Project Gutenberg News

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]

Just recently Project Gutenberg had a major crashe of their hardrives and subsequently lost some data and the newsletter lists were destroyed. They are currently using some ancient backups but most people should still be on the list.

A number of poeple have been asking how to subscriber/unsubscribe from the Project Gutenberg mailing list. Full instructions can be found at www.gutenberg.org/howto/subscribe-howto but here is a quick overview;

Mailing Lists

There are various Project Gutenberg mailing lists here is a brief description along with a link to visit and subscribe/unsubscribe. All lists live at pglaf.org, and are moderated except for the discussion lists:

• Newsletters, with new eBook listings, calls for assistance, general information, and announcements
  • gweekly: Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter – Usuall only one weekly newsletter.
  • gmonthly: Project Gutenberg Monthly newsletter – Usually only one monthly newsletter.
• Notification as new eBooks are posted
  • posted: receive book postings as they happen, along with other PG related internally-focused discussion (high traffic, over 10 postings per day)
• Discussion for active volunteers
  • gutvol-d: general unmoderated volunteer discussion (moderate traffic)
  • gutvol-p: programming volunteers, for software development (light traffic)
  • gutvol-w: website volunteers, for website development (new list)
  • glibrary: library help, for physically tracking down books and copyright research. Low traffic, with occasional requests.

• Other lists
  • gutvol-l: moderated volunteer announcements (light traffic)

If you would like to subscribe to one of the above mailing lists, simply visit the lists.pglaf.org website and select a mailing list name.

All lists require a password and email confirmation to subscribe as part of the Lyris anti-spam measures.

In this months newsletter, Michael Hart announces some major projects from Project Gutenberg for this year.

Web Pages designed by and for our Project Gutenberg readers

Michael wants to make a push for web pages to be designed by, and for, people from various age groups and in any language. This can include the youngest through to the oldest with pages designed around favorite subjects, favorite authors, or even favorite books or characters.

Michael is putting a lot of emphasis on kids taking part in this and would love to see web pages designed by readers at various grade levels, and then translated into many languages.

In fact, I would LOVE to see kids write up their own versions of our classics such as Alice In Wonderland, Looking Glass or Peter Pan, Robin Hood, AEsop’s Fables, etc., in their own words!!!

THAT would be a VERY interesting collection to read!!!

Please, if you know any kids or schools who would be interested in making eBooks, eBook pages, or anything at all related, then please get in touch with Michael directly, or use my contact form and I will forward your email to him.

Textbooks are becoming a more and more highly requested item

In an age when more people are spending more years in home schooling, a greater portion of both children and adults are asking Project Gutenberg for more books that will help them learn many different subjects from reading, writing and arithmetic to geography and astronomy to the dinosaurs and every subject in between.

If you ever wanted to pass on your knowledge, now is the time and the place, for books here last forever and cover the world.

Request to help complete our collection of Andrew Lang books

The many different Fairy Books from Andrew Lang are hugely popular titles in the Gutenberg archives (Red Fairy Book, Yellow Fairy Book, etc). However, we still don’t have a complete list of either the Fairy Books or other Lang titles, including a surprising number of books relating true events.

Michael would like to request that if you find any Andrew Lang books, Fairy, Animal, True, etc., that we don’t currently have in the PG collection then please let us know. Gutenberg will provide you with all the help you need to get these books into the Project Gutenberg archives.

…and for you tech heads

For those of you who are into a bit of computer programming, Michael has also included an awk [mawk] script (written by Jon-Egil Korsvold) in this months newsletter that will allow you to convert the Gutenberg eBooks to formats for smaller screens.

Don’t worry though, for you non-techies their should be some online tools for converting eBooks for use on to your cellphone on the pglaf.org website next month.

It was only a few months ago that Project Gutenberg announced an effort to make mobile editions of their titles available. This was of course big news, however, in my eyes the latest eBook format to be released by PG is even bigger.

Project Guternberg now has most of their titles available in the industry standard EPUB eBook format and free from any DRM (Digital Restrictions Management)!

Although only embraced as an eBook standard within the last 12 months, it has been truly embraced by many big names including; Sony, Google, Penguin, Harper Collins and Adobe, to name but a few. There are also many EPUB readers, both software and hardware, that can read eBooks in this format.

For all you gadget lovers, you can read EPUB formatted books on;

• iPhone and iPod Touch using the very popular Stanza Reader.
• Google Andriod and other Linux-based mobile devices using FBReader
• Sony Reader PRS-505 and PRS-700

There are a number of desktop readers such as the wonderful Calibre eBook Management program, and the Stanza Desktop reader.

Although the Amazon Kindle does not read EPUB files natively, there are several popular programs (Calibre) that will convert our EPUB files so that they can be read on your Kindle device.

There is also the excellent Bookworm ePub Reader, which is an online reading application (hosted by O’Reilly)  where you can upload you EPUB books and so read them from any computer or mobile device which has a web browser and internet connection – this also includes the Amazon Kindle!

