Book People Archive

Re: EXTRA! Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter

On June 22, Michael Hart wrote:


>                     *eBook Milestones*
> 
>      20,000 eBooks As Of Today At These Four PG Sites
> 
> 
>      20,000 Project Gutenberg  [+111] Grand Total [Automated]
>         710 Australian eBooks   [+42] [Included in above line]
>         318 Gutenberg Europe     [+0] [Including after July 4]
>         368 PG   PrePrint Site [  +0] [Included in above total]
>         109 Total New Books This Week
>      19,995 Grand Total of all four sites [Four more since then]
>      20,000 [via our automated program]
>               [Please note we have several counting methods,
>               and they often differ by several book that we
>               have to hunt down by hand to reconcile.]


Actually, Michael, even though it's a week later, you still have a 
ways to go to reach 20,000. The latest ebook posted at PG as of 1:00 
PM EDT today is #18708. From that we have to subtract the 
"reserved/pending count." According to last week's newsletter, that 
number is 43. (For those who may not know what the "reserved/pending 
count" is, basically, some PG ebook numbers have been reserved for 
ebooks that aren't in the collection yet. For instance, #1984 is 
reserved for Orwell's "1984" and #2001 is reserved for Clarke's 
"2001.") That leaves a total for the original PG site of 18,665.

The latest ebook posted at PG-Au is #741. Adding the PG and PG-Au 
totals to the numbers from "Gutenberg Europe" and the "Preprint Site" 
we get this:


  18,665 Project Gutenberg
     741 Australian eBooks
      46 Gutenberg Europe
     368 PG PrePrint Site
  ------
  19,820 Grand Total


Now, you may be wondering why I credited Gutenberg Europe with only 46 
instead of 318. The reason is very simple. Here's a link to the list 
of all their books:

http://dp.rastko.net/list_etexts.php?x=g

As you can see, the total is up to 326 now, but if you look at where 
the file links are pointing, you'll see that 271 of the 326 were 
actually posted to the *original* PG site. In other words, they're 
*already* included in the 18,665 total for PG. Another 3 of the ebooks 
were posted to PG-Australia, so they're already part of the 741 total 
for PG-Au. And another 6 are apparently phantom ebooks. Their names 
are on the list, but there are no links to any files. So we have


    326
    271
      3
  -   6
  -----
     46


As I said, you still have a ways to go. Of course, if we were to 
subtract all the files that in no way should be called "books" (e- or 
otherwise), such as about 130 MP3s of old Edison recordings (some only 
a minute long), 30 MP3s of individual folk songs recorded by Roger 
McGuinn, and hundreds of "ebooks" made by splitting up real books into 
many pieces, you'd have much further to go. :)


> Project Gutenberg began operation on July 4, 1971


Really? Are you sure about that? Here's a link to the index of PG's 
etext90 directory:

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext90/

Now scroll down to file when11.txt. You'll see that the "last 
modified" date is "15-Nov-1993," nearly 13 years ago. Now open the 
file, and let's read what you wrote when you were almost 13 years 
younger and your memory should have been much fresher:

"The United States Declaration of Independence was the first Etext 
released by Project Gutenberg, early in 1971."

Since when is the 4th of July "early" in a year, Michael? It's past 
the half-way mark. If July 4, 1971 was the actual date, why didn't you 
write "in mid-1971"? More to the point, why didn't you just write "on 
July 4, 1971" instead of the vague "early in 1971"?

Out of curiosity, I've been examining official ARPANET records 
*written in 1971* by the people who were designing, setting up, and 
monitoring the network. In particular, I've been looking at the ones 
that gave details about the University of Illinois' node in 1971. I'll 
have a lengthy post in a day or two, describing in greater details 
what the records revealed, along with links to copies of them in their 
official archive. For now here's a very brief summary:


FACT: The University of Illinois' node in 1971 was at the Center for 
Advanced Computation, which was part of the Engineering Research Lab, 
not the Materials Research Lab.

FACT: In 1971, the university connected two computers to the ARPANET: 
a PDP-11 and a Burroughs B6500. No Xerox Sigma V.

FACT: The university hadn't even finished setting up its node on July 
4, 1971.

FACT: When the node was finished, it did not include a server. Its 
status on the network was, and I quote, "user only." And that was its 
status through the end of 1971 and at least through July of 1972 as well.


In short, Michael, I think your anniversary story has problems.


Jose Menendez