eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971
It’s been another fantastic year at Project Gutenberg with yet many more landmarks and milestones to add to an ever increasing list.
The Complete "CIA World Factbooks"
The latest project to be completed is “The CIA Factbook,” complete, from 1990 to 2008. It has been many years of hunting to get all the years, and even more to reformat the files from their originals to something easier to search. The CIA Factbook 2008 is still officially in flux until July 1, or thereabouts, so it is being held in PrePrints.
On July 1, the new 2009 edition will be authorized, but it usually doesn’t appear until Aug, Sep, or even Oct. Sometimes new editions are released without any real announcement, so please do get in touch as soon as you hear about it. This way we can get it into our archives with as little delay as possible.
Note: We are still searching for the pre-1990 CIA Factbooks. If anyone can locate these editions it would be greatly appreciated if you could get in touch.
Project Gutenberg Is Now A Firefox Plugin
Yes you read that right! Project Gutenberg now has a Search Plugin for the ever popular FireFox web browser.
Installation is very easy. Visit the Project Gutenberg FireFox Search Plugin page at Mozilla, click the big ‘Add to FireFox’ button and follow the directions. Very cool!
The Project Gutenberg Year In Review of January 7, 2009
eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971
As many of you are aware, the Project Gutenberg year is from noon of the first
Wednesday of a year to the next.
Thus, I have to wait until noon today to get the finals of our various
categories, though some will not be here in time, due to the normal delays,
and will be marked.
New Project Gutenberg Landmarks and Headlines
The Complete "CIA World Factbooks"
The latest project to be completed, just last night, as a matter of fact, is
"The CIA Factbook," complete, from 1990 to 2008. It has been many years of
hunting to get all the years, and even more to reformat the files from their
originals to something easier to search.
2008, since it is still officially in flux until July 1 or thereabouts, is
still in PrePrints:
http://www.preprints.readingroo.ms/factbook2008
On July 1, the new 2009 edition will be authorized, but it usually doesn't
appear until Aug, Sep, or even Oct.
If any of you would like to keep an eye out for it, I'd greatly appreciate it,
as it sometimes appeared without any real announcements, and we'd like to get
it up with as little delay as possible.
Also, if anyone can located any pre-1990 editions, that would also be greatly
appreciated.
Project Gutenberg Is Now A Firefox Plugin
If you look through the provided list of search engines that appear in the
upper right hand of [my] Firefox you may note that along with Google, Merriam-
Webster, and a handful of others, you'll find Project Gutenberg with a place
in that list of great places to search.
Chinese Moves Into Our Top 5 List
As has been noted in our recent Monthly Newsletters, we have finally managed
to do nearly 400 eBooks in Chinese and to start to do justice to the most
spoken language.
Note: The collection of 307 Chinese Preprints eBooks I mentioned in earlier
Newsletters, has been "retired."
This means we are no longer sure they will be done, for lack of copyright
research, etc. They are still there, waiting, if you would care to see if you
can bring even just a few of them, into general circulation.
Statistical Note: I am counting the 307 in the totals, for 2008, but not
2009, since they appeared from all of the year ending a week ago. There is a
method to these madnesses, and that is that if I officially removed the 307, I
would have to move in a couple thousand that are waiting in the wings, and we
prefer to balance the year
2008 with 2009 as well as possible. So by eliminating, as it were, 307
between the official years, 2009 should still come out well ahead due to the
new thousands that will be put in PrePrints as soon as possible.
Spanish Is Our New Goal for Entry Into the Top 5 List
I desperately need some Spanish speaking people to help me!
This project is somewhat on hold, as the sponsor are still, as we speak, on
their holiday vacations.
Note: You can find many more books in other languages at:
http://www.gutenberg.cc
where there are over 75,000 books, half in other languages.
Project Gutenberg Books Equal The Average Library
We also officially passed 32,000 original Project Gutenberg eBooks this past
year, including all our usual listings.
