The 2008 Project Gutenberg Year In Review

by Michael Cook on January 7, 2009
News

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!

Chinese Moves Into Our Top 5 List

As has been noted in our recent Monthly Newsletters, we have finally managed to do nearly 400 eBooks in Chinese and to start to do justice to the most spoken language.

Note: The collection of 307 Chinese Preprints eBooks mentioned in earlier Newsletters, has been “retired.” This means we are no longer sure they will be done, for lack of copyright research, etc. They are still there, waiting, if you would care to see if you can bring even just a few of them, into general circulation.

Project Gutenberg Books Equal The Average Library

During 2008 we officially passed 32,000 original Project Gutenberg eBooks. This now means that the original Project Gutenberg editions now list as many book titles as your average U.S. public library.

The 2008 Statistical Year in Review

Detailed statistics can be found in the full version of the December Newsletter but here is a very quick run down of the totals from the various Gutenberg Projects.

27,616   PG General Automated Count
 1,726   Project Gutenberg of Australia
  554   Project Gutenberg of Europe
  225   Project Gutenberg of Canada [Estimated]
2,431   PrePrints [Counting the 307 Chinese eBooks +111]
======   ======
32,552   Grand Total

Languages at Gutenberg.org

  • 23,374 English (EN)
  • 1,343 French (FR)
  • 557 German (DE)
  • 482 Finnish (FI)
  • 395 Chinese (ZH)
  • 380 Dutch (NL)
  • 292 Portuguese (PT)
  • 219 Spanish (ES)
  • 174 Italian (IT)
  • 62 Latin (LA)
  • 55 Esperanto (EO)
  • 54 Tagalos (TL)
  • 50 Swedish (SV)

Many thanks to all of the Project Gutenberg volunteers for making 2008 another great year!

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