I wonder what libraries have the highest circulation, and how many times their average books circulate, and things like that.Are these the kinds of things you consider?
The Loneliness of the Unread Books
I recall learning in Library School that the averages for circulation are around six times during the whole lifespan a book spends in a library.
I was shocked.
After all, the books I was reading were checked out six times while I still had them on reserve!
Then I realized for the first time how lonely average books must be in the libraries, and how lonely people who read them must be, knowing hardly anyone else was ever going to read them, and thus not being able from nearly the same perspective to share what they read.
We had some new friends over for dinner last night, and towards dessert, the conversation turned to books, and eventually to all the books that were now available online. They were quite interested in the travel accounts by women that Mary had been putting online, and remarked “You must have a passion for this.” When they found out that over 300 books had been republished on her site, on a completely volunteer basis, they said “that’s a *lot* of passion!”
I think that could be said about a lot of the people on the list.
Whether it’s the regular posters, or the folks who mostly lurk and occasionally send us email, this has been a group that’s been passionate about books, what they can do for people, and the importance of doing the best job we can to make them available to as many people as possible.
Well, life today, as so often, has been so hectic, with newspaper articles and interviews to do about the recent PR blitzes from billion dollar products or at least what they HOPE will be such, that I am down to the wire with well under an hour to Mark’s deadline and so I must do what I can with the time I have left…and apologize for not doing more.
As always, I lean more towards the future and less towards the past than most of us do, with a little care towards preserving such “look and feel” paper and it predecessors have given us over millennia.
My own concern at this final Book People juncture, is for the future, a future I think we will find a great of which we have failed to consider when and if we look back on this date a decade from now, or especially from even longer periods, though I will not likely be with you a decade from now.
eBooks as I invented them are what you would get if you sat at your computer and typed in a book the same way a person types in anything else, however, but most of the news items that claim a million books are book pictures rather than actual computer characters.
Here is the difference:
When you hear about a megabyte, that is the one million sized bunch of computer characters…just what we get if we typed in a million characters like this.
A gigabyte is a billion characters, or bytes.
A terabyte is a trillion characters…etc.
This month terabytes have been around $200, very cheap.
For several months DP Canada was running in limited operation. On December 1, 2007 they went “live” again.
DP Canada is dedicated to;
Preserving Canadiana one page at a time
Taking advanatge of Canada’s more liberal copyright laws to ensure public access to books in the Public Domain in Canada.
PGC presented the first DP Canada French language title on December 9, 2007: Jacques Cartier's account of his 1534 voyage to Canada.The first English language title appeared on Decembr 12, 2007: Walter de la Mare's children's story "The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire".
“Acting without a vote, the Assembly, also recognizing that the United Nations pursues multilingualism as a means of promoting, protecting and preserving diversity of languages and cultures globally, emphasized the paramount importance of the equality of the Organization’s six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).”
Note the lack of languages from India and Africa, but the inclusion of previous world powers of Spain, France, and Russia, and only one currently rising superpower, China.
This reflects a greater concern with political power than serving the actual general world population, where India, Indonesia, Africa, Pakistan, etc., reflect some one third of the entire world population without their languages in the official representation of the United Nations.
General Assembly
GA/10592
Department of Public Information • News and Media Division • New York
Sixty-first General Assembly
Plenary
96th Meeting (PM)
GENERAL ASSEMBLY PROCLAIMS 2008 INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF LANGUAGES, IN EFFORT TO PROMOTE UNITY IN DIVERSITY, GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING
The General Assembly this afternoon, recognizing that genuine multilingualism promotes unity in diversity and international understanding, proclaimed 2008 the International Year of Languages.
Acting without a vote, the Assembly, also recognizing that the United Nations pursues multilingualism as a means of promoting, protecting and preserving diversity of languages and cultures globally, emphasized the paramount importance of the equality of the Organization’s six official languages (Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish).
pgweekly_2007_12_19.txt
The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter for Wednesday, December 19, 2007
****eBooks Readable by Both Humans and Computers since July 4, 1971****
http://www.gutenberg.org
NOTE: Best viewed with a fixed-width font, e.g. Courier New.
Windows Notepad is a good a program to use for viewing.
NEWS HEADLINES
--------------
Our automated listing showed 79 new eBooks [usually a bit over] and
at least one came in from PG of Australia, so 80 for total.
I will forward the PG of Canada Newsletters.
Happy Holidays!!!!!!!
Micahel
pgweekly_2007_12_12.txt
The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter for Wednesday, December 12, 2007
****eBooks Readable by Both Humans and Computers since July 4, 1971****
http://www.gutenberg.org
NOTE: Best viewed with a fixed-width font, e.g. Courier New.
Windows Notepad is a good a program to use for viewing.
NEWS HEADLINES
--------------
From Wednesday to Wednesday we received 89 in our report of automated
listings and 2 more from PG Australia.
The third PGAU listing was to add an HTML to the second.
I should perhaps add that Canadian copyright is in news reports
these days as being under attack from the power players in world
copyright, and is likely to fall to an outside economic warfare
power in the next few years.
Probably in a quite similar way as Australian copyright did just
a few year ago. . . .
pgweekly_2007_12_05.txt
The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter for Wednesday, December 5, 2007
****eBooks Readable by Both Humans and Computers since July 4, 1971****
http://www.gutenberg.org
NOTE: Best viewed with a fixed-width font, e.g. Courier New.
Windows Notepad is a good a program to use for viewing.
NEWS HEADLINES
--------------
Just a note to say that 63 eBooks ticked in on Marcello Perathon's program
this week [usually a bit too high]--and a decent handful came in from
PG Australia.
Due to a seriously limited internet access the PG-News site will not be update for the next 3 weeks. My apologies to all for this and I thank you for your patience.