Book People Archive

Re: Google Still #3 In eBooks

Michael Hart writes:
 > The Rankings
 > 
 > #1  ~250,000 eBooks in The World eBook Library
 > #2  ~100,000 eBooks in The Project Gutenberg Library
 > #3   ~50,000 eBooks in The Google Book Search Project
 > #4   ~25,000 eBooks in Yahoo's Open Content Alliance
 > [See footnote for details]

As usual, I find your marketing a bit amusing and somewhat
suspect. I'm assuming that your listing of eBooks for The Project
Gutenberg Library is from http://www.gutenberg.cc, and not
http://www.gutenberg.org (or http://www.gutenberg.net, whichever is
preferred). A quick observation is that www.gutenberg.org claims
18,000 eBooks, whereas www.gutenberg.cc claims 75,000, but that
includes a lot of doubly counted books (for example, the blackmask
archive contains a large number of PG texts).  Google also has some
duplicated books (same edition owned and scanned by different partner
libraries), but the actual number is fairly small.

I'm curious, I've been asking on a couple of lists, is there really
any way to get a good list of the content available from the OCA?
Internet Archive doesn't have a catalog of them, like the other
archives they host, and my search at yahoo for the site
www.openlibrary.com only shows about 600 results, and not all of them
link to books.

Lastly, how many books in the World eBook Library are free? 

 > Moore's Law Doubts Google Progress In eBooks

I'm not going to comment on Michael's ludicrous claims here, except to
simply say that any mention of Moore's Law, which is an observation on
the ability of chip manufacturers to shrink the size of gates on
integrated circuitry, and therefore estimates the future complexity of
ICs makes no sense when discussing the growth rate of eBook libraries.
Furthermore, Moore has revised his "Law" at least once, after noting a
slowdown in the growth-rate of IC complexity, and he clearly believes
that growth in IC complexity is not sustainable.

If you want to claim that PG's growth rate has been exponential, fine,
I'll accept that, but to claim that PG can maintain an exponential
rate of growth is just not believable. If the primary source of PG's
texts is Distributed Proofreaders, they're releasing less than 2,000
texts a year, and are definitely not increasing that amount
exponentially. 

BTW, a list of Google Books, and the MARC entries I've found for them
(not yet cleaned up, many duplicate MARC entries, and some erroneous
MARC entries), 1000 books at a time, is at
http://pdbooks.zuhause.org/display.html?limit=1000&sort=title