This means the original Project Gutenberg editions now list as many book
titles as the average U.S. public library.
Reminder:
The difference between
http://www.gutenberg.org
and
http://www.gutenberg.cc
is that most of the books at gutenberg.org are put through a rigorous internal
screening, proofreading and formatting before they are ever entered into our
catalog, as WE would be responsible for correcting any errors.
The books at gutenberg.cc have been donated by other eBook producers and
eLibraries around the world, hundreds of the world's best collections are
represented. However, eBooks at gutenberg.cc are the responsibility of the
donors so we can't fix the errors without their permission, or else our
edition differs from theirs. So usually we have to wait a while as they make
various updates and corrections.
Project Gutenberg PrePrints
Please note that PrePrints now has over 2,000 books!!!
Well worth looking into:
http://www.preprints.readingroo.ms
We could use someone to write a piece about PrePrints.
The books in PrePrints are usually waiting for some final, necessary, "missing
piece" of information before complete, and ready to be entered into our
permanent catalog.
However, we don't want to deprive the general readership's access to these
books just on a technicality, one which is sometimes going to take years to
resolve, so we put them a stone's throw away from our original collection,
with some words of warning.
The News In More Detail
The times are changing, and we can either lead or follow.
If we don't lead in the field of Chinese eBooks we follow-- and we are
starting a Project Gutenberg of Chinese, for all who may wish to get in on the
ground floor.
Believe it or not, Spanish is listed as the third language, with regard to its
use on the entire Internet so that's the next goal, to bring Spanish to out
Top 5.
Our All Time Hottest Requests!!!!!!!
FLASH RAM
I am still looking for the earliest flash RAM possible.
The very earliest were PCMCIA cards, such as used for the Poqet computer, etc.
One of these for an HP is coming.
The earliest USB flash drives were DisgoDizgo, M-Systems and these were OEMed
by IBM, HP, etc. They are particular in a recognizable fashion because their
snapon connectors resemble the connectors of jigsaw puzzles.
POWERPOINT
We need someone who can do PowerPoint illustrations.
One in particular, building a 3-D box of 1,000 dominoes.
And in other languages.
Additional Newsletter Services
In addition, we will provide the PG Canada Newsletter and totals from PG of
Australia, Europe, PrePrints, etc.
The 2008 Statistical Year in Review
These totals do NOT include 75,000+ at
http://www.gutenberg.cc
Where there are eBooks representing over 100 languages.
These are the various totals from the ~30,000 at
http://www.gutenberg.org
and our other Project Gutenberg Sites
PrePrints
2431 [Counting the 307 Chinese eBooks]
[and 111 more as retired/promoted/published]
2009 will start without these 307 as follows:
2013 titles (approximately)
(448 other titles have been
retired/promoted/published,
and will be listed as such,
starting next Newsletter.)
2008 CIA World Factbook. The editions prior to 2008 are already in the main
collection but the 2008 edition is subject to change until mid-2008. We have
the current edition copied here, until then, as both a large .zip
(49MB) and unpacked. Added January 6, 2009.
1,726 Project Gutenberg of Australia
554 Project Gutenberg of Europe
225 Project Gutenberg of Canada [Estimated]
[202 up to December, no current report]
2,320 PrePrints [Counting the 307 Chinese eBooks]
Grand total for today: 27,616
23,374 English en
1,343 French fr
557 German de
482 Finnish fi
395 Chinese zh
380 Dutch nl
292 Portuguese pt
219 Spanish es
174 Italian it
62 Latin la
55 Esperanto eo
54 Tagalog tl
50 Swedish sv
We now have just over a dozen languages with over 50.
> From Project Gutenberg Sites Worldwide
27,616 PG General Automated Count
1,726 Project Gutenberg of Australia
554 Project Gutenberg of Europe
225 Project Gutenberg of Canada [Estimated]
[202 up to December, no current report]
2,431 PrePrints [Counting the 307 Chinese eBooks +111]
====== ======
32,552 Grand Total [Counting those PrePrints]
Note Without counting PrePrints, we are still 30,000 plus and some of the new
.lit collection will not make it under our current rules of addition from
PrePrints, and would be deleted from PrePrints without moving to other
listings.
