Pgweekly 2004 03 03 Part 1

The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter March 3, 2004 eBooks Readable By Both Humans and Computers For Since 1971 Part 1 In this week's Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter: 1) 2) 3) 4)

Editorial News and Comment Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features Mailing list information

Editorial Hello, Well, following a very exciting Thursday watching the Posted list to find out just how many books and languages would arrive from DP-EU we have the answer below, along with a small summary of one of the many events Michael Hart attended whilst in Europe and the letter 'U' makes an appearance. All resemblance to Sesame Street ends at this point! We also have some reader correspondence on the Australian copyright issue. We would be interested to hear more. Happy reading, Alice Send feedback and suggestions to the newsletter editor at: news at pglaf.org Founding editor: Michael Hart hart at pobox.com Newsletter editor: Alice Wood news at pglaf.org Project Gutenberg CEO: Greg Newby gbnewby at pglaf.org Project Gutenberg website: http://gutenberg.net Project Gutenberg Newsletter website: http://gutenberg.net/newsletter Radio Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.net/audio Hosted by iBiblio, The Public's Library: http://ibiblio.org Distributed Proofreaders: http://www.pgdp.net Distributed Proofreaders Europe: http://dp.rastko.net Newsletter and mailing list subscriptions: http://gutenberg.net/subs.shtml

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2) News and Comment Project Gutenberg at the European Parliament Below we present a summary written by Arnaud Herve. A meeting was held yesterday in H1, about the Project Gutenberg, which is basically the main free library on Internet. Project Gutenberg concerns litterature, philosophy, sciences works, etc. , not exactly software, and in that sense it is more akin to the Creative Commons license topic than to alternative exploitation systems for example. The meeting was chaired by MP Johanna Boogerd, and the main speaker was Michael Hart, American founder of project Gutenberg. I was warmly welcomed without even having to mention my political group. Michael Hart made me reflect on how much this endeavour was ideologically related to the first days of Internet, at that precise dawn when the network was supposed to serve knowledge as its main purpose, and was seen as a huge and better library. I think we should be a bit conservative/nostalgic in that extent. Michael Hart made a convincing speech about how the public domain for written works is threatened by corporate interests, who would like to extend copyrights to eternity. He and some European counterparts mentioned another project, that of translating a huge amount of books. I am much more doubtful about that, I have been a professional translator and I can tell the software solutions that were mentioned won't work. I also think they are losing valuable time here, and should concentrate first on getting all the public domain works published in their original language. To put it short, I propose the Gutenberg team should be contacted in the scope of our present efforts about software patents and that kind of stuff, and that the Johanna Boogerd team in the EP should be registered as a honourable contact by the Green group.

Arnaud HERVE Mr Herve is an assistant at the European Parliament. Many thanks to the people on the PG-EU mailing list for keeping us informed of events. Readers Correspondence >From Andy Templeton Hello, Like most who read that the US - Australia free trade deal effectively 'steals' all of the PG Australia books from the public, starting in January, I was disgusted! But I also remember reading a notice in the weekly newsletter that PG Canada was soon going to start up. I believe that Canada still follows the 50+ rule for copyright. That being the case, wouldn't it be possible to transfer all the PG Aus. books to the new PG Can. site once it is up and running? If so, I would like to recommend that the PG Aus. books be somehow marked to indicate that these books were 'stolen' from the Australian public by their government at the behest of the US government. These books should forever carry a notice of shame for the Australian government for this crime so that it is never forgotten. It is very difficult to explain to the general public why the 'copyright extension ad nauseum' practice of governments should greatly concern them. It seems like such a hypothetical argument when you can't actually point to any specific book that has been lost as a result of such legislation. But here we have a very specific case of well over 300 books that will be taken away from the public -- retroactively no less! How can our governments shake their collective fingers at those who illegally copy mp3 files while they themselves steal books from the public? What nerve! Best regards, Andy Templeton If you have any comments to make about this subject or Andy's idea please feel free to forward them to the newsletter at news AT pglaf.org Posting by Distributed Proofreaders The following books were posted this week to mark the end of their testing period. Kameno doba. Jovan Zujovic (Serbian) Sekund vecnosti. Dragutin J. Ilic (Serbian) Tymmmmmmiehen vaimo. by Minna Canth (Finnish) Lehtori Hellmanin vaimo. by Minna Canth (Finnish) Jan van Huysums Blomsterstykke. by Henrik Wergeland (Norwegian)

Juhana Herttuan ja Catharina Jagellonican lauluja. by Eino Leino (Finnish) Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine. Edward Harrison Barker (English) O cancioneiro portuguez da Vaticana e suas relacoes com outros cancioneiros dos seculos XIII e XIV. Teophilo Braga (Portuguese) Les gens de bureau. Emile Gaboriau (French) La belle Gabrielle, vol. 1 Auguste Maquet (French) Travels through the empire of Morocco. John Buffa (English) El la Biblio (Elektitaj Capitroj de la Psalmaro, Sentencoj de Salomono kaj Predikanto. L. L. Zamenhof (Esperanto) Diario de la navegacinnn empredida en 1781. Basilio Villarino (Spanish) La Campagna del 1796. Eugenio Barbarich (Italian) Vain fortune. George Moore (English) The Lake. Goerge Moore (English) Catalanisches Streitgedicht zwischen En Buc und seinem Pferd Statistical roundup 11711 138 138 100.50 492 804 14.11 4658 69 249 491 $ 0.85 $ 1.38 7234 8 57 2 2384 13.17 2093 11.50 5841

