ebkfutr2.art PT2 The Future of eBooks How Many eBooks? Predicting the future of eBooks has always been a combination of fun and funny: fun in the sense I enjoy predicting something no one ever believes-- funny in the sense that even after so many years, nearly 14 now, of growth rates exceeding "Moore's Law," yet, still every single year including this one, so many people still say we can't do it, one more year or the year after. How many free eBooks are available? This week there are so many new eBooks officially posted for free download that it is hard to count them all, simply because we don't know which ones are duplicates of other ones. This will take the professional cataloguers some time to figure out. Meanwhile we will try to be well on the way to an eBook collection of 100,000 unique files for them to catalogue. So far we would guesstimate that the total number of volunteers at Project Gutenberg has been about 30,000, from those who have dropped into our site to proofread a few Distributed Proofreader pages, you can take a quick look at: http://pgdp.net , to those who have worked on thousands of eBooks. It will obviously take many more volunteers, your own efforts hopefully included, to create a final eLibrary containing all the public domain books a library of this nature might contain, and I use a term such as "final" somewhat lightly, as it will always be the case the new ones are coming in. However, just for the sake of those who want some "real" predictions, I would guesstimate that some 10,000,000 public domain works will be available, counting books, newspapers, magazines, music, and all the other items found in libraries today. Of course, this number of 10 million is exceeded, already, at a few dozen of the largest libraries, and I leave it again to the cataloguers to figure out just how things should be counted. The Current Counting Methodology Here is a brief rundown of Moore's Law projecting the growth pattern of eBooks, as compared with an actual growth pattern at Project Gutenberg. Projected Growth Rate Actual Growth Rate eBooks Date Year Years eBooks Date Year Years 10 Dec 10, 1990 0 10 Dec 10, 1990 0 40 Dec 10, 1993 3 100 Dec 10, 1993 3 160 Dec 10, 1996 6 1000 Aug 15, 1997 6.6 640 Dec 10, 1999 9 2000 Dec 10, 1999 8 2560 Dec 10, 2002 12 6400 Nov 27, 2002 11.9 10240 Dec 10, 2005 15 10000 Oct 15, 2003 12.8 20480 Dec 10, 2008 18 ?25000 Nov 04, 2004 14? Just think of what we can do, if you can help us continue this growth rate past 2014!!! eBooks Date Year Years eBooks Date Year Years 20480 Dec 10, 2008 18 ?25000 Nov 04, 2004 14? 81920 Dec 10, 2011 21 ?100000 Nov 04, 2007 17? 327680 Dec 10, 2014 24 ?400000 Nov 04, 2010 20? 1310720 Dec 10, 2017 27 ?1000000 Nov 04, 2014 23? Still think this is impossible? One year ago there were 10,000 eBooks available, that's 1,000 for every 10 eBooks back in 1990-- that's 100 for every 100 eBooks back in 1993! Today there are 25,000 Project Gutenberg eBooks, all we need is to multiply that by 400. . . . And we have years and years to do it. . . .