Weekly_November_30.txt *The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter For Wednesday, November 30, 2005 PT1* *******eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since July 4, 1971******** PT1A *** A detailed Project Gutenberg interview with Sam Vaknin is available in: "The Ubiquitous Project Gutenberg" http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb46.html *** Editor's comments appear in [brackets]. Newsletter editors needed! Please email hart@pobox.com or gbnewby@pglaf.org Anyone who would care to get advance editions: please email hart@pobox.com * WANTED!

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* Wanted: People who are involved in conversations on Slashdot, Salon, etc. * TABLE OF CONTENTS [Search for "*eBook" or "*Intro". . .to jump to that section, etc.] *eBook Milestones *Introduction *Hot Requests, New Sites and Announcements *Continuing Requests and Announcements *Progress Report *Distributed Proofreaders Collection Report *Project Gutenberg Consortia Center Report *Permanent Requests For Assistance: *Donation Information *Access To The Project Gutenberg Collections *Mirror Site Information *Instant Access To Our Latest eBooks *Have We Given Away A Trillion Yet? *Flashback *Weekly eBook update: This is now in PT2 of the Weekly Newsletter Also collected in the Monthly Newsletter Corrections in separate section 1 New From PG Australia [Australian, Canadian Copyright Etc.] 48 New Public Domain eBooks Under US Copyright *Headline News from Edupage, etc. *Information About the Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists *** *eBook Milestones* ***512 eBooks Averaged Per Year Since July 4, 1971*** 17,653 eBooks As Of Today!!! [Includes Australian eBooks] We Are ~88% of the Way to 20,000!!! 14,591 New eBooks Since The Start Of 2001 That's ~250 eBooks per Month for ~56 Months We Have Produced 2697 eBooks in 2005!!! 2,347 to go to 20,000!!! 7,739 from Distributed Proofreaders Since October, 2000 [Details in PT1B] 509 from Project Gutenberg of Australia 90 from Project Gutenberg of Europe [We will start including these in 2006] We Averaged ~339 eBooks Per Month In 2004 We Are Averaging ~250 books Per Month This Year [This change is due to the opening of Project Gutenberg sites other than the original one at www.gutenberg.org] This Site Is Averaging ~57 eBooks Per Week This Year 49 This Week It took ~32 years, from 1971 to 2003 to do our 1st 10,000 eBooks It took ~32 months, from 2002 to 2005 for our last 10,000 eBooks It took ~10 years from 1993 to 2003 to grow from 100 eBooks to 10,100 It took ~2.00 years from Oct. 2003 to Nov. 2005 from 10,000 to 17,500 * ***Introduction [The Newsletter is now being sent in two sections, so you can directly go to the portions you find most interesting: 1. Founder's Comments, News, Notes & Queries, and 2. Weekly eBook Update Listing. Note bene that PT1 is now being sent as PT1A and PT1B. [Since we are between Newsletter editors, these 2 parts may undergo a few changes while we are finding a new Newsletter editor. Email us: hart@pobox.com and gbnewby@pglaf.org if you would like to volunteer.] This is Michael Hart's "Founder's Comments" section of the Newsletter *Headline News from Edupage [PG Editor's Comments In Brackets] LIBRARY OF CONGRESS BACKS WORLD DIGITAL LIBRARY The U.S. Library of Congress has launched an effort to create a vast digital collection of artifacts representing the cultures of the world. Librarian of Congress James Billington said the World Digital Library would be "a documentary record of other great cultures of the world," dealing "with the culture of those people rather than with our contacts as Americans with those cultures." The new initiative will use as models the American Memory Project, which has digitized more than 10 million items representing "Americana," and the Global Gateway, a joint project with five national libraries in Europe and Brazil that highlights connections between those cultures and that of the United States. Initial funding for the World Digital Library will come from Google, which has pledged $3 million for the effort. Billington said he hopes to attract other private funding for the project. MSNBC, 22 November 2005 http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10147556/ ICANN TO CONSIDER SINGLE-LETTER WEB ADDRESSES The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed to consider single-letter addresses such as a.com in response to company requests. (Six companies with single-letter names were allowed to keep their names when the existing system was established.) In deciding whether to accept single-letter names, ICANN will also have to determine how to sell the names and whether companies will have to seek individual entries across all suffixes. Domain name brokers and others expect intense demand for the names because of their rarity. There are no plans to consider two-letter names because of possible confusion with two-letter country code suffixes. Yahoo, 28 November 2005 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051128/ap_on_hi_te/single_letter_domains DUTCH COMPANY DUMPS COMMON TOP-LEVEL DOMAIN NAMES Amsterdam-based UnifiedRoot S&M BV has created an Internet addressing system that eliminates top-level domains such as .com and .edu, allowing organizations and individuals to