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.

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.

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.

Continue Reading »

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.

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 »

As of May 21, 2008: “Original Project Gutenberg eBook” site totals have reached 28,000, details below.

Please do not forget the 1600+ from PG of Australia, the ~500 from PG Europe, and the ~100 from PG Canada, with a detailed list included below. Not to mention the sites: Gutenberg.cc with 75,000+ eBooks, and Project Runeberg with eBooks in the Scandinavian languages.

Please note: the figures presented here are usually the more conservative figures people have presented, but the date of our eBook #25,000 was said to have been slightly earlier than reported. Personally, I would prefer to be a little cautious about reporting the numbers of eBooks, but if anyone would like to help us with the accounting, that would be GRRRREAT!!!

slightly edited version of Michael’s entry from the May 2008 monthly newsletter — Ed

Chinese Moves Up!

The Chinese collection of eBooks at Project Gutenberg has been increasing steadily and there are now over 300 titles in the archive. The PG Chinese eBook collection has now taken over 5th place in the language lists (excluding English.) Congratulations to everyone involved in producing this collection. Continue Reading »

Back in January we mentioned that there was going to be a Newsletter Team. Unfortunately this will now not happen.

Project Gutenberg is therefore putting forward a request for volunteers to help out with the weekly newsletter. Everyone is welcome to participate no matter what your background.

Please use our Contact page and let us know your interest. All messages will be forwarded directly to Michael Hart.