BPN 1580 Book closed for e-book pioneer

Michael Hart has died on Tuesday September 6, 2011. He was 64 years of age.

Michael Hart was a student at the university of Illinois (USA). When he had a job at the computer department of the university in 1971, he was awarded computer hours for his efforts; these he could spent for his ow projects. According to the myth, he went to his room, set up his thinking cap and thought about a project to spend the computer hours. He did not wear his cap for long before finding his destination: e-books.

In the time frame computer departments worked with main-frames, computers as large as a room. Linked keyboards were used to type computer commands, which were represented on dumb terminals. Content was recorded on punch cards or punched taped. In this way Michael Hart started to key his first book. One restriction he put on the selection of the books: they should be in the public domain or copyright free.

For an American the choice was not difficult. He selected the Gettysburg Address, a speech by president Abraham Lincoln, calling on the states to form a united nation instead of a nation fragmented by state interests. According to the computer conventions of that time the text of the document was typed in capitals. (Coincidence: in the same year telecom engineer Roy Tomlinson forwarded the first e-mail with the @-sign. The content of this e-mail also was the Gettysburg Address and it also was typed in capitals. It has never been checked whether Roy used the copy of Michael.).

In 1987 Michael had copied more than 300 books like a monk, word by word. But then the internationalisation of the project Gutenberg took over and e-books augmented in numbers, but also in languages.  By 2011 more than 360.000 e-books in the public domain or copyright free are available for free.

BPN 1580

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BPN 1356 2 mln+ eBooks for summer for free

You do not know what to do with your summer time? Start reading eBooks. From July 4 till August 4 more than 2 million eBooks are available online and for free through World eBook Fair program! This year the fourth edition will be held of the World eBook Fair.

By giving access to a number of eBook collections people linked to internet can download more than 2 million eBooks for free. The collections available come from the Project Gutenberg, the World Public Library, Digital Pulp Publishing, the Internet Archive and another 100 eBook libraries. Besides public domain books, also modern and commercial eBooks are on offer for free. On an office day more than 1.000 eBooks are produced for eBook Libraries.

100,000 eBooks in het Project Gutenberg
500,000 eBooks on de World Public Library
1,385,000 eBooks in het Internet Archive
250,000 eBooks van eBooks About Everything
17,000 eBooks IMSLP's Music eLibrary
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2,252,000 total

eReader or mobile phone reader
MichaeL Hart, the pioneer of eBooks since 1970, makes an interesting comment on the World Book Fair site. He observes that : “In addition to presenting twice as many books, we are also trying to reach 10x as much of the population by including a number of programs a person can use to read these eBooks on LIKE phones, MP3 players, PDA's, iPods, etc. Think about it this way: There aren't even a million Kindles or Sony's, but there are now ~4 1/2 billion cell phones-- which means the possibility of reading readers via cell phones is larger than any other media. The cell phone is the wave of the future, not, I repeat, NOT the Kindle or Sony approach, for they are only targeting millions, and I should like very much to reach billions of people.

More eBooks In More Languages
The eBooks on offer are mainly in the English language, but other languages are also served like the Top Six list such as: English, Chinese, German, French, Spanish and Urdu. Worldwide there are 250 languages with over a million speakers. With the collection of 2.5 million eBooks the World eBook Fair is trying to reach readers in over half of these. I checked the number of books available from the World eBook Fair in my mother tongue Dutch; the search on the site delivered 42 eBooks in the Dutch language. When I made a search with the local eBook distributor eBook.nl, I found 790 eBooks in the Dutch language listed.

Blog Posting Number: 1356

Tags: eBook, ereader

BNP 1353 A changing e-Book world (2)

It is not only e-readers, where you see changes. Also in the distribution of e-books things are moving. Google will soon offer a program for publishers to offer the digital versions of their books. But also the e-book veteran, the Project Gutenberg, will increase its offer.

Google has a long standing tradition with publishers. In 2004 it launched its book search service, in which copyrighted books could be read online. Google was heavily attacked by authors and publishers. Yet it made 1,5 copyright free books available in the public domain through its site. Google is launching a download service in which publishers can set their own price on the book; this in contrast to Amazon, which offers books in Mobipocket format and optionally on its own e-reader Kindle.
Details about the service still have to be published. No word on the format, except for the guarantee that a book must be readable on an e-reader, on PC or a mobile phone. It is rumoured that the e-books will be transformed to HTML. There is also no word on whether Google will have its own e-reader produced (with android software).
Also the veteran of the electronic book, the Project Gutenberg, is shifting gear and making eyes to mobile phones. 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 mobile phone access the project management is now setting its goal at 15 percent of the world population or 1 billion. Given that there are approximately 4.5 billion mobile phones now in service around the world that means that the project with its offer could reach just over one-fifth of all mobile phone users to accomplish this goal.

Given the estimated 4.5 billion mobile phones for which eBooks could be made, 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, Project Gutenberg could reach more readers than Kindle and Sony combined. This attempt to reach these mobile phones has to include books in many more languages than English.

This means that Project Gutenberg will have to be more multi-lingual, if Project Gutenberg is to reach anyone beyond the number of people comfortable enough with English to read the eBooks on the mobile phones. There are already 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 offer a library in these languages.

Project Gutenberg especially aims at the smart phones and iPhones in particular. With iTunes as a shop it has a software and content distributor in one. Various iPhone applications for eBooks have appeared in the iTunes appl shop such as Plucker, the defacto mobile eBook reader format for Project Gutenberg, houses over 20,000 free eBooks. Another eText reader for the iPhone is Eucalyptus.

Blog Posting Number: 1353

tags: e-books, content