Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter 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