If there are any experts out there in Perl or Excel, you would be greatly appreciated in helping us with PG statistical numbers; daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. We can provide data, and hopefully you can provide us with weekly, monthly or yearly totals for the Newsletters.
If you would like a complete listing of each book title, and the accompanying data, we do have a daily listing to subscribe to, which also includes additional data on the book as it is uploaded for final preparation.
The Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter, April 21, 2008
e-Books Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971
56 Months to The End of the World Via Mayan Calendaring!
This leaves 4 2/3 years, 18 2/3 seasons, or 56 months...
Not to worry. I will still make predictions further on.
HEADLINE NEWS
As of today, April 21, 2008, original "Project Gutenberg
eBook" site totals have reached 25,000, having passed on
from 24,998 in the period since yesterday's totals for a
new total of 25,004.
eBook #25,000 is:
English Book Collectors, by William Younger Fletcher
25000
[Editor: Alfred Pollard]
[Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/2/5/0/0/25000 ]
[Files: 25000.txt; 25000-8.txt; 25000-h.htm]
Thanks to Suzanne Lybarger, Jane Hyland, Brian Janes and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
Please do not forget the 1600+ from PG of Australia, the
~500 from PG Europe, and the ~100 from PG Canada, with a
detailed list included below.
Exact figures follow the rest of the Newsletter.
As we have seen, our current batch of volunteers for the
Project Gutenberg Newsletters is now down to about zero,
so Greg Newby, PG CEO, and I are working up a revival so
if you would like to contribute or take over, email us.
I will continue to create The Monthly Newsletter, and to
get it out around the 21st of each month, counting down,
month by month, to the end of the Mayan calendar date of
December 21, 2012.
Note: There won't be any new postings from PG Australia
for the rest of April, May, and possibly June.
Portable Reading offers a service to read books from a
library of over 20,000 Gutenberg titles in dozens of
languages.? Readers can upload their own book and share it
with friends.? They can also communicate with each other
and with authors by writing reviews and annotating
individual pages with notes.? The reading interface is
customizable by font size, type, background color, etc.
Portable Reading is currently available on the iPhone, the
iPod Touch, and on Facebook.? Many more mobile devices are
coming soon.
Try Portable Reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch:?
http://www.textonphone.com
Try Portable Reading on Facebook:?
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=20655241480&ref=s
Second Request!
If there are any experts out there in Perl or Excel, you
would be greatly appreciated in helping us with numbers;
daily, weekly, monthly and yearly. We can provide data,
and hopefully you can provide us with weekly, monthly or
yearly totals for these Newsletters.
If you would like a complete listing of each book title,
and the accompanying data, we do have a daily listing to
subscribe to, which also includes additional data on the
book as it is uploaded for final preparation.
First Request
I need someone who can do PowerPoint illustrations.
One in particular, building a 3-D box of 1,000 dominoes.
In addition, I will provide the PG Canada Newsletter and
totals from PG of Australia, Europe, PrePrints, etc.
These totals do NOT include 75,000+ at:
http://www.gutenberg.cc
Here is the output for the current week:
day | cnt
----------------+-----
Mon 2008-04-14 | 5
Tue 2008-04-15 | 5
Wed 2008-04-16 | 4
Thu 2008-04-17 | 5
Fri 2008-04-18 | 12
Sat 2008-04-19 | 11
Sun 2008-04-20 | 2
[partial day]
Current Totals
25,004 Project Gutenberg Under US Copyright Law
1,624 Project Gutenberg Of Australia +6
494 Project Gutenberg of Europe +3
110 Project Gutenberg of Canada +12
387 Project Gutenberg PrePrints +0
======
27,619 Grand Total
[About as many as the average public library]
PG Australia posted their eBook #1600 on Feb. 8, 2008
PG Canada posted their eBook #100 on March 25, 2008
PG US posted their eBook #25,000 on April 20, 2008
Note: PG Canada includes English, French, and Italian.
Top Language Totals
21475 English en
1168 French fr
530 German de
433 Finnish fi
326 Dutch nl
217 Portuguese pt
196 Chinese zh
180 Spanish es
128 Italian it
55 Latin la
54 Tagalog tl
45 Esperanto eo
40 Swedish sv
20 Danish da
19 Catalan ca
10 Welsh cy
10 Norwegian no
7 Russian ru
7 Icelandic is
7 Hungarian hu
6 Middle English enm
6 Greek el
6 Bulgarian bg
///
Here is how we ended 2007
The combined PG projects have now produced a total of 26,161 titles.
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 books per month, 78 per week and 11.13 per day.
99 titles have been REposted to the new filing system, bringing us
almost to the 2,000 mark.
