Project Gutenberg News

[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]

As many of you know, I like to do something around this time every year to take a new step forward in Project Gutenberg.

As luck would have it, I recently received an email reminder from one of our volunteers who reads our eBooks out loud for those who need or want audio eBook versions of our library.

This volunteer was kind enough to keep a log of errors found while recording one of our classics eBooks out loud and then sent us that list of errors, and now was following up.

Due to the fact that we receive more errors messages than we have volunteers to handle, these errors were not corrected, which stimulated me to write a request for help on this in a recent Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

The results were immediate, effective, and continuing.

The new edition, complete with ~23 corrections is online and has been for a couple days already, and we are still getting more volunteers for error correction.

This is a great and wonderful thing because the one thing in the history of eBooks that separates Project Gutenberg is an everlasting continuing process of improvement. Continue Reading »

PG Mobile is going to be a new addition to gutenberg.org, which will allow mobile/cell phone users to download and read eBooks. The files will be available on the normal download page of any PG eBook. Here is the full Press Release.

Look For PG Mobile – Project Gutenberg’s Mobile Edition

Why using Amazon’s proprietary Kindle when you can use your mobile phone instead? Today’s cell phones offer excellent screens and massive computing power to ensure best reading comfort. Mobile books do not weigh much and you can carry them with you wherever you are. Each Java / MIDP 2.0 enabled cell phone is sufficient – the most common computing platform in the world: There are by far more cell phones shipped worldwide than personal computers.

PG Mobile is a software that transfers the plain text format provided by Project Gutenberg onto small handset screens – together with all the features known from physical books like turning pages, page numbers and bookmarks. Just download the PG Mobile version of any eBook and read it on your phone: All Project Gutenberg mobile eBooks will soon be available for download as an additional file format in the download section of each Gutenberg title on Gutenberg.org. Stay tuned!

PG Mobile is based on the common Java file format (JAR) readable on nearly all mobile handsets. The superior features of the PG Mobile reader offer benefits like landscape mode and bookmarks, among many others. There’s no book size limit, the book size is only limtated by the individual capabilities of your handset.

All mobile books can be downloaded as Java-applications and can then later be installed on the cell phone by using Bluetooth, serial connection, infrared or data cable. Additionally it will be possible to install the books directly over the air by using WAP: Just browse to Gutenberg.org and click on the JAR-link. And soon the mobile book will automatically be installed on your phone.

Please visit the homepage of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation: www.gutenberg.org.

PG Mobile developed by QiOO Interactive, PG Mobile – JAR-book Technology by QiOO Interactive, www.qioo.com.

QiOO Interactive is the first producer of free mobile books worldwide. As a result of a university spin-off project at the Institute of Electronic Business e.V., www.ieb.net, the first mobile books were created in summer 2003.

In 1985 when Gary Kildall, IBM’s first choice before Bill Gates to design their PC’s operating system a few years earlier, came out with the first electronic encyclopedia, who would figure it would be only a quarter of a century before print encyclopedias faded from the limelight to join vinyl records and dinosaurs?

$999 would buy you an external Sony CD drive and Grolier’s CD– pretty much the same price as the paper encyclopedias, but with the option of putting any number of CDs in the drive.

This was only a year after the famous “1984″ Super Bowl ad that ran only once and changed Super Bowl ads forever.

It was only a year after IBM offered the AT. Continue Reading »

It’s all over for those hefty paper encyclopedias.

No less an authority than The New York Times tells us it is time to “Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias,” that it is all over other than rolling out the last few editions of some last few hard-boiled Luddites who insist on paper encyclopedias, at a price that could easily buy you a decent used car.

$1500 would buy you an encyclopedia when I was a kid, and that’s not so much less than we paid for our first brand new $2100 car.

Obviously this pricing has taken a beating to remain competitive with electronic resources, as I just clicked on an ad for a 2007 Britannica, there doesn’t seem to be a 2008, and got three kinds labeled as follows: Continue Reading »

We’ve just posted the 100th eBook. It’s from 1904, seems not to have been reprinted, and is a very interesting account of Toronto’s legal establishment in the 19th century: it’s a rather spectacular addition to the collection. Here’s the description from the website:

2008/03/25: As our 100th eBook, we’ve chosen this beautifully illustrated history of Toronto’s lawyers and judiciary – A true rarity and a delight to read, packed with anecdotes. You may end up thinking that the history of Toronto is the history of its lawyers!

Hamilton, James Cleland (1836-1907) [Canadian lawyer]
Osgoode Hall – Reminiscences of the Bench and Bar (1904) [History]

Rescuing excellent titles like this from undeserved oblivion is one of the great pleasures of having a Literary Archive.

Forwarded from Mark Akrigg of PG Canada

After all these years of saying free eBooks were anathema to the Olde Boye Networke of the publishing world….

The publishers are finally realizing that when eBooks are given away free of charge actually increase paper sales–not that there weren’t any number of academic studies and articles saying this from the very beginning.

So, if any Project Gutenberg volunteers ever needed kinds of vindication, it doesn’t get much better than this…at least until we find there are more eBook going out for consumption than paper books….

Again my HUGE thanks to ALL Project Gutenberg volunteers!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg

Tor Books Is Giving Away E-Books

Tor Books is launching a new site and running a campaign in which they are giving away e-books (free as in beer) until the site goes live. To get in on the deal, fill out the form at their site, and each week you will receive a newsletter containing links to download a new book. The first two books are Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson followed by Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. Scalzi’s site says: ‘My understanding is that they don’t have DRM on them. Or at least, mine isn’t supposed to have, and I don’t think they’re planning mine to be special in that regard.

The above is from the Slashdot.org article of the same name.

This only a day or so after HarperCollins appear in the NYTimes doing the same thing.

A Million Books Scanned at U. of Michigan — and Counting

Librarians at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor threw themselves a party on Friday to celebrate a milestone in their ambitious effort to scan every single book in the collection. They scanned the one millionth book, leaving just 6.5-million to go.

Most of the scanning has been done as part of the library’s controversial deal with Google. The search giant is working with dozens of major libraries around the world to scan the full text of books to add to its index. But Michigan is one of the only institutions to agree to scan every one of its holdings — even those that are still covered by copyright.

Read the full article here.

Every year I write my predictions, hopes and fears, but this year I think we can all agree that these predictions cross boundaries, concern advances, and declines, in both the technology and social world orders that are far beyond anything I previously predicted.

This year’s predictions include “personal libraries” on “personal computers” to rival the largest libraries in the world; USB 3.0– which will reduce overnight data copying and backups to ONE HOUR; and very inexpensive terabyte drives.

Prediction #1: The “Personal Computer” as “Personal Library”
Prediction #2: USB 3.0 Will Change The World of Copies/Backups
Prediction #3: USB 3.0 Terabyte Drives Will Do More Than. . . .
Prediction #4: Is “The Digital Divide” Half Empty Or Half Full?
Prediction #5: Rethinking “The Digital Divide”. . .More or Less

The World’s Largest Libraries, Will eLibraries Be Counted? Continue Reading »