[gmonthly] Project Gutenberg Newsletter, Yearly Report
Michael S. Hart
hart at pglaf.org
Wed Jan 6 11:46:48 PST 2010
Project Gutenberg Ends One Year And Starts Another
Noon, January 6, 2010, is the end of our calendar production year
number 39 and the beginning of our 40th year, though our 40 years
of calendar time won't be complete until July 5, 2011. This date
is due to our previous calendar being a weekly one running from a
Wednesday noon to the next Wednesday noon. Once someone else has
taken over the Newsletters, they are welcome to change this to an
alternate date such as midnight January 1, but I was always awake
and working at noon, and able to send out weekly newsletters so I
just did what worked on that schedule.
Hot Requests
We need lawyers in the following fields:
Probate
Contract
Copyright
We also need people who can help make our web pages better for an
ever increasing number of people surfing in on cellphones, and in
different languages. We will give you all you need to design and
implement your own Project Gutenberg web pages. Who knows, it is
possible you could start a whole famous web page design career.
Public Domain Day
The first day of the years is Public Domain Day, when we list the
works that would have gone into the public domain that day if not
for the most recent two copyright extensions [but don't forget we
have had more extensions from the original 14 years].
Notable items that would be public domain now:
Fahrenheit 451
Walt Disney's Peter Pan
The First James Bond Book
Early books by Saul Bellow, Arthur Miller, Leon Uris, Jas Baldwin
Watson and Crick's Original "Nature" Article on DNA
Salinger's Nine Stories
>From Here To Eternity
Asimov's Second Foundation
Early works of Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, E.E. Smith, van Vogt
War of the Worlds
Julius Caesar [James Mason, Marlon Brando, etc.]
Before these last two major copyright extensions renewals were of
legal necessity to double the length of copyright terms, and most
works were never renewed: 15% of all copyrights, 8% of books had
never been renewed, meaning the vast majority of everything under
copyright before 1982 would now be public domain.
Read more about this at:
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/pre1976
and related web pages.
These are great articles by a great copyright lawyer.
Milestones Of The Year
In 2009 we saw our 35,000th internally produced eBook go out, and
our 25,000 in English, our 1,500th in French, 600th in German and
500th in Finnish. We also saw Dutch and Chinese pass 400 eBooks.
We still need to find ways to do more in Spanish and Portuguese.
These 35,000+ eBooks representing over 50 languages are at:
http://www.gutenberg.org
75,000+ Donated eBooks representing over 100 languages are at:
http://www.gutenberg.cc
100,000 Total Titles
In toto, counting the eBooks donated to us from other eLibraries,
individuals and schools at http://www.gutenberg.cc we now have in
well excess of 100,000 titles, though it is probably closer to an
even 100,000, given various duplications, etc.
Production Year Statistics
The numbers presented below will approximate what are recorded as
of noon on January 6, and the production year will be recorded as
running last year from Wednesday, January 7, 2009 through January
6, 2010, and the coming year will end on January 5, 2011.
Thus we had 52 Wednesdays this past year for 364 days; every once
in a while we get 53 production weeks on this calendar, which has
to be one reason for eventually changing it.
Here is how we ended 2009
day | cnt
----------------+-----
Wed 2009-12-30 | 9
Thu 2009-12-31 | 12
Fri 2010-01-01 | 6
Sat 2010-01-02 | 10
Sun 2010-01-03 | 2
Mon 2010-01-04 | 21
Tue 2010-01-05 | 5
Weekly Total 65
Grand total for today: 30761 from automated in house counter
25866 English en
1531 French fr
625 German de
517 Finnish fi
455 Dutch nl
405 Chinese zh
384 Portuguese pt
270 Spanish es
225 Italian it
etc.
30,761 Up 3,145 From 27,616 PG General Automated Count
1,830 Up 104 From 1,726 Project Gutenberg of Australia
675 Up 121 From 554 Project Gutenberg of Europe
468 Up 243 From 225 Project Gutenberg of Canada [Estimated]
2,008 DN 423 From 2,431 PrePrints [Subtracted 307 Chinese eBooks]
====== ======
35,742 Up 3,190 From 32,552 Grand Total [Counting subtractions]
9.825 eBooks Per Day
68.773 eBooks Per Week
297.850 eBooks Per Month
///
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 ~~ Rechecking Date
31,500 on 20081021 [not an error, 1,777 PrePrints]
30,000 on 20081021
29,500 on 20080919
29,000 ~~ Rechecking Date
28,500 ~~ Rechecking Date
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
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