[gmonthly] Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter

Sun Jun 21 07:41:56 PDT 2009

Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter

The Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter--June 21, 2009
eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971

42 Months to The End of the World Via Mayan Calendaring
on December 21, 2012 [some now saying October 11, 2011]

Leaving 3 years 6 months, 14  seasons or 42 months.

Not to worry, I will still make long range predictions.

Headline News

More eBooks To More People Via More Hardware and Software

The 39th year of Project Gutenberg will begin July 4th, 2009--
and we will once again be one of larger sponsors of The World
eBook Fair at http://www.worldebookfair.org, which will reach
the neighborhood of ~2.5 million eBooks from July 4 to August
4, starting in about two weeks.

One of the major developments this year is the advance in the
variety of hardware and software methods of reading eBooks in
more circumstances, more locations, and, of course, with more
eBooks in wider and wider circulation.

We will be sending out a special edition of this Newsletter a
few weeks from now dedicated to these.

Our 25,000th eBook In English Will Be Coming Up Shortly

If you have any ideas, suggestions, comments, etc., about how
we might commemorate this event, please let us know.

We Just Published Our:

200th eBook in Italian
400th eBook in Chinese
500th eBook in Finnish

We are coming up on our 250th in Spanish. . .suggestions???

iPhone Acquisition

As you know, we try to get one of each of the popular reading
devices to test how our eBooks work on them and demonstrate a
wide variety of reading options.

A friend is updating his iPhone today and I am buying his old
one, so we would appreciate any suggestions of which programs
we should load to demonstrate the widest variety of readers.

Some interesting notes about eBooks of various varieties:

National archives reviews purchases of paper materials in digital
age Library and Archives Canada has put a moratorium on buying paper
documents and books for its collection. Full Story:
http://links.cbc.ca/a/l.x?T=jncickgjiekjmplpgobfifjajd&M=36

...

Google Books Improves -
http://www.slaw.ca/2009/06/18/google-books-improves/

Google Books has released a number of improvements designed to make
reading and sharing their material easier. The Books blog, Inside
Google Book Search lists seven changes:

- embedding and links - From the new toolbar on a Books page you can
copy a link to the source or the html necessary to produce an iframe
in your blog or web page that will embed the source.

- improved search - There's now more context around your search
terms, and you can rank your search results by relevance as well as
page order.

- thumbnail view - More useful, perhaps, where images are involved,
you can see an overview in thumbnails of the book you're examining.

- drop-down menu - The drop-down menu displays links to the various
divisions within the book.

- plain text mode - Viewers can turn off the html mode and work
simply with plain text.

- page turn animation - This feature, invoked by clicking at the
bottom of

the screen, simulates a more natural progression through the book.

- improved book overview - There's more data about the book offered
on the overview page.

British Library Publishes Online Archive of 19th-Century Newspapers
Maev Kennedy The Guardian Thursday 18 June 2009
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/18/
british-library-newspaper-archive-online>

A shorter URL for the above link:

<http://tinyurl.com/nknweq>

Over two million pages of 19th and early 20th century newspapers go
online today, part of the vast British Library collection.

The 49 British national and regional titles cover events including
the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815 "Vague reports have been made of
the numbers slain on both sides ... We should not quote them if our
silence could prevent the

spreading of disastrous intelligence", the Morning Chronicle
reported. There was also the banks crisis of 1878, the first FA Cup
final in 1872, and the triumph of the music hall star Vesta Tilley
in a talent contest.

<snip>

The site

<http://newspapers.bl.uk/blcs>

holds journals including the True Crime of its day, the Illustrated
Police News which covered the Jack the Ripper murders. The British Library
worked in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee
and Gale, part of Cengage Learning, to create the service. Searches
are free, but users can pay to download information.

["Can pay"???  I wonder if that translates into "must pay,"
unless one is a certain kind of member or the like?]

Our All Time Hottest Requests!!!!!!!

FLASH RAM

I am looking for the earliest flash RAM possible.

The very earliest were PCMCIA cards, such as used for the
Poqet computer, etc.

