Project Gutenberg News

Over 3 Million Items Feted At World eBook Fair

Project Gutenberg, The World Public Library, The Internet Archive, and ebooksabouteverything are proud to sponsor the fourth edition of The World eBook Fair.

July 4 – August 4 at http://www.worldebookfair.org

eBook readers will have over 2 million to pick from:

~1.5 million from http://www.archive.org
~ .5 million from http://www.worldpubliclibrary.org
~ .13 million from http://ebooksabouteverything.com
~ .11 million from the various Gutenberg servers
~ .01 million from various other eBook sites
===== ======= ==================
~2.5 million eBooks Grand Total

Please note that archive.org and PG etc. have many audio files, movies, music files, etc. with totals of an additional ~.5 million files.

Grand Total: ~3.1 million Files of all Kinds Many of these eBooks are available for cellphones.

Approximately 1,000 titles will be added each week.

Contact information:

If you have any questions, or seek further materials, an interview or would like to confirm the schedule or contents please feel free to contact the following:

Michael S. Hart
Founder, Project Gutenberg

405 W. Elm, Urbana, IL 61801
hart@pglaf.org
hart@pobox.com
US Phone 217-344-6623
Cellphone 808-295-0615

Gregory B. Newby
CEO, Project Gutenberg

gbnewby@pglaf.org
US Phone 907-450-8663
http://www.gutenberg.org

John Guagliardo
Director, World Public Library
Director, World Public Library

Honolulu, Hawaii
john@gutenberg.cc
US Phone 808-292-2068
http://www.worldpubliclibrary.org

Catherine Hodge
eBooks About Everything

info@ebooksabouteverything.com
US Phone 760-327-5100
http://ebooksabouteverything.com

The Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/details/texts

[Michel actually sent this as an email, which I am posting here with his permission. He probably won't reply to any comments directly but I will pass these along to him -- Ed.]

Many people have argue with me for years on the subject of dedicated eBook reader devices, with any number of reasons they like them, but it is really only that they can’t read small print or they still want “the look and feel” of the dead trees pulp bound up in dead animal skins.

I won’t even address the latter issues here but to say that the world always says it will stick with the old ways until a new generation comes, and then the car or the telephone or hairstyle, or whatever, becomes ubiquitous, then the story is closed, and the argument forgotten.

However, I will address the issue of font size.

This is an issue mainly of interest to Boomers, and to others born with limited vision, rather, sadly, than just from olde age.

However, the Boomers are losing power faster in all respects than the media are willing to show because the media is still controlled by Boomer and even older groups, who will not admit their time went, of even pretending to be middle age. I won’t argue right now that people born in ‘65 were the last Boomers, how silly, those Boomers of the real kind were already having kids!!!

Even so, it should be obvious, and I tried this out on a 9 year old this week, new generations, those whose eyesight will not deteriorate for a long time to come, those people can read prints I can’t even read with my reading glasses, thus they could care less about the size of the font available in a Kindle, leaving the Kindle sadly to the declining Boomers, who are spending $500 on the average when they buy a Kindle, while an entirely new computer generation is buying this new crop of Netbooks that are full computers in pretty much all senses, but are even smaller in size than the Kindles, and smaller in price.

I just bought one for $278 that I can use every other hour from 9 to 5 and still have the power for a little extra work afterwards.

Yes, the keyboard is a bit too small for my big hand, much larger than average so I think I may look into an external keyboard for long usage.

However, I should add, I have always been quite satisfied with the little foldup keyboards with my Palm Pilots and Visors and the like.

But my values are not the ones that count here, it is world values, and I will be the world has no desire to spend more on a Kindle than on the full boat, or even full sized, laptops that are the best selling computers for years now. They replaced desktops as the primary around 2005…depending on whose reports you believe.

There are several reasons people will not buy a dedicated eBook reader, and some of them a very powerful reasons that cannot be argued with via any intelligent reasoning rationality. Continue Reading »

The first goal of Project Gutenberg was simply to reach totals of estimated audiences of 1.5% of the world population, or the total of 100 million people.

With the advent of cell phone [mobile phone] access we are now setting our goal at 15% of the world population or 1 billion.

Given that there are approximately 4.5 billion cell phones now in service around the world, that means we would have to reach just over 1/5 of all cell phone users to accomplish this.

Possible. . .but not likely unless we make it extremely easy!

To this end we will be emphasizing eBook reader programs for a wide range of cell phones.

Given the estimated 4.5 billion cell phones that we could make eBooks for today, presuming they can all display plain eBooks, and the extremely slow rise in Kindle sales as compared to the iPod, iPhone, Blackberry Curve, and all the others, we should be able to reach more readers than Kindle and Sony combined if we just reach one cell phone user out of a thousand. This has to include many more languages than English, of course, so our effort also has to be multi-lingual, if we are to reach anyone beyond the number of people comfortable enough with English to read our eBooks on their cell phones.