register Internet addresses ending with the name of their businesses or other words. The new system can combine top-level domains with second-level domains for what the company calls more intuitive addresses for different categories of products and services, such as vegetables.supermarket. UnifiedRoot has established 13 master root servers worldwide to run its domain name system. To avoid conflicts, the company said, it will not register top-level domain names already registered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Existing Internet service providers will have to update their server directories to accommodate the new system names. ComputerWorld, 28 November 2005 http://www.computerworld.com/news/2005/story/0,11280,106559,00.html U.S. SUPREME COURT TO HEAR E-BAY PATENT CASE The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a patent-infringement lawsuit involving eBay and a patent holding company that eBay lost in 2003. MercExchange holds a patent over sales and purchasing methods used in online auctions. The appeal deals with whether the U.S. District Court that handled the case should have issued a permanent injunction against eBay. The Federal U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which handles patent lawsuits on appeal, ruled that the federal trial judge should have issued a permanent injunction against eBay, which said they believe the legal reasoning used will force district courts to issue more injunctions in patent lawsuits. Meanwhile, Congress is considering legislation that would change how patent injunctions are issued by federal courts. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is also exploring the issue. Wall Street Journal, 28 November 2005 (sub. req'd) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113319064690608067.html BBC2 TO BROADCAST VIA BROADBAND Controller Roly Keating intends to make BBC2 the first mainstream TV station to broadcast via broadband. A broadband service pilot is scheduled for 2006 to run concurrently with further trials of MyBBCPlayer technology, which enables viewers to download and watch BBC content on demand. The broadband version of BBC2 reportedly will combine streamed media and downloads. Silicon.com, 25 November 2005 http://networks.silicon.com/broadband/0,39024661,39154583,00.htm MPAA AND BITTORRENT MAKE NICE The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the creator of BitTorrent technology have announced an agreement that will keep many BitTorrent users from finding copyrighted movie files with the technology. In May, Bram Cohen added a service to his site, BitTorrent.com, that allowed users to search the Web for file downloads that use the popular technology. Under the new agreement, Cohen will remove copyrighted content from search results on his site. Although his technology has become a favorite for many traders in copyrighted material, Cohen does not offer services targeted at such users and has previously discouraged using the technology for illegal file trading. The entertainment industry has not targeted Cohen for prosecution for copyright violations, but a number of individual BitTorrent users have been sued for such violations. Despite the agreement, however, several other sites that search the Web for BitTorrent downloads remain operational. CNET, 22 November 2005 http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5967750.html You have been reading excerpts from Edupage: If you have questions or comments about Edupage, send e-mail to: edupage@educause.edu To SUBSCRIBE to Edupage, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU and in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName or To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 *** News from other sources: Music On A Stick The first album is now available for purchase on a RAM stick. $30 will buy you an entire CD of music, plus some holiday tunes, video, and other DVDish inclusions on a 128M RAM stick. [If you want only a 128M RAM stick, I just bought one at Fry's for $9.] Source: MICHELLE MEGNA and JIM FARBER NEW YORK DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS *DOUBLESPEAK OF THE WEEK "Plan B" "Thanks to an investigation by the Government Accountability Office released this fall, we now know that the FDA's decision went against the advice of doctors and scientific experts. In fact, the decision was made by top FDA officials even before the scientific review was complete." Source: Lansing State Journal This one is a little strange: Berenstain Bears author Stan Berenstain died at 82, which was reported in depth on the public networks, Canadian Networks, and even in Italy, but I cannot find reports from CBS, NBC, or ABC. I wonder if there is some new bias on both sides, due to the fact there was a public broadcasting version of the Berenstain Bears. [The New York Times seems to have given the Bears some grief on this occasion for not being very politically correct. Of course, you might want to take into account that the Berenstain Bears started long before Policially Correct was in our Newspeak Dictionaries.] *PREDICTIONS OF THE WEEK Global Warming will continue to wreak havoc the polar caps, creating more record hurricanes, etc. *STRANGE QUOTES OF THE WEEK "If junk food is banned by the government," in schools, then why shouldn't we be able