Total 03/03/04 Week #8 (57/302) New This Week New Last Week Weekly Average New This Month New This Year Average per day this year Projected Total for this year New this week last year (02/26/03) New this month last year (Feb) New this year last year (2003) Trillion dollar cost/book Trillion dollar cost/book last year Etexts This Week Last Year Production Weeks this Year 44 to go. Production Days this Year 302 to go. Production Months this Year eBooks in last 6 months (09/03/03 - 03/03/04) 26 weeks (35 - 8) Daily Average for the last 6 months (181 production days) eBooks in the prior 6 months (02/26/03 - 08/27/03) 26 weeks (8 - 34) Daily Average for the prior 6 months (182 production days) eBooks in the last 18 months (09/04/02 - 03/03/04) 78 weeks (35 - 8)

We passed 1/6 of the way from 10k to 20k this week! -----------------

Also this week, entering a new promotional drive, our very own Brett Fishburne has created a Project Gutenberg group on the SETIhome website (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu). Anyone interesting in using their screensaver to search for aliens can go to the website, join the effort and then JOIN THE GROUP! Thanks to Brett for this.

Radio Gutenberg Update www.gutenberg.net/audio channel 1 - Sherlock Holmes "The Sign of Four" channel 2 - Robert Sheckley's "Bad Medicine" Both are high quality live readings from the collection. Testing of Radio Gutenberg audio books on demand is currently taking place.

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3) Notes and Queries, Reviews and Features A to Z - U A possibly overlooked letter of the alphabet, 'U' presents us with some of the most informative and popular choices from the Project Gutenberg catalogue under the authorship of 'United States'. Here you can find titles such as 'Copyright Law Of The United States Of America And Related Laws Contained In Title 17 Of The United States Code, Circular 92', which is probably mandatory reading for everyone here. But there are lighter items such as the 'LandSat Picture Of Washington, DC' and a MPEG Animation 'Motion Picture Of Rotating Earth', one of our most popular, and probably larger items, is the 'Motion Pictures Of The Apollo 11 Lunar Landing'. This is a really facinating section of the catalogue so I will save some of the good bits for further investigation, although in passing I will say if you want etext 1 this is the place to find it. You will also find another of those strange authors, 'Unknown'. This presents us with a real cross-section of books such as '365 Foreign Dishes' which has been featured in the newsletter cookery club previously. Many religious texts: New Testament: The Common Edition; Dhammapada, a collection of verses; being one of the canonical books of the Buddhists; The Qur'an and Sri Vishnu Sahasranaamam Sanskrit. Also housed here are a pile of maths texts: The First 100,000 Prime Numbers; The Golden Mean Or Ratio[(1+sqrt(5))/2]; A List Of Factorial Math Constants; The Number "e"; Second Story of Meno, The [A Socratic Dialogue Proving the Square Root of 2 Irrational]; The Square Root of 4 To A Million Places - for which I still await part 2. Historic tomes are also here: 'Ancient Poems, Ballads, And Songs Of The Peasantry Of England', The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Codex Junius 11 amongst others. For a little musical entertainment you could do worse than Moonlight Sonata, by Bellini Ensemble Unique. Now to book titles and it is impossible to get past 'U' without mentioning Uarda : A Romance Of Ancient Egypt by Georg Ebers, a ten volume epic described in the introduction thus "A narrative of Herodotus combined with the Epos of Pentaur, of which so many copies have been handed down to us, forms the foundation of the story. The treason of the Regent related by the Father of history is referable perhaps to the reign of the third and not of the second Rameses. But it is by no means certain that the Halicarnassian writer was in this case misinformed; and in this fiction no history will be inculcated, only as a background shall I offer a sketch of the time of Sesostris, from a picturesque point of view, but with the nearest possible approach to truth. It is true that to this end nothing has been neglected that could be learnt from the monuments or the papyri; still the book is only a romance, a poetic fiction, in which I wish all the facts derived from history and all the costume drawn from the monuments to be regarded as incidental, and the emotions of the actors in the story as what I attach importance to." Also here, amongst classics such as 'Ulysses' and Uncle Tom's Cabin, we find intriguing titles such as 'Umboo, the Elephant', 'Umbrellas

And Their History', and 'Uncle Remus, his songs and his sayings'. Finally, a well known author well worth a look 'Utopia Of Usurers And Other Essays' by G. K. Chesterton. Compared to some letters 'U' has a smaller niche in the catalogue, but it's well worth the time to investigate and find some real treasures in here. Having missed the obvious last week in V is for volunteers, I'll take this small opportunity to exercise artistic licence and finish with U is for 'You' and all that 'You' do.

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