As many of you know, we already have well over a thousand book titles in French, followed by lesser numbers in German and the other more popular languages, but not nearly enough to really, sincerely, say we are offering a library in these languages.

Once we complete a survey of our Top Ten languages we are down to under 50 books per language. . .it’s a start, only a start.

[This article was originally released in the May 2009 Project Gutenberg Newsletter]

Just recently Project Gutenberg had a major crashe of their hardrives and subsequently lost some data and the newsletter lists were destroyed. They are currently using some ancient backups but most people should still be on the list.

A number of poeple have been asking how to subscriber/unsubscribe from the Project Gutenberg mailing list. Full instructions can be found at www.gutenberg.org/howto/subscribe-howto but here is a quick overview;

Mailing Lists

There are various Project Gutenberg mailing lists here is a brief description along with a link to visit and subscribe/unsubscribe. All lists live at pglaf.org, and are moderated except for the discussion lists:

• Newsletters, with new eBook listings, calls for assistance, general information, and announcements
  • gweekly: Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter – Usuall only one weekly newsletter.
  • gmonthly: Project Gutenberg Monthly newsletter – Usually only one monthly newsletter.
• Notification as new eBooks are posted
  • posted: receive book postings as they happen, along with other PG related internally-focused discussion (high traffic, over 10 postings per day)
• Discussion for active volunteers
  • gutvol-d: general unmoderated volunteer discussion (moderate traffic)
  • gutvol-p: programming volunteers, for software development (light traffic)
  • gutvol-w: website volunteers, for website development (new list)
  • glibrary: library help, for physically tracking down books and copyright research. Low traffic, with occasional requests.

• Other lists
  • gutvol-l: moderated volunteer announcements (light traffic)

If you would like to subscribe to one of the above mailing lists, simply visit the lists.pglaf.org website and select a mailing list name.

All lists require a password and email confirmation to subscribe as part of the Lyris anti-spam measures.

In this months newsletter, Michael Hart announces some major projects from Project Gutenberg for this year.

Web Pages designed by and for our Project Gutenberg readers

Michael wants to make a push for web pages to be designed by, and for, people from various age groups and in any language. This can include the youngest through to the oldest with pages designed around favorite subjects, favorite authors, or even favorite books or characters.

Michael is putting a lot of emphasis on kids taking part in this and would love to see web pages designed by readers at various grade levels, and then translated into many languages.

In fact, I would LOVE to see kids write up their own versions of our classics such as Alice In Wonderland, Looking Glass or Peter Pan, Robin Hood, AEsop’s Fables, etc., in their own words!!!

THAT would be a VERY interesting collection to read!!!

Please, if you know any kids or schools who would be interested in making eBooks, eBook pages, or anything at all related, then please get in touch with Michael directly, or use my contact form and I will forward your email to him.

Textbooks are becoming a more and more highly requested item

In an age when more people are spending more years in home schooling, a greater portion of both children and adults are asking Project Gutenberg for more books that will help them learn many different subjects from reading, writing and arithmetic to geography and astronomy to the dinosaurs and every subject in between.

If you ever wanted to pass on your knowledge, now is the time and the place, for books here last forever and cover the world.

Request to help complete our collection of Andrew Lang books

The many different Fairy Books from Andrew Lang are hugely popular titles in the Gutenberg archives (Red Fairy Book, Yellow Fairy Book, etc). However, we still don’t have a complete list of either the Fairy Books or other Lang titles, including a surprising number of books relating true events.

Michael would like to request that if you find any Andrew Lang books, Fairy, Animal, True, etc., that we don’t currently have in the PG collection then please let us know. Gutenberg will provide you with all the help you need to get these books into the Project Gutenberg archives.

…and for you tech heads

For those of you who are into a bit of computer programming, Michael has also included an awk [mawk] script (written by Jon-Egil Korsvold) in this months newsletter that will allow you to convert the Gutenberg eBooks to formats for smaller screens.

Don’t worry though, for you non-techies their should be some online tools for converting eBooks for use on to your cellphone on the pglaf.org website next month.

It was only a few months ago that Project Gutenberg announced an effort to make mobile editions of their titles available. This was of course big news, however, in my eyes the latest eBook format to be released by PG is even bigger.

Project Guternberg now has most of their titles available in the industry standard EPUB eBook format and free from any DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)!

Although only embraced as an eBook standard within the last 12 months, it has been truly embraced by many big names including; Sony, Google, Penguin, Harper Collins and Adobe, to name but a few. There are also many EPUB readers, both software and hardware, that can read eBooks in this format.

For all you gadget lovers, you can read EPUB formatted books on;

• iPhone and iPod Touch using the very popular Stanza Reader.
• Google Andriod and other Linux-based mobile devices using FBReader
• Sony Reader PRS-505 and PRS-700

There are a number of desktop readers such as the wonderful Calibre eBook Management program, and the Stanza Desktop reader.

Although the Amazon Kindle does not read EPUB files natively, there are several popular programs (Calibre) that will convert our EPUB files so that they can be read on your Kindle device.

There is also the excellent Bookworm ePub Reader, which is an online reading application (hosted by O’Reilly)  where you can upload you EPUB books and so read them from any computer or mobile device which has a web browser and internet connection – this also includes the Amazon Kindle!

Project Gutenberg Experimental EPUB

It must be stated that at this time, the PG EPUB books should be considered experimental. It is a huge task to convert  the entire PG collection, so many may be either buggy or not actually work at all.

The EPUB files are generated automatically from the HTML version, if there is one, otherwise the Plain Text file is used. In this case the conversion program must guess at the structure of the text, so it is more than likely that the EPUB book will contain some formatting errors. These can include verse lines running together or paragraphs being marked as headers. Still, they are very readable.

EPUB eBook Reading Software

• Adobe Digital Editions
• Stanza Desktop eBook Reader
• Bookworm Online Reader
• FBReader
• AZARDI Reader

There are a number of other readers out there so you might want to search around to find your prefered software.

As I’m sure everyone is aware, Obama was inaugurated as the new U.S. President this last week and we now have the Official Transcript of the Inaugural Presidential Address. This can be found in the Gutenberg archives at; www.gutenberg.org/etext/28001

This is now the 44th US Presidential Inaugural Speech and Project Gutenberg has all these compiled into one eText (Obama’s will be added shortly) which is available at; www.gutenberg.org/etext/4938

400 Chinese eBooks in our Archives

With the help of many volunteers the Gutenberg.org Chinese eBook Library has reached 400 titles. Many thanks to everyone involved in helping to get these Chinese books in to our archives.

Project Gutenberg on Twitter

In a further step to expanding the PG community I have now set up a Project Gutenberg account at Twitter.com.

http://twitter.com/GutenbergNews

Any news or interesting info that we come across relating to Project Gutenberg will get its Twitter announcement, in 140 characters or less.

The full January Newsletter can be viewed in our archives.

Monthly Newsletters

All of the Project Gutenberg Newsletters sent via our mailing lists during 2009 will be archived here on pg-news.org for easy viewing. If you wish to subscribe to our monthly newsletters please read the newsletter information page.

pgmonthly_2009_05_21
pgmonthly_2009_04_22
pgmonthly_2009_03_27 – PG Australia Newsletter
pgmonthly_2009_03_21
pgmonthly_2009_02_28 – PG Australia Newsletter
pgmonthly_2009_02_21
pgmonthly_2009_02_21 PG Canada
pgmonthly_2009_01_31 – PG Australia Newsletter
pgmonthly_2009_01_21

Weekly Newsletters

pgweekly_2009_04_22

eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since 1971

It’s been another fantastic year at Project Gutenberg with yet many more landmarks and milestones to add to an ever increasing list.

The Complete “CIA World Factbooks”

The latest project to be completed is “The CIA Factbook,” complete, from 1990 to 2008. It has been many years of hunting to get all the years, and even more to reformat the files from their originals to something easier to search. The CIA Factbook 2008 is still officially in flux until July 1, or thereabouts, so it is being held in PrePrints.

On July 1, the new 2009 edition will be authorized, but it usually doesn’t appear until Aug, Sep, or even Oct. Sometimes new editions are released without any real announcement, so please do get in touch as soon as you hear about it. This way we can get it into our archives with as little delay as possible.

Note: We are still searching for the pre-1990 CIA Factbooks. If anyone can locate these editions it would be greatly appreciated if you could get in touch.

Project Gutenberg Is Now A Firefox Plugin

Yes you read that right! Project Gutenberg now has a Search Plugin for the ever popular FireFox web browser.

Installation is very easy. Visit the Project Gutenberg FireFox Search Plugin page at Mozilla, click the big ‘Add to FireFox‘ button and follow the directions. Very cool!

Continue Reading »

Monthly Newsletters

pgmonthly_2009_01_07 – The Project Gutenberg Year In Review of January 7, 2009
pgmonthly_2009_01_07 – Project Gutenberg Canada Monthly Newsletter
pgmonthly_2008_12_31 – Project Gutenberg Australia Monthly Newsletter
pgmonthly_2008_12_25 – Error Correction of Project Gutenberg eBooks
pgmonthly_2008_12_21 – Gutenberg Mobile / Cellphone eBooks Press Release.
pgmonthly_2008_12_21
pgmonthly_2008-11-30 – Project Gutenberg Australia Monthly
pgmonthly_2008_11_21
pgmonthly_2008_11_10 (PG Canada)
Continue Reading »