On Tue, 14 Jun 2005, grendelkhan wrote:
I was having a discussion with my father, and I thought I would bring it up on the mailing list, as it seems to be the place for it.
We'd just come out of our local Wal-Mart, and I'd noticed the out-of-copyright books (classics and such) being sold for $6 to $11 each. I commented that folks could just download the books for free if they wanted to read them, but he asked how many people owned a computer, and how many of those had heard of Project Gutenberg?
There have been over a billion computers in use in the world for some time now, and thus well over a billion computer users. In the US the computer saturation rate is somewhere around ~7/8 of all US households. [Anyone have the latest figures?] Not to mention that ~3/4 of these households have hi-speed access. As to how many of these people know about Project Gutenberg, that's hard to measure. . .perhaps we should do a survey. As for the rest of the world, the US is far from being the most saturated in terms of either computers or access, and in some lists doesn't even make the top ten. . .for some reason the Scandiavian countries seemed to beat us there. More later, Michael