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
pgmonthly_2008_11_21.txt