Coming: The Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon and
Interview with Bruce Sterling on his new book, Holy Fire.

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Our Spanish readers may read about us in the latest issues of
Information World en Espanol, we are very interested in doing
more books in more languages.

You may also want to keep an eye out in about a month for the
article on Project Gutenberg in the January issue of Wired.

***

Once again we have managed to present 32 files we hope will be of interest to the general population. We have two more months scheduled for 32 per month-- then we hope to once again double our production, this time to 64 per month-- for each of the 12 months of 1997.

While this may appear as an incredible amount of work, the truth is that your volunteers at Project Gutenberg have already spend several months doing books at the rate of 64 per month, during the Spring of 1996 just to insure that in 1997 we would be capable of accomplishing our goals.

However, while we were doing this, you may have also heard that most supports for Project Gutenberg from the University of Illinois have been withdrawn and what you may NOT have heard is that this has also been true of the support we have been receiving from Benedictine University [Illinois Benedictine College was their previous name], and also support from Walnut Creed CDROM, who makes and markets the only official Project Gutenberg CDROM has also been less of a support than in previous years.

A separate message requesting your individual, college, or corporate support, is accompanying this Newsletter. . .if you are not interested just delete it.

We currently have just about #700 volunteers, as is usually the case the book number is approximately the same as the number of volunteers we have. A 1997 production on the schedule we have managed to keep doubling every year should be possible if we receive support on two levels:

1. We will need approximately 800 more volunteers if we are going to produce 800 more Etexts during 1997.

2. We will need approximately $2,000 per month to keep afloat as I am unable to continue funding Project Gutenberg without financial assistance.

3. We could also use some public relations people, if we can get any for the next year. We did manage to get one last year, but AOL stole her away.

I thank you all for your continued support of what I feel to be the very best possible investment you can make in the world. Every book we produce goes to millions, perhaps even hundreds of millions, of the 1.2 billion computers out there in the world, and usually there is more than one user per computer.

Your single effort of putting your favorite book into electronic text formats could change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. . .please help.

My HUGE thanks!