The Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter--June 21, 2009
eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971
42 Months to The End of the World Via Mayan Calendaring on December 21, 2012
[some now saying October 11, 2011]
Leaving 3 years 6 months, 14 seasons or 42 months.
Not to worry, I will still make long range predictions.
Headline News
More eBooks To More People Via More Hardware and Software
The 39th year of Project Gutenberg will begin July 4th, 2009-- and we will
once again be one of larger sponsors of The World eBook Fair at
http://www.worldebookfair.org, which will reach the neighborhood of ~2.5
million eBooks from July 4 to August 4, starting in about two weeks.
One of the major developments this year is the advance in the variety of
hardware and software methods of reading eBooks in more circumstances, more
locations, and, of course, with more eBooks in wider and wider circulation.
We will be sending out a special edition of this Newsletter a few weeks from
now dedicated to these.
Our 25,000th eBook In English Will Be Coming Up Shortly
If you have any ideas, suggestions, comments, etc., about how we might
commemorate this event, please let us know.
We Just Published Our:
200th eBook in Italian
400th eBook in Chinese
500th eBook in Finnish
We are coming up on our 250th in Spanish. . .suggestions???
iPhone Acquisition
As you know, we try to get one of each of the popular reading devices to test
how our eBooks work on them and demonstrate a wide variety of reading options.
A friend is updating his iPhone today and I am buying his old one, so we would
appreciate any suggestions of which programs we should load to demonstrate the
widest variety of readers.
Some interesting notes about eBooks of various varieties:
National archives reviews purchases of paper materials in digital age Library
and Archives Canada has put a moratorium on buying paper documents and books
for its collection. Full Story:
http://links.cbc.ca/a/l.x?T=jncickgjiekjmplpgobfifjajd&M=36
...
Google Books Improves -
http://www.slaw.ca/2009/06/18/google-books-improves/
Google Books has released a number of improvements designed to make reading
and sharing their material easier. The Books blog, Inside Google Book Search
lists seven changes:
- embedding and links - From the new toolbar on a Books page you can copy a
link to the source or the html necessary to produce an iframe in your blog or
web page that will embed the source.
- improved search - There's now more context around your search terms, and you
can rank your search results by relevance as well as page order.
- thumbnail view - More useful, perhaps, where images are involved, you can
see an overview in thumbnails of the book you're examining.
- drop-down menu - The drop-down menu displays links to the various divisions
within the book.
- plain text mode - Viewers can turn off the html mode and work simply with
plain text.
- page turn animation - This feature, invoked by clicking at the bottom of
the screen, simulates a more natural progression through the book.
- improved book overview - There's more data about the book offered on the
overview page.
British Library Publishes Online Archive of 19th-Century Newspapers Maev
Kennedy The Guardian Thursday 18 June 2009
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/18/
british-library-newspaper-archive-online>
A shorter URL for the above link:
<http://tinyurl.com/nknweq>
Over two million pages of 19th and early 20th century newspapers go online
today, part of the vast British Library collection.
The 49 British national and regional titles cover events including the Battle
of Waterloo in June 1815 "Vague reports have been made of the numbers slain on
both sides ... We should not quote them if our silence could prevent the
spreading of disastrous intelligence", the Morning Chronicle reported. There
was also the banks crisis of 1878, the first FA Cup final in 1872, and the
triumph of the music hall star Vesta Tilley in a talent contest.
<snip>
The site
<http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs>
holds journals including the True Crime of its day, the Illustrated Police
News which covered the Jack the Ripper murders. The British Library worked in
partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee and Gale, part of
Cengage Learning, to create the service. Searches are free, but users can pay
to download information.
["Can pay"??? I wonder if that translates into "must pay,"
unless one is a certain kind of member or the like?]
Our All Time Hottest Requests!!!!!!!
FLASH RAM
I am looking for the earliest flash RAM possible.
The very earliest were PCMCIA cards, such as used for the Poqet computer, etc.
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.
We received two examples of RAM actually labeled "Flash,"
for the H-P 95 pocket DOS machine from 1991, and a sample of Fairchild bubble
memory, as well, from down under.
Thank you, Mate!
POWERPOINT
We need someone who can do PowerPoint illustrations.
One in particular, building a 3-D box of 1,000 dominoes.
Additional Newsletter Services
In addition, we will provide the PG Canada Newsletter and totals from PG of
Australia, Europe, PrePrints, etc.
You should notice that we had a very good month, with 100 books done nearly
every single week.
These totals do NOT include 75,000+ at
httpwww.gutenberg.cc
Where there are eBooks representing over 100 languages.
The Project Gutenberg Statistical Report [As of about noon Central Daylight
Time]
Various totals from the ~30,000 at
httpwww.gutenberg.org
and our other Project Gutenberg Sites
This week:
day | cnt
----------------+-----
Sun 2009-06-14 | 6
Mon 2009-06-15 | 13
Tue 2009-06-16 | 2
Wed 2009-06-17 | 16
Thu 2009-06-18 | 6
Fri 2009-06-19 | 12
Sat 2009-06-20 | 13
Thanks to Marcello Perathoner!