The next Newsletter will start with 448 less PrePrints, unless we already have
the new Chinese 2,000+ already.
Note There are perhaps 100 eBooks not listed here that are already in
circulation from Project Gutenberg.
Note PG Canada includes English, French, and Italian.
Here is how we ended 2007
The combined PG projects had produced a total of 26,161 Today using the same
accounying methodology it's 32,552
6,391 Grand Total for 2008 [2009 subtracts 448 to start]
532.5 Per Month
17.5 Per Day
120.5 Per Week [53 Wednesdays in 2008]
I don't have all the other details yet.
Back to how we ended 2007, below.
The most number of books posted...
...in one day was 65 on the 26th December
...in one week was 151 in Week 18 (week ending 9th May)
...in one month was 477 in November
We averaged
338 per month [Over 4,000 for the year]
78 per week
11.13 per day
99 titles were newly REposted to the new filing system,
bringing us almost to the 2,000 mark.
Here is a small selection of project milestones;
TOTAL Original Project Gutenberg eBooks equals about the number of books in
the average U.S. public library
32,552 on 20090107 [Counting 448 PrePrints]
32,500 on 20082121 [Counting the 307 Chinese Preprints]
[And presuming 3 after official count]
32,000 ~~ Calculating
31,500 on 20081021 [not an error, 1,777 PrePrints]
30,000 on 20081021
29,500 on 20080919
29,000 ~~ Calculating
28,500 ~~ Calculating
28,000 ~~ 20080516
27,500 on 20080405
27,000 ~~ 20080229
26,500 on 20080126
26,000 on 20071224
25,000 on 20071012
24,000 on 20070710
23,000 on 20070415
PG-AU
1,700 on 20081010
1,600 on 20080208
1,500 on 20070407
PG Canada
175 on 20080930
100 on 20080325
110 on 20080417
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Here is the news from PG Canada for December.
We published a total of 18 ebooks during the month: we have now published a
cumulative total of 228 ebooks.
The New Releases section at the top of the PGC main page always gives the
details of new releases for the most recent three months.
LANGUAGES:
- 14 in English
- 4 in French
GENRES
- 9 books for children
- 6 novels
- 1 set of short stories
- 1 book of poetry
- 1 biography
2 of this month's ebooks were by Canadians or had a connection to Canada.
17 of this month's titles were fiction, and 1 was non-fiction. This is a
higher proportion of fiction than usual, and to some extent reflects an
editorial decision to offer a higher proportion than usual of "holiday
reading" titles during the holiday season.
Authors new to PGC this month included:
Fyleman, Rose Amy (1877-1957) [English children's author] Gilchrist, Anne
(1828-1885) [English biographer and essayist] Lewis, Percy Wyndham (1882-1957)
[Canadian writer and painter] Vautel, Clément [pseudonyme de Clément-Henri
Vaulet] (1875 [ou
1876]-1954) [Journaliste français]
***************
Thanks as ever for your support!
Mark
This is a follow up to the previous newsletter release from Michael Hart requesting volunteers to help with error correction in PG text’s. As a response to Michael’s request a new page has been set up on the PG Wiki: ErrorCorrection.
PG is currently using a Request Tracker (RT) ticketing system for dealing with errata but the Wiki post also talks of the possibility of setting up a new Error Correction Team (ECT) that would handle all aspects of the process.
Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter
Error Correction of Project Gutenberg eBooks
Your assistance is hereby requested:
As many of you know, I like to do something around this time
every year to take a new step forward in Project Gutenberg.
As luck would have it, I recently received an email reminder from one of our
volunteers who reads our eBooks out loud for those who need or want audio
eBook versions of our library.
