[gmonthly] Project Gutenberg Newsletter, Yearly Report

Michael S. Hart hart at pglaf.org
Wed Jan 6 11:46:48 PST 2010



Project Gutenberg Ends One Year And Starts Another

Noon, January 6, 2010, is the end of our calendar production year
number 39 and the beginning of our 40th year, though our 40 years
of calendar time won't be complete until July 5, 2011.  This date
is due to our previous calendar being a weekly one running from a
Wednesday noon to the next Wednesday noon.  Once someone else has
taken over the Newsletters, they are welcome to change this to an
alternate date such as midnight January 1, but I was always awake
and working at noon, and able to send out weekly newsletters so I
just did what worked on that schedule.




Hot Requests


We need lawyers in the following fields:


Probate

Contract

Copyright


We also need people who can help make our web pages better for an
ever increasing number of people surfing in on cellphones, and in
different languages.  We will give you all you need to design and
implement your own Project Gutenberg web pages.  Who knows, it is
possible you could start a whole famous web page design career.

Public Domain Day

The first day of the years is Public Domain Day, when we list the
works that would have gone into the public domain that day if not
for the most recent two copyright extensions [but don't forget we
have had more extensions from the original 14 years].

Notable items that would be public domain now:

Fahrenheit 451
Walt Disney's Peter Pan
The First James Bond Book
Early books by Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, Jas Baldwin
Watson and Crick's Original "Nature" Article on DNA
Salinger's Nine Stories
>From Here To Eternity
Asimov's Second Foundation
Early works of Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, E.E. Smith, van Vogt
War of the Worlds
Julius Caesar [James Mason, Marlon Brando, etc.]

Before these last two major copyright extensions renewals were of
legal necessity to double the length of copyright terms, and most
works were never renewed:  15% of all copyrights, 8% of books had
never been renewed, meaning the vast majority of everything under
copyright before 1982 would now be public domain.


Read more about this at:

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976

and related web pages.


These are great articles by a great copyright lawyer.




Milestones Of The Year


In 2009 we saw our 35,000th internally produced eBook go out, and
our 25,000 in English, our 1,500th in French, 600th in German and
500th in Finnish.  We also saw Dutch and Chinese pass 400 eBooks.

We still need to find ways to do more in Spanish and Portuguese.


These 35,000+ eBooks representing over 50 languages are at:

http://www.gutenberg.org



75,000+ Donated eBooks representing over 100 languages are at:

http://www.gutenberg.cc




100,000 Total Titles


In toto, counting the eBooks donated to us from other eLibraries,
individuals and schools at http://www.gutenberg.cc we now have in
well excess of 100,000 titles, though it is probably closer to an
even 100,000, given various duplications, etc.



Production Year Statistics


The numbers presented below will approximate what are recorded as
of noon on January 6, and the production year will be recorded as
running last year from Wednesday, January 7, 2009 through January
6, 2010, and the coming year will end on January 5, 2011.

Thus we had 52 Wednesdays this past year for 364 days; every once
in a while we get 53 production weeks on this calendar, which has
to be one reason for eventually changing it.



Here is how we ended 2009


      day       | cnt
----------------+-----
 Wed 2009-12-30 |   9
 Thu 2009-12-31 |  12
 Fri 2010-01-01 |   6
 Sat 2010-01-02 |  10
 Sun 2010-01-03 |   2
 Mon 2010-01-04 |  21
 Tue 2010-01-05 |   5

Weekly Total       65



Grand total for today: 30761  from automated in house counter

25866   English en
1531    French  fr
625     German  de
517     Finnish fi
455     Dutch   nl
405     Chinese zh
384     Portuguese      pt
270     Spanish es
225     Italian it
etc.



30,761  Up 3,145  From  27,616  PG General Automated Count
 1,830  Up   104  From   1,726  Project Gutenberg of Australia
   675  Up   121  From     554  Project Gutenberg of Europe
   468  Up   243  From     225  Project Gutenberg of Canada [Estimated]
 2,008  DN   423  From   2,431   PrePrints [Subtracted 307 Chinese eBooks]
======   ======
35,742  Up 3,190  From  32,552   Grand Total [Counting subtractions]


  9.825 eBooks Per Day
 68.773 eBooks Per Week
297.850 eBooks Per Month


///



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 ~~ Rechecking Date
  31,500 on 20081021 [not an error, 1,777 PrePrints]
  30,000 on 20081021
  29,500 on 20080919
  29,000 ~~ Rechecking Date
  28,500 ~~ Rechecking Date
  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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