Project Gutenberg News

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

Great news for all us UK based eBook lovers. Sony are finally releasing their Reader Digital Book (PRS-505) to the UK market!

Sony have partnered with the UK book store Waterstones, who will start selling the Reader from 3rd September 2008 for £199 - available for Pre-Order (see below). This costs a little more than the U.S. version, which sells for $299 (approx. £150). Now we are seeing eBook readers entering the high street let’s hope the prices will start tumbling.

The Reader uses an E-Ink Screen, which gives the user a paper like reading experience. You can store around 160 books in the memory and the battery will last for around 6,800 page turns. I myself have the older PRS-500 model and probably only have to charge it once every couple of weeks.

If you are concerned about buying Sony’s propriety eBook format then not to worry, you can also read ePub formatted books as well as PDF files. The .epub format is fast becoming an industry standard and many publishers are releasing their titles in this format, Penguin and HarperColins are just two publishers.

You will be able to buy books from both the Sony Connect store and Waterstones.com - all the titles sold at Waterstones will be in the ePub format. There are now a number of software and hardware readers which support the ePub format, so all your purchases will be readable in the years to come, no matter which hardware you then have.

If you wish to read public domain books there are plenty of sites; Feedbooks.com have all their titles available for free and in the ePub format.

All the Project Gutenberg eBooks can be read on the Sony Reader. Just download any .txt file and drag onto you reader using the provided software - it really is that easy.

In the future we are hopeful that Sony will release their Reader in other European countries; perhaps Germany will be next.

Where to buy the Sony Reader Digital Book online in the U.K.
Waterstones.com - available in Silver (PRS-505/SC) for £199
SonyStyle.co.uk - available in Silver (PRS-505/SC) for £199

A Million Plus Books Free for the Taking!

July 4 2008

The Third Annual World eBook Fair Starts July 4th.

“Own Your Own Library” is the theme of this year’s World eBook Fair.

Starting July 4th you will be able to do just that in an unprecedented opportunity to download books in the widest variety ever available.

Visit www.worldebookfair.org to get started.

Project Gutenberg and partner sponsors encourage readers to create the “personal library” of their choice in a “personal computer.”  Most of the fair’s electronic books are free of charge, and an additional 160,000 or more have coupon or discount purchases available during the month.

All possible types of electronic books, or eBooks, are available:

• eBooks in over 100 Different Languages!
• eBooks designed for cell phones!
• eBooks designed for Adobe readers!
• eBooks designed for plain text readers!
• eBooks out loud in theatrical performances!
• eBooks that your computer can read aloud to you!
• eBooks that can be easily quoted in school papers!
• 160,000 eBooks in brand new commercial editions!!!
• Music, movies, etc. are also included. . . .

Continue Reading »

Marie Lebert has completely rewritten and brought up-to-date her excellent article on the history of Project Gutenberg - Ed

Contents

• Overview
• A Bet Since 1971
• The Method
• Shared Proofreading
• Becoming Multingual
• Public Domain vs. Copyright
• From the Past to the Future
• Chronology
• Stats
• Links

OVERVIEW

• August 1997: 1,000 books
• April 2002: 5,000 books
• October 2003: 10,000 books
• January 2005: 15,000 books
• December 2006: 20,000 books
• April 2008: 25,000 books

In July 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg with the goal of making available for free, and electronically, literary works belonging to public domain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library. When the internet became popular, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and an international dimension. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 5,000 (in April 2002), 10,000 (in October 2003), 15,000 (in January 2005), 20,000 (in December 2006) and 25,000 (in April 2008), with a current production rate of around 340 new books each month. With 55 languages and 40 mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. Continue Reading »

Portable Reading offers a service to read books from a library of over 20,000 Gutenberg titles in dozens of languages. Readers can upload their own book and share it with friends. They can also communicate with each other and with authors by writing reviews and annotating individual pages with notes. The reading interface is customizable by font size, type, background color, etc.Portable Reading is currently available on the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and on Facebook. Many more mobile devices are coming soon.

Try Portable Reading on the iPhone and iPod Touch: http://www.textonphone.com

Try Portable Reading on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=20655241480&ref=s

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 »

I recently updated my essay, same subject, that expands on the Afterwords and References chapters in my e-novel ‘The Universe–or Nothing.’ The novel (2006) is archived in the Project Gutenberg Library Archive Foundation (PGLAF) from where it may be freely downloaded at:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18257

The essay (about 8,000 words and more than 20 active links to supporting data) may be freely downloaded at:

http://scribe1917x.livejournal.com/4923.html

The novel and the follow-on essay speculate on a possible far-stretching future for humankind from realities of this era. Excerpt from the essay’s Preface:

There is a convergent, worldwide focus in these early decades of the 21st century on:

– the Earth’s steadily diminishing reserves of accessible metals, minerals and other natural-state ‘nonrenewable’ substances that are essential to sustain civilization’s industrial base into the future;

– developing technological and logistics’ concepts and capabilities to locate, identify and acquire essential industrial-base substances from ever-deepening wells in the Earth’s crust and sea beds; and increasing confidence that, in time, the planet’s diminishing reserves of ‘industrial-base nonrenewables’ will be replenished from elsewhere throughout the Solar System and beyond;

and

– Initiatives and commitments throughout the world toward creating the means by which humankind will transform into realities its vision of evolving into an eventual spacefaring race.

Meyer Moldeven (Mike)

~~~

‘It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.’
Dr. Robert H. Goddard, Rocket Pioneer

~

‘There is no way back into the past; the choice, as H. G. Wells once said, is ‘the universe — or nothing.’ Though men and civilizations may yearn for rest, for the dream of the lotus-eaters, that is a desire that merges imperceptibly into death. The challenge of the great spaces between the worlds is a stupendous one; but if we fail to meet it, the story of our race will be drawing to its close.”
Arthur C. Clarke

Many of us dream of a universal digital library freely available on the web, i.e. available anywhere and at any time. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and others, we are getting there, at least for the books from public domain. The process began a while ago with a few pioneers - It is running at full speed now. We still need to see copyright issues worked out in order to provide free access to as many works as possible. We still need large scale knowledge-building projects to get reliable reference, scholarly and educational content. We still need better quality OCR technology and in the future, go back to the original image files to provide a higher quality book. We still need more efforts, there are currently 25 million books belonging to the public domain and as of mid-2007, just over 2 million freely available on the internet.

Continue Reading »

Traducido por Anna Alvarez

Las líneas que siguen están dedicadas a todos los voluntarios del Proyecto Gutenberg en los cinco continentes. Gracias a ellos, más de 20.000 clásicos de la literatura mundial ya están disponibles en la red, en una versión gratuita y de gran calidad, con una previsión de una biblioteca de un millón de libros.

En 1971, Michael Hart creó el Proyecto Gutenberg con el objetivo de difundir gratuitamente bajo forma electrónica las obras literarias que pertenecían al dominio público. Hasta hoy, nadie consiguió obrar con más éxito para poner los clásicos de la literatura mundial a disposición de todos. Ni tampoco crear con tan pocos gastos una red tan inmensa de voluntarios en el mundo entero, sin derroche de competencias y de energía.

Continue Reading »