This volunteer was kind enough to keep a log of errors found while recording
one of our classics eBooks out loud and then sent us that list of errors, and
now was following up.
Due to the fact that we receive more errors messages than we have volunteers
to handle, these errors were not corrected, which stimulated me to write a
request for help on this in a recent Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
The results were immediate, effective, and continuing.
The new edition, complete with ~23 corrections is online and has been for a
couple days already, and we are still getting more volunteers for error
correction.
This is a great and wonderful thing because the one thing in the history of
eBooks that separates Project Gutenberg is an everlasting continuing process
of improvement.
Hundreds of our eBooks are reissued each year with a variety of improvements,
some technical, some in format and/or style of presentation, many with various
error corrections.
How Good Can An eBook Get?
If we keep this process going for as many years more as this has been going on
already, there is no reason average eBooks should not be as accurate, or even
more accurate, than books being published on paper.
Some people like to pretend Project Gutenberg eBooks that we run through
certain processes are "perfect," but I think our own sensibilities tell us
this is not the case.
The recent new edition mentioned above is a perfect example, as it had been
through just about all the processes we have, and yet reading it out loud
revealed ~23 more errors.
I would certainly hesitate to bet that our average 250 pages long book would
not have ~23 errors still in it.
After all, 25 errors in 250 pages at only 1,000 characters a page, would mean
the book had 1 error per 10,000 characters, or that it was 99.99% perfect.
I won't bore you all with numerical details, other than just a quick mention
that the earliest eBook standards were 99.9% and then The Library of Congress
upped that to 99.95%, and a few years later Project Gutenberg raised it to
99.975% and I would certainly bet our average eBook that has completed all our
standard processes is at least that good.
However, there is always room for improvement, and that's an awfully touchy
subject for some, but not for CEO Greg Newby, or for myself, or for a few
others who are willing to create a new Project Gutenberg Error Correction
Team.
Believe it or not, we have receives perhaps 10,000 messages, over 37 years,
encouraging us to check certain parts of book files for errors.
10,000 error messages!!!
We should expect to receive many more in the coming years as we will have many
more readers.
What Makes A Project Gutenberg eBook?
As I said earlier, the greatest difference between Gutenberg eBooks and all
others is in the proofreading.
No one spends as much time and effort on accuracy as we do.
In the end, after virtually all the easy to find eBooks have been created,
there will only be error correction to do, and translations into other
languages, the rest grinding slowly, but assuredly to a halt, unless copyright
trends reverse.
There is a reason that Project Gutenberg is used so greatly, particularly when
compared to the millions of other eBooks-- and that is because we work harder
to make them better.
It takes an hour to work over the average book to correct an already existing
list of errors. . .you have to get the book and then you have to open up in a
program that won't leave a trace behind, the various "artifacts" you often see
when the eBooks have been pumped through ill-mannered programs, and a final
pass to make sure all the margins still fit, etc.
Even then, one of our "Whitewashers" has to go over the book with a final fine
tooth comb that pops out every character-- every single character, even a
comma, that changed from what was in the previous edition, and make sure each
one of those changes was intentional.
It's really not terribly easy to be the last persons to work on an eBook, and
to know that any errors you leave behind or accidentally create will be there
for millions of readers in the world until, hopefully, the next error checker
finds and corrects them.
It is a great responsibility, but it also carries a greatest sense of
achievement, as you realize all the future readers, which could be billions,
will benefit from your work.
So, I thank each and every one of our Error Checking Team in great sincerity
for their efforts, and at the same time I am asking for new members for this
team to step forward to make yet one more level of contribution towards
creating the best library humanity has ever seen.
Please be encouraged to forward this message to everyone and anyone you know
who might be interested.
Again my HUGE thanks to you all!!!!!!!
Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg
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As many of you know, I like to do something around this time every year to take a new step forward in Project Gutenberg.
As luck would have it, I recently received an email reminder from one of our volunteers who reads our eBooks out loud for those who need or want audio eBook versions of our library.
