Marcello Perathoner wrote:

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I am a new commer to this group. Please share any thoughts/comments in regards to selling/promoting the Gutenberg Project.

A nice idea would be to place a search box on the front page to make it obvious that PG does actually give away books :-)

That's a problem of screen real estate.

Most new people come from google and land on a bibrec page anyway.

People who come back already know it.

Hi! It may be a problem of real estate but I do think that adding a search box to the front page should be a priority. Let me explain myself: the goal of P.G. is to give away free books. Therefore, I find it slightly bizarre that search functionality is omitted from the front page. Surely if our goal is to give away books, a search box should be in a prominent place on the front page? In terms of real estate, I have a small LCD monitor running at 1024x768 (which I believe to be the most common resolution in use today). Of the navigation bar to the left of the screen, the lower (approx.) 45% is blank on my screen. Surely, then, a search box could be placed in the navigation bar? Don't get me wrong, I really do like the P.G. home page. It's just this one omission which causes me problems. With other sites who have a goal to distribute books (e.g. Amazon.com, archive.org), a search box is featured in a prominent position on the main page. The lack of this on P.G.'s site makes it less easily usable given some experience browsing the web. The effect is quite jarring when the user is not (as expected) given an easy-to-find search box and, instead, must actually stop to browse the text on the main page to find some link which might take them to a search box. Perhaps I'm making a mountain out of a molehill but this one feature of P.G.'s home page seems (to me, at least) counter-intuitive. Thanks for your time, Holden

On Sun, 8 May 2005, Dave Fawthrop wrote:

If everyone used a PG sig on whatever usenet newsgroups they are subscribed to it would cost nothing and get to many people.

I believe there is a decent amount of awareness already. For quite a while now, I've regularly searched newsgroups for mentions of Project Gutenberg. In general, I would say that messages I used to find were along the lines of "Here's a really worthwhile project you ought to check out...", whereas today, I find more reference to specific works relating to the disscussion at hand that "you can find at Project Gutenberg". Some people are even nice enough to provide a link. :) I've also used this try to be a "goodwill ambassador" and correct any misconceptions. (i.e. "they use only plain ASCII, so can't do any French texts.") Andrew