[gmonthly] Extra Edition of the PG Newsletter

[Michael S. Hart]

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