Michael Hart wrote:
On Wed, 24 May 2006, Michael Dyck wrote:
However, if it makes things easier, I'll gladly refuse to acknowlege that statement *now*. A linear growth curve *is* a growth curve, and a pretty ordinary one at that. It certainly doesn't make it impossible to create an ordinary growth curve. But that's just disagreeing with what you said, rather than what you meant.
No, a line is not a curve.
Well, it is to a mathematician. But if you want to use that definition of "curve", fine, I agree, linear growth is straight, not bendy. I'm *quite* positive that I never refused to acknowlege such a thing. (If you look close enough, PG's ebook count is actually a step function, piecewise constant: after a book is posted, the number of books is constant until the next one is posted. Dunno if that satisfies your definition of "curve".)
However, the case is even more drastic than that, as there was a period of over a decade when 0 eBooks were added, due to the hassles of the US Copyright Act of 1976, which took us forever to find out about, and the truth is that we would probably NEVER have figured them out without the help of one of the top dozen copyright lawyers in the US.
Thus, if you INSIST on talking about curves, the curve was downward.
Uh, if no books are added, the number is constant, which I would consider "flat" rather than "downward". But if you want to define it as "downward", fine.
Just one more obvious reason why you can't talk about growth curves for this period of Project Gutenberg's history.
A downward curve is still a curve. Though if you want to say it isn't a "growth curve", fine. (Mind you, it's not hard to find talk of "negative growth".)
You also mentioned that you can't fit real world items into such growth curves, but you never mentioned that the graph I included is a remarkably good overall fit,
(Well, now you're blurring a distinction I made between two meanings of "fit": real world data doesn't "fit" (= rigidly conform to) exponential curves, but you can "fit" (=approximate) it to an exponential curve. But anyway.) And in fact, I HAVE mentioned how closely the PG numbers are approximated by an exponential curve. See, e.g., http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/2005-January/001263.html and http://lists.pglaf.org/private.cgi/gutvol-d/2005-January/001456.html But now we (well, you, really) have strayed from the topic that brought me in, the comparison between Google's progress and PG's (and dang, I wish I'd changed the subject line at that point), so my interest in this discussion is probably fading. -Michael