This volunteer was kind enough to keep a log of errors found while recording one of our classics eBooks out loud and then sent us that list of errors, and now was following up.
Due to the fact that we receive more errors messages than we have volunteers to handle, these errors were not corrected, which stimulated me to write a request for help on this in a recent Project Gutenberg Newsletter.
The results were immediate, effective, and continuing.
The new edition, complete with ~23 corrections is online and has been for a couple days already, and we are still getting more volunteers for error correction.
This is a great and wonderful thing because the one thing in the history of eBooks that separates Project Gutenberg is an everlasting continuing process of improvement.
PG Mobile is going to be a new addition to gutenberg.org, which will allow mobile/cell phone users to download and read eBooks. The files will be available on the normal download page of any PG eBook. Here is the full Press Release.
Look For PG Mobile – Project Gutenberg’s Mobile Edition
Why using Amazon’s proprietary Kindle when you can use your mobile phone instead? Today’s cell phones offer excellent screens and massive computing power to ensure best reading comfort. Mobile books do not weigh much and you can carry them with you wherever you are. Each Java / MIDP 2.0 enabled cell phone is sufficient – the most common computing platform in the world: There are by far more cell phones shipped worldwide than personal computers.
Over the last month we officially passed 32,000 original Project Gutenberg eBooks, including all our usual listings and almost 2,500 eBooks at PrePrints. This means the original Project Gutenberg editions now list as many titles as the average U.S. public library.
27,475 + 287 112008 PG General Automated Count
1,723 + 6 111808 PG Australia
553 + 13 102108 PG Europe
2,494 + 33 102108 PG PrePrints
202 + 12 110908 PG Canada [Estimated]
======
32,447 + 349 by various automated counts and newsletters
Notes
Without counting PrePrints, we are still about 30K, and some of the new .lit collection will not make it under our current rules of addition from PrePrints, and would be deleted from PrePrints without moving to other listings.
This Service Just Announced As Follows!!!
Our CEO, Greg Newby, is trying this out, it's working fine!
[The following is the press release pretty much as it arrived]
Look For PG Mobile - Project Gutenberg's Mobile Edition
Why using Amazon's proprietary Kindle when you can use your mobile phone
instead? Today's cell phones offer excellent screens and massive computing
power to ensure best reading comfort. Mobile books do not weigh much and you
can carry them with you wherever you are.
Each Java / MIDP 2.0 enabled cell phone is sufficient - the most common
computing platform in the world: There are by far more cell phones shipped
worldwide than personal computers.
PG Mobile is a software that transfers the plain text format provided by
Project Gutenberg onto small handset screens - together with all the features
known from physical books like turning pages, page numbers and bookmarks. Just
download the PG Mobile version of any eBook and read it on your phone: All
Project Gutenberg mobile eBooks will soon be available for download as an
additional file format in the download section of each Gutenberg title on
Gutenberg.org. Stay tuned!
PG Mobile is based on the common Java file format (JAR) readable on nearly all
mobile handsets. The superior features of the PG Mobile reader offer benefits
like landscape mode and bookmarks, among many others. There's no book size
limit, the book size is only limtated by the individual capabilities of your
handset.
All mobile books can be downloaded as Java-applications and can then later be
installed on the cell phone by using Bluetooth, serial connection, infrared or
data cable. Additionally it will be possible to install the books directly
over the air by using WAP: Just browse to Gutenberg.org and click on the JAR-
link. And soon the mobile book will automatically be installed on your phone.
Please visit the homepage of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation: http://www.gutenberg.org.
PG Mobile developed by QiOO Interactive, PG Mobile - JAR-book Technology by
QiOO Interactive, http://www.qioo.com.
QiOO Interactive is the first producer of free mobile books worldwide. As a
result of a university spin-off project at the Institute of Electronic
Business e.V., http://www.ieb.net, the first mobile books were created in
summer 2003.
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eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971