Project Gutenberg Experimental EPUB

It must be stated that at this time, the PG EPUB books should be considered experimental. It is a huge task to convert  the entire PG collection, so many may be either buggy or not actually work at all.

The EPUB files are generated automatically from the HTML version, if there is one, otherwise the Plain Text file is used. In this case the conversion program must guess at the structure of the text, so it is more than likely that the EPUB book will contain some formatting errors. These can include verse lines running together or paragraphs being marked as headers. Still, they are very readable.

EPUB eBook Reading Software

• Adobe Digital Editions
• Stanza Desktop eBook Reader
• Bookworm Online Reader
• FBReader
• AZARDI Reader

There are a number of other readers out there so you might want to search around to find your prefered software.

As I’m sure everyone is aware, Obama was inaugurated as the new U.S. President this last week and we now have the Official Transcript of the Inaugural Presidential Address. This can be found in the Gutenberg archives at; www.gutenberg.org/etext/28001

This is now the 44th US Presidential Inaugural Speech and Project Gutenberg has all these compiled into one eText (Obama’s will be added shortly) which is available at; www.gutenberg.org/etext/4938

400 Chinese eBooks in our Archives

With the help of many volunteers the Gutenberg.org Chinese eBook Library has reached 400 titles. Many thanks to everyone involved in helping to get these Chinese books in to our archives.

Project Gutenberg on Twitter

In a further step to expanding the PG community I have now set up a Project Gutenberg account at Twitter.com.

http://twitter.com/GutenbergNews

Any news or interesting info that we come across relating to Project Gutenberg will get its Twitter announcement, in 140 characters or less.

The full January Newsletter can be viewed in our archives.

Over the last month we officially passed 32,000 original Project Gutenberg eBooks, including all our usual listings and almost 2,500 eBooks at PrePrints. This means the original Project Gutenberg editions now list as many titles as the average U.S. public library.

27,475  +   287  112008  PG General Automated Count
 1,723  +     6  111808  PG Australia
   553  +    13  102108  PG Europe
 2,494  +    33  102108  PG PrePrints
   202  +    12  110908  PG Canada  [Estimated]
======
32,447  +   349  by various automated counts and newsletters

Notes
Without counting PrePrints, we are still about 30K, and some of the new .lit collection will not make it under our current rules of addition from PrePrints, and would be deleted from PrePrints without moving to other listings.

The 307 Chinese eBooks in PrePrints will probably go, as a team of our best Chinese workers says they are not worth a lot more time to work on, etc.

There are perhaps 100 eBooks not listed here that are already in circulation from Project Gutenberg.

PG Canada includes English, French, and Italian.

The times are changing, and we can either lead or follow.

If we don’t lead in the field of Chinese eBooks we follow– and we are starting a Project Gutenberg of Chinese, for all who may wish to get in on the ground floor.

Believe it or not, Spanish is listed as the third language, with regard to its use on the entire Internet so that’s the next goal, to bring Spanish to out Top 5. Michael also mentions that he will be giving a presentation for a new combination of Internet efforts called Both Americas, in Buenos Aires early next Spring, followed by what I would hope will be a similar conference in France.

Our All Time Hottest Requests!!!!!!!

FLASH RAM

I am looking for the earliest flash RAM possible. The very earliest were PCMCIA cards, such as used for the Poqet computer, etc. The earliest USB flash drives were DisgoDizgo, M-Systems and these were OEMed by IBM, HP, etc. They are particular in a recognizable fashion because their snapon connectors resemble the connectors of jigsaw puzzles.

POWERPOINT

We need someone who can do PowerPoint illustrations. One in particular, building a 3-D box of 1,000 dominoes.

Visit the Newsletter Archives to read the full newsletter.

The big news this month is that Project Gutenberg has officially passed 30,000 original eBooks, bringing the the original Project Gutenberg editions to as many titles as the average U.S. public library.

27,188  (+212)  11/20/08 - PG General Automated Count
 1,717  (+ 11)  11/18/08 - PG Australia
   542  (+ 12)  10/21/08 - PG Europe
 2,461  (+  0)  10/21/08 - PG PrePrints
   190  (+ 13)  11/09/08 - PG Canada
======
32,098  (+348) by various automated counts and newsletters

Another major landmark is that the number of books in the Chinese language has now passed Dutch to become the newest member of Project Gutenberg’s “Top 5 Languages”, with a total of over 375 books in the Gutenberg archives.

There are still around 300 Chinese titles being held on the PrePrint site so we really need help in cataloging these. If you can work in Chinese you are encouraged to look into the directory called /china over at PrePrints, or get the .zip file (one directory above) to downloaded all the files in one go.

Here’s an update on the languages (NOT counting the new 307 PrePrints);

• 23075 English (EN)
• 1319 French (FR)
• 553 German (DE)
• 476 Finnish (FI)
• 377 Chinese (ZH)
• 361 Dutch (NL)
• 267 Portuguese (PT)
• 217 Spanish (ES)
• 164 Italian (IT)

Spanish is listed as the third language, with regard to its use on the entire Internet, so Michael Hart wants this to be the next goal for Project Gutenberg; bring Spanish in to the Top 5.

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.