The earliest USB flash drives were DisgoDizgo, M-Systems
and these were OEMed by IBM, HP, etc. They are particular
in a recognizable fashion because their snapon connectors
resemble the connectors of jigsaw puzzles.

We received two examples of RAM actually labeled "Flash,"
for the H-P 95 pocket DOS machine from 1991, and a sample
of Fairchild bubble memory, as well, from down under.

Thank you, Mate!

POWERPOINT

We need someone who can do PowerPoint illustrations.

One in particular, building a 3-D box of 1,000 dominoes.

Additional Newsletter Services

In addition, we will provide the PG Canada Newsletter and
totals from PG of Australia, Europe, PrePrints, etc.

You should notice that we had a very good month, with 100
books done nearly every single week.

These totals do NOT include 75,000+ at

httpwww.gutenberg.cc

Where there are eBooks representing over 100 languages.

The Project Gutenberg Statistical Report
[As of about noon Central Daylight Time]

Various totals from the ~30,000 at

httpwww.gutenberg.org

and our other Project Gutenberg Sites

This week:

      day       | cnt
----------------+-----
 Sun 2009-06-14 |   6
 Mon 2009-06-15 |  13
 Tue 2009-06-16 |   2
 Wed 2009-06-17 |  16
 Thu 2009-06-18 |   6
 Fri 2009-06-19 |  12
 Sat 2009-06-20 |  13

Thanks to Marcello Perathoner!

Here are the current language totals
for languages with 200 or more eBooks.

Grand total for today: 29082

24519   English en
1434    French  fr
584     German  de
505     Finnish fi
423     Dutch   nl
402     Chinese zh
329     Portuguese      pt
241     Spanish es
200     Italian it

Not to mention PrePrints, Canada, Australia, Europe....

Total increase       +287      All Reported Languges

and from the previous month. . . .

Thanks to Greg Newby!

//////

And From Project Gutenberg Sites Worldwide [2 months]

29,082   up   283  PG General Automated Count
 1,767   up     7  PG of Australia
   637   up     6  PG of Europe
 2,021   up     0  PG PrePrints, Reserved [42],etc.
   325   up    36  PG of Canada, End of May.
======
33,832   up   320  Grand Total

Note  Without counting PrePrints, we are still over 30,000
and some of the new .lit collection will not make it under
our current rules of addition from PrePrints, and would be
deleted from PrePrints without moving to other listings.

Note  There are perhaps 100 eBooks not listed here
that are already in circulation from Project Gutenberg.

Note  PG Canada includes English, French, and Italian.

///

Here is how we ended 2008

27,616   PG General Automated Count
 1,726   Project Gutenberg of Australia
   554   Project Gutenberg of Europe
   225   Project Gutenberg of Canada [Estimated]
         [202 up to December, no current report]
 2,431   PrePrints [Counting the 307 Chinese eBooks +111]
======   ======
32,552   Grand Total [Counting those PrePrints]

Here is how we ended 2007

The combined PG projects had produced a total of 26,161 titles.

The most number of books posted...
 ...in one day was 65 on the 26th December
 ...in one week was 151 in Week 18 (week ending 9th May)
 ...in one month was 477 in November

We averaged
338 per month [Over 4,000 for the year]
 78 per week
 11.13 per day

99 titles were newly REposted to the new filing system, bringing us
almost to

the 2,000 mark.

Here is a small selection of project milestones;

TOTAL Original Project Gutenberg eBooks equals about
the number of books in the average U.S. public library
  32,500 on 20082121 [Counting the 307 Chinese Preprints]
                     [And presuming 3 after official count]
  32,000 on Calcuating
  31,500 on 20081021 [not an error, 1,777 PrePrints]
  30,000 on 20081021
  29,500 on 20080919
  29,000 ~~ Calculating
  28,500 ~~ Calculating
  28,000 ~~ 20080516
  27,500 on 20080405
  27,000 ~~ 20080229
  26,500 on 20080126
  26,000 on 20071224
  25,000 on 20071012
  24,000 on 20070710
  23,000 on 20070415

PG-AU
  1,700 on 20081010
  1,600 on 20080208
  1,500 on 20070407

PG Canada
  175 on 20080930
  100 on 20080325
  110 on 20080417