The Counting of Project Gutenberg eBooks Several people have questioned how we count Project Gutenberg eBooks, from counting the individual collection to the possible grand totals. Some say that we should have counted more books, such as eBooks #100, #10, and the like, which were The Complete Works of Shakespeare, etc. but we only counted them as a single book because we received single book volumes as their source material. Some say that we should have counted less books, such as eBooks #100, #10 and the like, which were eventually re-released via an individual book per play, etc., due to requests from our readers to be get plays one at a time, or books of the Bible one at at time. My own personal choice was to release larger and larger books as just single volumes and single entries to counteract the policies of eBook providers who did what I called "padding their bibliographies" by the process of listing every single one of AEsop's Fables in their count. However, as we received more and more requests to make Shakespeare or the Bible available play by play and book by book, it became more and more obvious that our readers wanted to be able to just download that one particular play of "Hamlet," or that one book of the Bible. In other instances we have done just the opposite, as with the latest DVD image we have made available for downloading. It contains eBooks from other sources than Project Gutenberg, but until we have these in individual downloadable formats, we are counting the entire DVD, with all ~20,000 eBooks, as a single entry, even though hundreds of eBooks are not listed in the various Project Gutenberg catalogues. As always in cases involving over 100,000 eBook files, there would be duplications, sometimes different paper editions, sometimes different formats of the same editions, and since Project Gutenberg volunteers, a very valued resource, make all these eBooks, we tend to try to give them the kind of recognition they deserve in the catalogues. However just moving an eBook from one format to another doesn't usually count as a new edition unless there is a lot of work involved rather than a simple run through a conversion program, pretty much the same way the copyright law regards "sweat of the brow" copyrights. Some copyright laws count this, some don't. Since our Project Gutenberg volunteers, from all over the world, were under so many different copyright laws, we also decided to let them choose how their eBooks should appear for listing in our catalogues, whether they were copyrighted or not. So some people will say we haven't counted all the books as they were counted it bricks and mortar libraries, and are far too short, and an alternate number of people will say we have counted duplications when we should not have. In each case I encourage them to create a catalogue from ours that in some aspects will be better, in their opinions, and offer to place it online at our Project Gutenberg sites will full credit to them. Obviously there would be some who would want to add more counts to do justice to more "editions" of the same books, some who will want only to include separate paper editions as separate eBook editions, and in other cases those who would count in other ways. The current count as it appears in the Project Gutenberg Newsletters, gives as much credit as possible to the various sub-totals, and those collections donated to the Project Gutenberg Consortia Center are for the purposes of keeping those collections intact. In addition, Project Gutenberg has five major different sites, and at least as many different ways of cataloguing eBooks. http://gutenberg.org ~50 languages The original PG site ~20,000* http://gutenberg.net.au Project Gutenberg of Australia ~700 http://pgdp.net Original Distributed Proofreaders Site ~8,750 http://gutenberg.cc ~100 languages PG Consortia Center ~75,000* http://pge.rastko.net ~65 languages PG of Europe ~325 http://dp.rastko.net Distributed Proofreaders Europe ~325 http://preprints.readingroo.ms/ Project Gutenberg PrePrints ~500* [Numbers expected during Project Gutenberg 35th Anniverary Month] [Australian and European eBooks are now counted up in the 20,000, as are the eBooks in the new Project Gutenberg PrePrints Section] [The totals marked with an * add up to the total number of eBooks available from the multiple collections. The 75,000 is extremely conservative, and my own guess is that the grand total of all the Project Gutenberg sites is now approximating 100,000 eBooks but I realize that some cataloguers would want to deduct duplications-- while other cataloguers would want to add more entries as they do for the same title in large print editions, audio books, etc.]