to ban military recruiters?" "Politics demands we have access to those oil fields." [Sorry, I must have written these down wrong, as I haven't been able to find them in my online searches.] *ODD STATISTICS OF THE WEEK The hurricane season is finally ending, but not without new tropical storms appearing. The grand total appears as if a new record has been set at 26 named storms requiring letter names from the Greek alphabet for the first time, and going again into the record books with the most powerful storm of all recorded weather. The storms also struck a wider range geographically than ever before, in over 20 nations. Three category 5 hurricanes were included, yet another record. Katrina, Rita and Wilma each made the Top 5 of all time and clocked winds over 175 miles per hour. [So much for there being no evidence for Global Warming.] *** Still hoping for more statistical updates and additional entries. "If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following. There would be: 57 Asians 21 Europeans 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both North and South America 8 Africans 52 would be female 48 would be male 70 would be non-white 30 would be white 70 would be non-Christian 30 would be Christian 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States 80 would live in substandard housing 70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition 1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth 1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education 1 would own a computer [I think this is now much greater] 1 would be 79 years old or more. Of those born today, the life expectancy is only 63 years, but no country any longer issues copyrights that are sure to expire within that 63 year period. I would like to bring some of these figures more up to date, as obviously if only 1% of 6 billion people owned a computer then there would be only 60 million people in the world who owned a computer, yet we hear that 3/4 + of the United States households have computers, out of over 100 million households. Thus obviously that is over 1% of the world population, just in the United States. I just called our local reference librarian and got the number of US households from the 2004-5 U.S. Statistical Abstract at: 111,278,000 as per data from 2003 U.S Census Bureau reports. If we presume the saturation level of U.S. computer households is now around 6/7, or 86%, that is a total of 95.4 million, and that's counting just one computer per household, and not counting households with more than one, schools, businesses, etc. I also found some figures that might challenge the literacy rate given above, and would like some help researching these and other such figures, if anyone is interested. BTW, while I was doing this research, I came across a statistic that said only 10% of the world's population is 60+ years old. This means that basically 90% of the world's population would never benefit from Social Security, even if the wealthy nations offered it to them free of charge. Then I realized that the US population has the same kind of age disparity, in which the rich live so much longer than the poor, the whites live so much longer than the non-whites. Thus Social Security is paid by all, but is distributed more to the upper class whites, not just because they can receive more per year, but because they will live more years to receive Social Security. The average poor non-white may never receive a dime of Social Security, no matter how much they pay in. * POEM OF THE WEEK dawn we grow in the direction of the zenith with sunrise rays revealing naked land my skin is yours in the morning embrace like pearly treasures buried in the sand the skies are wide your eyes the deepest blue transcend the mortal needs we feel today we look and see above the highest clouds the precious, secret dreams we've kept at bay enjoy today, your fingers say to me there's no return to yesterdays, you know and only us will gather where we've been and where to our hearts will want to go we grow in the direction of the zenith sometimes my moans embracing in a rhyme you are in me, I have the richest heart these sunrise rays abounding in your smile don't rush as time awaits for lovers still they live they die they are reborn again in just a second as it takes the sun to find the places where our hearts have been rejoice! The moment welcomes you and me into a land of pure reality; the fantasy belongs to past attempts to get to where we are and what we feel. A thousand years pass, I'll love you still. Copyright 2005 by Simona Sumanaru and Michael S. Hart Please send comments to: simona_s75 AT yahoo.com & hart AT pobox.com *** *Information About the Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists For more information about the Project Gutenberg's mailing lists, including the Project Gutenberg Weekly and Monthly Newsletters: and the other Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists: The weekly is sent on Wednesdays, and the monthly is sent on the first Wednesday of the month. To subscribe to any (or to unsubscribe or adjust your subscription preferences), visit the Project Gutenberg mailing list server: http://lists.pglaf.org If you are having trouble with your subscription, please email the list's human administrators at: help@pglaf.org