[gweekly] Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter

Tue Jul 21 06:50:19 PDT 2009

Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter

The Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter--July 21, 2009
eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971

41 Months to The End of the World Via Mayan Calendaring
on December 21, 2012 [some now saying October 11, 2011]

Leaving 3 years 5 months, 13 2/3 seasons or 41 months.

Not to worry, I will still make long range predictions.

I am adding the emergency Newsletter I wrote early, to make a
total copy of the July Newsletter[s] that are easier on those
who look them up in our archives, it will be at the end.

Headline News

More eBooks To More People Via More Hardware and Software

The 39th year of Project Gutenberg has started July 4th, 2009
and we are once again be one of largest 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, endin 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 reporting on these events.

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.

Our 30,000th eBook created under U.S. copyright law will come
out a month or two after that, please advise on suggestions.

We Recently 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.

Our All Time Hottest Requests!!!!!!!

FLASH RAM

I am looking for the earliest flash RAM possible.

The ideal piece around which to center this collection is
one of the 8 megabyte USBs.

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.

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
----------------+-----
 Tue 2009-07-14 |   7
 Wed 2009-07-15 |   8
 Thu 2009-07-16 |   8
 Fri 2009-07-17 |   7
 Sat 2009-07-18 |  17
 Sun 2009-07-19 |   9
 Mon 2009-07-20 |  10

Thanks to Marcello Perathoner!

Here are the current language totals
for languages with 200 or more eBooks.

Grand total for today: 29368

24762   English en
1442    French  fr
590     German  de
509     Finnish fi
433     Dutch   nl
402     Chinese zh
339     Portuguese      pt
242     Spanish es
202     Italian it

Total increase       +286      All Reported Languges

Last month:

Total increase       +287      All Reported Languges

Not counting PrePrints, Canada, Australia, Europe....

Thanks to Greg Newby!

//////

And From Project Gutenberg Sites Worldwide

29,368   up   286  PG General Automated Count
 1,774   up     7  PG of Australia
   641   up     4  PG of Europe
 2,021   up     0  PG PrePrints, Reserved [42],etc.
   375   up    50  PG of Canada [Est. since End of June]
======
34,179   up   347  Grand Total

from last month's

33,832   up   320  Grand Total

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

///

Here is the July emergency Newsletter in toto for archiving.

Extra Edition of the PG Newsletter

I'm sending this out now because I have serious doubts as
to whether I will be able to do this very easily when the
Newsletter is actually due.  This may be the last time on
this hard drive that I actually get booted up, and it was
pretty much just luck that got me this far.

I'll be buying some new computers this week, I hope, with
the hopes that I will be more or less back to normal, but
right now the thing won't even let me make backups as the
USB ports have power, but don't recognize any drives.

I'm actually dialed up on the modem right now.

If any of you have any suggestions as to the best deals I
should be looking at for laptops and netbooks, please let
me know, and please cc:  gbnewby at pglaf.org

The Brief News

We are rapidly coming up to our 25,000th eBook in English
and all suggestions for what title to use are welcome.

This should take place next month.

In addition, we are coming up on our 30,000th PG eBook of
all languages perhaps a month or so after that, so we are
also looking for a great eBook in another language to put
up as #30,000.

We are giving away about 75,000 books per day through the
http://www.gutenberg org server, for ~2 million per month
and the monthly total was often over 3 million per month,
all told over the past 4 years or so.

This means we have given away over 100 million books over
the past 4 years, just through that one site alone.

The World eBook Fair

In addition, over these same four years we have sponsored
The World eBook Fair along with The Internet Archive, The
World Public Library, ebooksabouteverything.org, etc.

http://www.worldebookfair.org handed out a million files,
just on one day alone, July 4, to start up this 39th year
of presenting eBooks on the Internet.

Please note:  this is less than a million eBooks, as some
entries are multi-file in nature.

Traffic has since dropped to about half that, with a very
healthy 50,000 downloads per day of our "best sellers."

In its first year The World eBook Fair gave away nearly a
total of 30 million eBooks, and if the averages have been
at 25 million over the 4 years, that's a 200 million book
total over those two URLs over a 4 year period, or totals
somewhere in that range.

This does not count all the other sites such as Australia
or Canada or PG of Europe, etc.

The Current PG Totals

I'm not sure I have time right now to fill in everything,
with monthly comparisons as I usually do, as I am running
mostly on adrenaline right now and will have to stop soon
to eat, sleep, shower, etc.

Here are the brief reports you can compare to last month:

I will also try to get back online after the fact and try
to redo a real Newsletter with all info as of July 21st.

Here are today's numbers for languages with 200+ eBooks:

Grand total for today: 29326

24725   English en
1442    French  fr
587     German  de
508     Finnish fi
433     Dutch   nl
402     Chinese zh
338     Portuguese      pt
242     Spanish es
202     Italian it

Courtesy of Greg Newby.

Here are the weekly totals:

      day       | cnt
----------------+-----
 Fri 2009-07-10 |   9
 Sat 2009-07-11 |  11
 Sun 2009-07-12 |  11
 Mon 2009-07-13 |  11
 Tue 2009-07-14 |   7
 Wed 2009-07-15 |   8
 Thu 2009-07-16 |   8

Courtesy of Marcello Perathoner

We have recently been averaging just under 10 books per day
with some very good days that are much better.

If we are lucky, we may do 3,500 to 4,000 books for 2009.

Not to mention the hundreds of books that have been updated
and improved, corrected, etc.

Many thanks to all who have helped us reach our 39th year!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg