Project Gutenberg News

During October Project Gutenberg Canada published a total of 13 eBooks bringing their total to 190 eBooks, which by the way, took Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg twenty-three years to achieve!

LANGUAGES:

• 7 titles in English
• 5 in French
• 1 in German (the first title in that language!)

GENRES

• 4 history books and monographs
• 3 novels
• 3 books for children
• 2 biographical monographs
• 1 book of essays

Eight of this month’s eBooks were by Canadians. Seven of this month’s releases were non-fiction titles and PGCA has science, philosophy, and economics titles underway.

“This is a very gratifying result: we want to ensure that there is a place of honour in the PGC catalogue for non-fiction”, writes Mark.

Visit the the 2008 Newsletter Archives to read the full newsletter.

With the introduction of the Stanza eBook reading application the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch have become major platforms on which to read eBooks. Since Stanza was released there have been several other eBook readers released for the iPod Touch allowing eBooks in many different file formats (including the ePub eBook standard) to be downloaded from any one of the many sources that have both free (public domain) and commercial eBook titles.

The goal of my own personal project is to provide Project Gutenberg eBooks formatted in the ePub eBook standard and make freely available from ePubBooks.com. Because of this I knew I would need to test how my conversions look on an iPhone or iPod Touch, therefore I decided to purchase an iPod Touch.

I’m not a fanatic of Apple so as you can imagine, I wasn’t really expecting much from the iPod Touch other to test my ePub formatted books and listening to music.

I won’t go into too many details in this review about the different Apple apps available on the iPhone/Touch (there are already plenty of other reviews like that) as I want to keep this focused on the eBook aspects, specifically targeting Project Gutenberg fans.

During the review I will only be focussing on the iPod Touch but it must be noted that the Touch is exactly the same as the iPhone, just without the cellular phone abilities or persistent internet access. So anything that can be done with the iPod Touch should also be available on the iPhone.
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I had been reading some very interesting things about the BeBook eBook Reader, so when it arrived in the mail, I was not disappointed. On the surface this reader from Endless Ideas BV is pretty much the same as any other. However, once you start to get a little more involved you soon realise that this is a pretty cool device with some great features that make it stand out from the rest.

As with most E-Ink readers the BeBook also uses the newer Vizplex screen technology, which gives a much brighter and faster screen. To help in displaying your books it comes bundled with its own font which gives a very solid text.

There are the normal three sizes of fonts available, although this device implements them in a slightly different way to others. At the maximum zoom setting the display switches to landscape view - this actually makes sense. If you really need the maximum font size then viewing in landscape mode will actually give a more satisfying reading experience, very clever - and particularly useful for those technical PDF documents.

One of the most common issues people have when buying a dedicated reader is regarding eBook formats and whether they will still be able to read their purchases if they change devices in the future. Well, to help relieve these concerns Endless Ideas BV have not only enabled the BeBook to view MobiPocket [DRM protected] eBooks, but also PDF, Microsoft LIT, CHM, ePub, HTML and a plethora of other formats. Giving you more choice in where you buy your books from.

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Project Gutenberg founder, Michael Hart, has now sent out the latest PG newsletter. We are just about to reach a new milestone;

We are rapidly approaching 30,000 eBooks in the originating Project Gutenberg collections…we should pass 30,000 before the end of the year.

It’s interesting to note that eBooks in the Chinese language are coming in fast, placing Chinese in the top 5 language list. There are still 307 titles on the PrePrints site, which need to be catalogued so anyone who can work in Chinese is encouraged to look in the PrePrints directory labelled china - a .zip file containing all the files is available. Once all 307 titles are online the total will be 627, then placing Chinese second in our non-English languages collection.

Project Gutenberg Conferences

Early spring 2009 will see Michael Hart give a presentation in Buenos Aires for a new internet effort called “Both Americas.” The goal for this is to bring Spanish to the “Top 5″ of the language list; Spanish is currently placed 8th in the PG archives and does not represent the volume at which it is spoken throughout the world.

The full newsletter can be found in the 2008 Newsletter Archives.

Mark from PG Canada sent through his monthly newsletter covering the activities for August 2008.

With 12 new eBooks released in August (7 English, 5 French) the total number of PGCA titles now reaches 164!

GENRES

• 6 of the books were novels
• 3 were children’s books
• 2 were collections of short stories and novellas
• 1 was non-fiction: a collection of essays

One of PG Canada’s objectives is to have a strong collection of eBooks in French, with almost half the new titles this month in French they are certainly achieving this goal.

The New Releases section at the top of the main PG Canada page, gives up-to-date information on all the newest releases during the last three months.

In the newsletter Mark commented on a special release of Canadian author, Pamphile Le May’s “Contes Vrais” including not only Le May’s celebrated short stories, but with illustrations by no fewer than twelve famous Quebec artists of his period! It is in effect a gallery of Quebec’s artists of the time.

You can read the newsletter in full over in the 2008 Newsletter Archives section.

So here we are, just 10 days to go before SonyStyle.co.uk and Waterstones.com start shipping out those lovely new PRS-505’s to all us UK residents!

This is going to be the first E-Ink reader from one of the big boys to enter the UK market . The Sony Reader has been getting substantial coverage in mainstream media of late, so it will be interesting to see what the take up will be. If forums such as MobileRead are anything to go by then there will be quite a demand.

Don’t know what the Sony Reader Digital Book (PRS-505) is?

The Sony Reader is an electronic book reader that uses an E-Ink screen to give a paper like reading experience. The Reader can hold around 160 books in its 250MB internal memory, but by using the two memory slots (10GB) you could potentially hold 10,000 books. If you don’t think you could fill this then remember that the Gutenberg.org archives have over 20,000 English language books to download for free!!

Another advantage for the Reader is its battery life. According to Sony, you can get 7,500 page turns on each charge. I’ve not tested that number, but in real life terms I charge mine [PRS-500] just once every couple of weeks.

I bought my PRS-500 when I was in the U.S. at the end of 2006 and have had almost 2 years of use. I’ve read many PG books and find it gives a great reading experience. The new Reader, with its much brighter and faster screen, should give an even better reading experience..

Sony Reader Books

For its UK release, Sony have partnered with Waterstones, the highstreet book store, who will have an online catalogue of over 25,000 titles when they go live. It is believed that the Waterstones books will be in the .epub book format.

ePub is a new eBook standard that is being adopted by publishers, professionals and amateurs alike (You can think of ePub as the book equivalent of MP3 music files.)

Sony also have their own book format, BBeB and you can also read PDF, MS Word, Plain TXT and RTF files, as well as view popular image formats such as .jpg.

The Sony Reader is available to order online at Waterstones.com and SonyStyle.co.uk for £199

Michael Hart has sent out his monthly newsletter for August 2008 and during this last month there have been a few nice milestones from the various PG projects.

First up, Greg Newby has provided us with an update on the top languages found at gutenberg.org. Currently there are over 100 languages available in the archives making a total of 26,272 eBook titles!

The top languages being;

22,432 -  English (EN)

 1,217 - French (FR)

   540 - German (DE)

   456 - Finnish (FI)

   349 - Dutch (NL)

   320 - Chinese (ZH)

   250 - Portuguese (PT)

   197 - Spanish (ES)

   153 - Italian (IT)

Other milestones

• PG Europe have now posted their 500th eBook- a fantastic effort from all involved
• PG Australia posted eBook #1674 on August 21, 2008
• PG Canada posted eBook #150 in July, 2008
• PG US posted the 1,200th eBook title in French - more than double any other language!

The combined PG projects have now released 28,988 eBooks for download - As Michael states, that’s about as many as your average public library.

Editors Note: Marie’s essay is available in English

[Table]

• Sommaire
• Un pari depuis 1971
• La méthode adoptée
• La correction partagée
• Des collections multilingues
• Domaine public versus copyright
• Du passé vers l’avenir
• Chronologie
• Statistiques
• Liens

SOMMAIRE

• Août 1997: 1.000 livres
• Avril 2002: 5.000 livres
• Octobre 2003: 10.000 livres
• Janvier 2005: 15.000 livres
• Décembre 2006: 20.000 livres
• Avril 2008: 25.000 livres

En juillet 1971, Michael Hart crée le Projet Gutenberg pour diffuser gratuitement sous forme électronique les oeuvres littéraires du domaine public. Un projet longtemps considéré par ses détracteurs comme impossible à grande échelle. Site pionnier à tous égards, le Projet Gutenberg est à la fois le premier site d’information sur un réseau encore embryonnaire et la première bibliothèque numérique. Les livres sont numérisés en mode texte (TXT) en utilisant le code ASCII (American standard code for information interchange). Lorsque l’utilisation du web se généralise, au milieu des années 1990, le projet trouve un second souffle et un rayonnement international. Les collections atteignent 1.000 livres en août 1997, 2.000 livres en mai 1999, 3.000 livres en décembre 2000, 4.000 livres en octobre 2001, 5.000 livres en avril 2002, 10.000 livres en octobre 2003, 15.000 livres en janvier 2005, 20.000 livres en décembre 2006 et 25.000 livres en avril 2008, dans 55 langues, avec 340 nouveaux livres par mois, 340 sites miroirs dans de nombreux pays, plusieurs dizaines de milliers de téléchargements par jour et des milliers de volontaires de par le monde. En octobre 2001, la principale source des livres devient Distributed Proofreaders, mis sur pied par Charles Franks pour gérer la correction partagée entre volontaires. D’abord essentiellement anglophones, le Projet Gutenberg s’internationalise et les collections deviennent multilingues. Le Projet Gutenberg Europe est lancé en janvier 2004 par le Projet Rastko, basé à Belgrade, en Serbie. Suivent le Project Gutenberg Canada et bien d’autres.

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ECTACO are probably better know for their electronic hand held translators, but now they gone and released their very own reader; the jetBook eBook Reader.

The jetBook does not use an E-Ink screen, however, this does give it an advantage over all the other eBook readers that are currently out there; a crisp and very white screen! One of the issues people have with the current E-Ink (and VixPlex) standard is that the page contrast is not high enough - usually with E-Ink screens you have a light gray background displaying dark gray text, making low light reading a challenge.

Well, if you think this will be an issue then perhaps you would be better suited to a jetBook. These use a reflective monochrome LCD screen so that the background is nice and white, allowing the text to be read much easier.

[The jetBook has] an easy to scan high-resolution 5-inch display and a viewing angle close to 180°, it is fully customizable. Even readers who have difficulty seeing print books will benefit from its adjustable text size and font face. And weighing in at only 7.5 ounces, this handy device fits perfectly into the palm of your hand.

They go on to say that this “revolutionary display reflects light without the need for backlighting”, which according to reviews gives a similar reading experience to an E-Ink screen.

For me however, the most impressive feature of the jetBook is its ability to search and cross-reference the text using bookmarks making it a great choice for dictionaries - I’m not sure if this means you can do a word lookup from within a book. I’ll try to find out and post an update.

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In Australia it is now 1st August 2008 and Project Gutenberg Australia is celebrating its seventh birthday!

In August 2001 Project Gutenberg Australia posted their first book online, “Animal Farm” by George Orwell - they now have over 1600 titles available for download. Project Gutenbereg (U.S.) only posted their 1,600th title in June 1998 - that’s 20 years longer that it has taken PGA!

“Aussies are perhaps the greatest volunteering nation on a percentage basis“, this is certainly no understatement from Project Gutenberg Founder, Michael Hart. We send our congratulations to all the Aussie’s who have volunteered over the years. I’m sure the next seven are going to be even more impressive.