Here is a small selection of project milestones;
TOTAL Project Gutenberg e-Texts
* 27,500 ~~ 2008/04/05
* 26,500 on 2008/01/26
* 26,000 on 2007/12/24
* 25,000 on 2007/10/12
* 24,000 on 2007/07/10
* 23,000 on 2007/04/15
PG-US
* 25,000 on 2008/03/20
* 24,000 on 2007/12/27
* 22,500 on 2007/09/09
PG-AU
* 1,600 on 2008/02/08
* 1,500 on 2007/04/07
PG Canada
* 100 on 2008/03/25
* 110 on 2008/04/17
In 1985 when Gary Kildall, IBM’s first choice before Bill Gates to design their PC’s operating system a few years earlier, came out with the first electronic encyclopedia, who would figure it would be only a quarter of a century before print encyclopedias faded from the limelight to join vinyl records and dinosaurs?
$999 would buy you an external Sony CD drive and Grolier’s CD– pretty much the same price as the paper encyclopedias, but with the option of putting any number of CDs in the drive.
This was only a year after the famous “1984” Super Bowl ad that ran only once and changed Super Bowl ads forever.
It’s all over for those hefty paper encyclopedias.
No less an authority than The New York Times tells us it is time to “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias,” that it is all over other than rolling out the last few editions of some last few hard-boiled Luddites who insist on paper encyclopedias, at a price that could easily buy you a decent used car.
$1500 would buy you an encyclopedia when I was a kid, and that’s not so much less than we paid for our first brand new $2100 car.
Obviously this pricing has taken a beating to remain competitive with electronic resources, as I just clicked on an ad for a 2007 Britannica, there doesn’t seem to be a 2008, and got three kinds labeled as follows:
I recently updated my Future History: Spacefaring Societies, Resources and Logistics essay, that expands on the Afterwords and References chapters in my e-novel ‘The Universe–or Nothing.’ The novel (2006) is archived in the Project Gutenberg Library Archive Foundation (PGLAF) from where it may be freely downloaded at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18257
We’ve just posted the 100th eBook. It’s from 1904, seems not to have been reprinted, and is a very interesting account of Toronto’s legal establishment in the 19th century: it’s a rather spectacular addition to the collection. Here’s the description from the website:
2008/03/25: As our 100th eBook, we’ve chosen this beautifully illustrated history of Toronto’s lawyers and judiciary – A true rarity and a delight to read, packed with anecdotes. You may end up thinking that the history of Toronto is the history of its lawyers!
Many of us dream of a universal digital library freely available on the web, i.e. available anywhere and at any time. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and others, we are getting there, at least for the books from public domain. The process began a while ago with a few pioneers – It is running at full speed now. We still need to see copyright issues worked out in order to provide free access to as many works as possible. We still need large scale knowledge-building projects to get reliable reference, scholarly and educational content. We still need better quality OCR technology and in the future, go back to the original image files to provide a higher quality book. We still need more efforts, there are currently 25 million books belonging to the public domain and as of mid-2007, just over 2 million freely available on the internet.
Las líneas que siguen están dedicadas a todos los voluntarios del Proyecto Gutenberg en los cinco continentes. Gracias a ellos, más de 20.000 clásicos de la literatura mundial ya están disponibles en la red, en una versión gratuita y de gran calidad, con una previsión de una biblioteca de un millón de libros.
En 1971, Michael Hart creó el Proyecto Gutenberg con el objetivo de difundir gratuitamente bajo forma electrónica las obras literarias que pertenecían al dominio público. Hasta hoy, nadie consiguió obrar con más éxito para poner los clásicos de la literatura mundial a disposición de todos. Ni tampoco crear con tan pocos gastos una red tan inmensa de voluntarios en el mundo entero, sin derroche de competencias y de energía.
With reference to this Times Online article, it seems that the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader are to be made available in the UK sometime over the next few months — it’s about bloody time!
…the launch of two rival devices due to come on sale in Britain over the next few months – Sony’s Reader and Amazon’s Kindle.
Although I already have my own Sony Reader, which I purchased while still working on the cruise ships out of Florida, I’m hoping this will mean I can start to purchase books for it from the Connect store. At present I have to settle for public domain books (PG, manybooks.net, etc) or download PDF’s from eBooks.com.
After all these years of saying free eBooks were anathema to the Olde Boye Networke of the publishing world….
The publishers are finally realizing that when eBooks are given away free of charge actually increase paper sales–not that there weren’t any number of academic studies and articles saying this from the very beginning.
So, if any Project Gutenberg volunteers ever needed kinds of vindication, it doesn’t get much better than this…at least until we find there are more eBook going out for consumption than paper books….