Here are the current language totals
for languages with 200 or more eBooks.
Grand total for today: 29082
24519 English en
1434 French fr
584 German de
505 Finnish fi
423 Dutch nl
402 Chinese zh
329 Portuguese pt
241 Spanish es
200 Italian it
Not to mention PrePrints, Canada, Australia, Europe....
Total increase +287 All Reported Languges
and from the previous month. . . .
Thanks to Greg Newby!
//////
And From Project Gutenberg Sites Worldwide [2 months]
29,082 up 283 PG General Automated Count
1,767 up 7 PG of Australia
637 up 6 PG of Europe
2,021 up 0 PG PrePrints, Reserved [42],etc.
325 up 36 PG of Canada, End of May.
======
33,832 up 320 Grand Total
Note Without counting PrePrints, we are still over 30,000 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.
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 2008
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]
Here is how we ended 2007
The combined PG projects had 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 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
32,500 on 20082121 [Counting the 307 Chinese Preprints]
[And presuming 3 after official count]
32,000 on Calcuating
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 May.
We published a total of 18 ebooks during the month: we have now published a
cumulative total of 325 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:
- 15 in English
- 3 in French
GENRES
- 7 novels
- 4 history books
- 2 cookbooks
- 1 book of essays
- 1 dictionary
- 1 book of poetry
- 1 personal journal
- 1 children's book
8 of this month's ebooks were by Canadians or had a connection to Canada.
9 of this month's titles were fiction, and 9 were non-fiction.
April saw the posting of two further titles by the famous English novelist and
essayist Arnold Bennett (1867-1931), courtesy of Distributed Proofreaders
Europe.
May was notable for the posting of our first titles by the famous missionary,
explorer, historian, and linguist Adrien-Gabriel Morice (1859-1938),
celebrated in the annals of British Columbia, and of the Canadian historian
Ernest Alexander Cruikshank (1854-1939).
Authors new to PGC this month included:
Bennet, Robert Ames (1870-1954) [American novelist] Bosse, Sara [née Eaton]
(1868-1940) [Canadian author] and Watanna, Onoto [Reeve, Winnifred Eaton: née
Eaton, Winnifred] (1875-1954) [Canadian novelist] Boucher-Belleville, Jean-
Philippe [Jean-Baptiste] (1800-1874) [Journaliste canadien] Cody, Hiram Alfred
(1872-1948) [Canadian priest, novelist, and biographer] Cruikshank, Ernest
Alexander (1854-1939) [Canadian historian] Dionne, Narcisse-Eutrope (1848-
1917) [Historien, lexicographe et bibliothécaire canadien] Hodgson, William
Hope (1877-1918) [English novelist and poet] Isle, June (active around 1864)
[American children's author] Lighthall, William Douw (1857-1954) [Canadian
lawyer, politician, historian, novelist, philosopher, and poet] Monck, Frances
Elizabeth Owen (d. 1919) [Irish memoirist] Morice, Adrien-Gabriel (1859-1938)
[Missionnaire, explorateur, ethnologue et lexicographe canadien] O'Duffy,
Eimar Ultan (1893-1935) [Irish playwright, novelist, and economist] Wallace,
Edgar [Wallace, Richard Horatio Edgar] (1875-1932) [English novelist,
playwright, and screenplay writer]
***************
Thanks as ever for your support!
Mark
Many people have argue with me for years on the subject of dedicated eBook reader devices, with any number of reasons they like them, but it is really only that they can’t read small print or they still want “the look and feel” of the dead trees pulp bound up in dead animal skins.
I won’t even address the latter issues here but to say that the world always says it will stick with the old ways until a new generation comes, and then the car or the telephone or hairstyle, or whatever, becomes ubiquitous, then the story is closed, and the argument forgotten.
However, I will address the issue of font size.
This is an issue mainly of interest to Boomers, and to others born with limited vision, rather, sadly, than just from olde age.
However, the Boomers are losing power faster in all respects than the media are willing to show because the media is still controlled by Boomer and even older groups, who will not admit their time went, of even pretending to be middle age. I won’t argue right now that people born in ‘65 were the last Boomers, how silly, those Boomers of the real kind were already having kids!!!
The first goal of Project Gutenberg was simply to reach totals of estimated audiences of 1.5% of the world population, or the total of 100 million people.
With the advent of cell phone [mobile phone] access we are now setting our goal at 15% of the world population or 1 billion.
Given that there are approximately 4.5 billion cell phones now in service around the world, that means we would have to reach just over 1/5 of all cell phone users to accomplish this.
The first goal of Project Gutenberg was simply to reach totals of estimated audiences of 1.5% of the world population, or the total of 100 million people.