From hart at pglaf.org Wed Jan 4 09:42:28 2006 From: hart at pglaf.org (Michael Hart) Date: Wed Jan 4 09:42:30 2006 Subject: [gweekly] PT1b Weekly Project Gutenberg Newsletter Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.60.0601040941550.25535@pglaf.org> pt1b4.d05 **The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter For Wednesday, January 4, 2006 PT1** *******eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since July 4, 1971******** PT1B 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 ***Continuing Requests New Sites and Announcements General Catalog of Old Books and Authors http://www.kingkong.demon.co.uk/ngcoba/ngcoba.htm which now indexes 24,000 books available free online, including all PG(US) & PG(Aus)'s books, along with some basic date information about them and their authors where you can find more. 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A Trillion Dollars Given Away At Just $.56 Value Per Book With 17,926 eBooks online as of January 04, 2006 it now takes an average of 100,000,000 readers gaining a nominal value of $0.56 from each book. This "cost" is down from about $.67 when we had 14,956 eBooks a year ago. Our Target Audience Is 1.5% Of The World Population, or 100,000,000 readers. At 17,926 eBooks in 34 Years and 06.00 Months We Averaged ~520 Per Year 43.3 Per Month 1.42 Per Day At 2970 eBooks Done In The 364 Days Of 2005 We Averaged 8.2 Per Day 57 Per Week 248 Per Month If you are interested in the population of the world or of the U.S. you might want to know that these numbers, official as they appear, are just just estimates, and perhaps not as accurate as we hope. Recently the U.S. Congress, pertaining to district reapportionment, who gets to vote for which Congresspeople, decided that many of the districts were undercounted by 5%, perhaps then later deciding that all districts had been undercounted by 5% [can't recall details]. However, I just this moment heard a news item that made me wonder a bit more about the accuracy of the U.S. Census. A "Special Census" is taking place in Normal, Illinois, that is expected to count more people, by a factor of 3,000 or 3,400, depending on which source. 45,386 was the population as per the 2000 Census, so 3,000 added to this would be an increase of 6.6%, and 3,400 would be 7.5%, above a possibly automatic increase of 5% as per the same terms above but I presume this is in addition to previous adjustments. Of course, we should consider that we would have to double figures, perhaps to 15% from those above, if are considering the normal time between censuses of 10 years, these are for 5 years' growth. In previous news I heard about the U.S. Census, no mention was made about the annexation of various nearly locations as a cause of this normally unexpected growth, but it is mentioned at the site I found on the subject of the current Special Census. If annexation is the primary cause of such increases, country wide, then we should not be expecting a huge rise in the 2010 Census, but rather should expect something more along the norm. However, if it is not annexation, but more actual people on the average, then this might be an indicator that the population of the U.S. may have seen 300 million go by some time ago. For more details, see: www.normal.org/WhatsNew/Census.htm The production statistics are calculated based on full weeks' production; each production-week starts/ends Wednesday noon, starts with the first Wednesday of January. January 5th was the first Wednesday of 2005, and thus ended PG's production year of 2004 and began the production year of 2005 at noon. 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pgweekly_2006_01_04_part_1b.txt
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