txt and 7risk10.zip]
[8-bit version with accented characters in 8risk10.txt and 8risk10.zip]
[rtf version with accented characters in 8risk10r.rtf and 8risk10r.zip]
[rtf version has numbered paragraphs; txt version has no paragraph numbers]
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Credits
Thanks this time go to Brett and George for the numbers and
booklists. Mark for the beer, no computers this week - too 'ot, Greg,
Michael, and Larry Wall. Entertainment for the workers provided by BBC 6music.
pgmonthly_2003_08_06_part_2.txt
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