The Project Gutenberg Monthly Newsletter, Nov. 21, 2008 eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971 By the time I wake up in the morning, it will be a time you usually expect The Monthly Newsletter so I am doing my best to get everything done before going to bed. However, I should warn you that my arithmetic lost some 11 eBooks in the shuffle, as noted below, but I'm going have to send this out as is and call it a day, as it is well after midnight here in Hawaii. 49 Months to The End of the World Via Mayan Calendaring on December 21, 2012 [some now saying October 11, 2011] This leaves 4 1/12 years, 16 1/3 seasons, or 49 months. Not to worry, I will still make long range predictions. New Project Gutenberg Landmarks and Headlines We just passed 375 books in Chinese at: http://www.gutenberg.org and there are more at: http://www.gutenberg.cc After several years of making Chinese eBooks a top priority as a personal project, Chinese just passed Dutch, to become the newest member of Project Gutenberg's "Top 5 Languages." The new goal is to put Spanish into our "Top 5 list." We also officially passed 30,000 original Project Gutenberg eBooks this past month, including all our usual listings. This means the original Project Gutenberg editions now list as many titles as the average U.S. public library. Please note that PrePrints now has nearly 2,500 eBooks!!! The News In More Detail Chinese Moves Into The Project Gutenberg "Top 5" More help needed to complete hundreds more Chinese eBooks. As you will notice in the language list below, Chinese will apparently be moving up to our 4th place language, counting non-English eBooks. We still need more help in cataloging these eBooks, but the latest 300 or so Chinese eBooks are now in PrePrints. Anyone who can work in Chinese is encouraged to look into a directory called /china in PrePrints, or get the .zip file, from one directory above to get all the files downloaded in one single command. http://preprints.readingroo.ms first one on the list: /china .zip of whole bunch is one directory up, get china.zip The current list, NOT counting the new 307 PrePrints: Grand total for today: 27188 [Yesterday, officially] 23075 English en 1319 French fr 553 German de 476 Finnish fi 377 Chinese zh 361 Dutch nl 267 Portuguese pt 217 Spanish es 164 Italian it When we get all 307 possible titles online, that will bring Chinese up to a total of ~675 which will place it second of our non-English languages collection which is approximately where it should go, given Internet language dispersal. The times are changing, and we can either lead or follow. Believe it or not, Spanish is listed as the third language, with regard to its use on the entire Internet so that's the next goal, to bring Spanish to out Top 5. In reference to that goal, I am giving a presentation for a new combination of Internet efforts called "Both Americas," in Buenos Aires early next Spring, followed by what I would hope will be a similar conference in France. India has had one or more problems with getting an actual invitation sent to me, and since their current conference will be over less than a month from now, I will not be able to attend even if such an invitation is issue at the last moment unless it is of such an unusual nature that I can't turn it down and may have to interrupt another trip I have now scheduled during, and including the same period, the coming month. This is the second time a conference hosted by people I had contact with in India has not worked out due to inabilities to get things organized in a manner that does not cost me a great deal of time and money, neither of which I have great amounts of to invest in any but the wisest of manners. I fear the conference in France may be headed the direction it was headed in last year, much as did the other one I had mentioned above, but right now I can't say for sure that it is either going to actually happen, or that I may speak. Something I should mention about possible conferences: If all the plans are not made, tickets purchased, arranged, etc., so that I can at least expect to break even on trips, at least one month in advance, the odds of my attending the conference fall very rapidly to zero. So far the only ones keeping up their end of the bargain are the "Both Americas" hosting the conference in Buenos Aires, so that appears the only conference I am certain to attend in six months. Greg Newby and I have made an attempt to set up one of few, very few, conference appearances with a joint presentation, but we haven't heard a word back from that one either, so I won't even mention it at the moment. Project Gutenberg just doesn't have the money for us to get to conferences where we would lose money in the process. 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 Disgo/Dizgo, 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. 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: http://www.gutenberg.cc Where there are eBooks representing over 100 languages. These are the various totals from the ~30,000 at: http://www.gutenberg.org and our other Project Gutenberg Sites [Yesterday's message, no mail coming in right now, but if I send this two different ways, I think ONE of them will get to you.] day | cnt ----------------+----- Thu 2008-11-13 | 5 Fri 2008-11-14 | 8 Sat 2008-11-15 | 11 Sun 2008-11-16 | 11 Mon 2008-11-17 | 7 Tue 2008-11-18 | 2 Wed 2008-11-19 | 4 ( Thanks to Marcello Perathoner! Here are the current language totals for languages with over 100 eBooks. [Again, from yesterday] Grand total for today: 27,188 [ - 26,867 =] +321 23,075 [ - 22,863 =] + 212 English en 1,319 [ - 1,289 =] + 76 French fr 553 [ - 549 =] + 4 German de 476 [ - 470 =] + 6 Finnish fi 361 [ - 359 =] + 2 Dutch nl 377 [ - 359 =] + 18 Chinese zh [+307 PP] 267 [ - 260 =] + 7 Portuguese pt 217 [ - 207 =] + 10 Spanish es 164 [ - 159 =] + 5 Italian it etc.,etc.,etc. Total increase + 321 All Reported Lanugages Thanks to Greg Newby! And From Project Gutenberg Sites Worldwide 27,188 + 212 11/20/08 PG General Automated Count 1,717 + 11 11/18/08 PG Australia 542 + 12 10/21/08 PG Europe 2,461 + 0 10/21/08 PG PrePrints 190 + 13 11/09/08 PG Canada ====== 32,098 + 348 by various automated counts and newsletters Nov 21 - Oct 21 = New 32,098 - 31,741 = 357 [Note Discrepancy of 11 eBooks] Sorry, it's midnight plus here in Hawaii, too tired. . . . Note: Without counting PrePrints, we are still under 30K, 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 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 * 31,500 on 2008/10/21 [not an error, 1,777 PrePrints] * 30,000 on 2008/10/21 * 29,500 on 2008/09/19 * 29,000 ~~ Calculating * 28,500 ~~ Calculating * 28,000 ~~ 2008/05/16 * 27,500 on 2008/04/05 * 27,000 ~~ 2008/02/29 * 26,500 on 2008/01/26 * 26,000 on 2007/12/24 * 25,000 on 2007/10/12 * 24,000 on 2007/07/10 * 23,000 on 2007/04/15 PG-AU * 1,700 on 2008/10/10 * 1,600 on 2008/02/08 * 1,500 on 2007/04/07 PG Canada * 175 on 2008/09/30 * 100 on 2008/03/25 * 110 on 2008/04/17 _______________________________________________ gweekly mailing list gweekly@lists.pglaf.org http://lists.pglaf.org/listinfo.cgi/gweekly
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