(Fwd) $100,000,000.00 In Your Spare Time

[RONALD SCHMIDT <SCHMIDT _at__ hbz-nrw.de>]

Die folgende Information ist vielleicht in diesem Kreis von 
Interesse?

------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
Date:          Tue, 20 Sep 94 08:26:17 PDT
Reply-to:      <HART _at__ vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>
From:          "Michael S. Hart" <HART _at__ vmd.cso.uiuc.edu>
To:            visions%library _at__ library.sdsu.edu
Subject:       $100,000,000.00 In Your Spare Time

[The following message is two pages in length.  Please,
post this to your listserv promoting free access to the
Information Superhighway.  We send this kind of message
only once every six months.]


MAKE $100,000,000.00 A WEEK AT HOME IN YOUR SPARE TIME!

Sound impossible??  We do the impossible twice a week!!
And with your help, we can do twice as much in 1995!!!!

PROJECT GUTENBERG IS THE OLDEST INFORMATION PROVIDER ON
THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY, HELP US KEEP IT RUNNING!!


Project Gutenberg has been doing this very same thing a
little at a time since 1971 and currently distributes 2
hundred million dollars a week in electronic texts. . .
Based on 10% market shares of the predicted one billion
computer users by the end of 2001.  [Nominal evaluation
of each book is only $1]


At the time of this issue [Sep 1994] there are a third-
of-a-billion computers in the world [~333,333,333], and
about 1% of them are on the Internet [3.3 million] with
an average of approximately 10 users per computer for a
total of about 33 million people on the Internet.  This
is one of the major reasons Project Gutenberg sends out
Etext in Plain Vanilla ASCII. . .because 99% of world's
computers are NOT on the Internet, and 95% of these are
not set up to read any files that are not in PVASCII or
their favorite word processor or presentation formats--
our Etexts have to be readable by all the computers out
there, not just those with Mosaic, SGML, HTML [Standard
Generalized Markup and HyperText Markup Languages], and
PostScript, LaTex, or any of the others.  Not even best
selling programs can boast of much more than 10 million
copies sold of ALL versions of their software, so it is
quite limiting to present a book in one of these format
types. . .it just makes the Information Rich richer and
the Information Poor poorer, by comparison.  If program
"WP" has sold 11 million copies, and there are at least
330 million computers in the world, then obviously only
1/30 of those computer could read a file prepared in an
exclusive format such as that.  So far, no program, not
even Mosaic, HTML, SGML, etc. has a market share of 10%
of the world's computers.  Hence, to distribute in only
those kinds of formats is to eliminate 90% of computers
from your audience, a self-defeating proposition if you
are intending to reach the whole world, a proposition a
little different if you are intentionally trying to NOT
reach most people, but hide your light under a bushel--
where only the elite few can see it.

Please let me strongly encourage you to make your files
available in Plain Vanilla ASCII and not just to a tiny
portion of the computer users who use Mosaic and WWW!!!
Let me encourage you to encourage them to also post the
files in a manner in which 95% of the users aren't kept
from having easy access.

It would be nice if these files were aimed at a largest
possible audience.


We are distributing 8 Etexts per month in 1994; a world
gets $800,000,000.00 worth of books and you get amazing
amounts of satisfaction. . .but no cash. . .in just the
few remaining months of 1994 we have to gear up to make
16 Etext per month available to as many as possible.



YOU CAN HELP

In one week almost anyone could type in a book the size
of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, or many others, with
nothing but a PC and a few hours of spare time each day
as Alice is a short book, and 10 pages a day would give
you two days off during your week.

If you want to do a Shakespeare play they are about the
same size as Alice in Wonderland.  Take a month to do a
longer favorite that can then be enjoyed free of charge
by everyone.

Details available on request, Project Gutenberg has all
volunteers working on these etexts:  and dollar amounts
are used only for evaluation's sake.  You won't get any
money, but we would put your name on any book you do.

BECOME ONE OF THE "BOOK PEOPLE" AS IN "FAHRENHEIT 451,"
Ray Bradbury's classic story.  Support the preservation
of your favorite books, and the distribution of them to
an UNLIMITED AUDIENCE.

We need your assistance in the greatest adventure of an
entire millennium, the first time a trillion dollars of
any commodity will be given away, absolutely free:  and
this commodity will help literacy, education, democracy
and all they stand for.

In return, we can provide you with remote scanning from
several of our volunteers if you can't enter books from
scratch, and we can also provide editing, spelling, and
layout assistance, to insure your books look as good as
possible on the screen.  No other Etext operation has a
fraction of this attention to details that make Project
Gutenberg Etexts the easiest for both computer & people
to read easily.

If text entry isn't your thing, you can proofread books
already in Etext format, or help us with programming or
a variety of other things it takes to get an Etext from
LIMITED paper editions to UNLIMITED Etext editions.

One of the biggest of these tasks is finding books that
are free of copyright restrictions.  If you know lawyer
types who would be willing to work on copyright, please
put us in touch with them, as this is one of the things
that slows us down the most.

*Please reply to dircompg _at__ ux1.cso.uiuc.edu for details*

=====================================================
|       The trend of library policy is clearly toward
|       the ideal of making all information available
|       without delay to all people.
|
|The Software Toolworks Illustrated Encyclopedia (TM)
|(c) 1990, 1991 Grolier Electronic Publishing, Inc.

=============================================
Thank you for your consideration,

Michael S. Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U of Illinois--UIUC
hart  _at__ uiucvmd.bitnet or hart _at__ vmd.cso.uiuc.edu


[Since the last time a similar note was posted, 2 whole
new generations have joined the Nets, which means three
times as many people are on the Nets as were September,
1993.  My apologies to the one out of three who read it
last year, and to those who might have received it from
a different source already this year.]


Dr. Ronald Schmidt               Tel. +49 221 40075-32
                                 EMail Schmidt _at__ HBZ-NRW.De
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