Project Gutenberg may have found the most useless conceivable yardstick by which to measure their success. They’re tracking the amount that each reader would have to value each e-text in order for them to have given away one trillion dollars of value, assuming that there are a hundred million downloads for each text they publish.

    With 3225 eTexts online it now takes an average of 100,000,000     readers gaining a nominal value of $3.10 from each book, for      Project Gutenberg to have given away $1,000,000,000,000 [One      Trillion Dollars] in books.      100,000,000 readers is one to two percent of the world's      population!

Yes, yes it is. It’s also pretty close to the total number of people in the world with Internet access, not all of whom know English or want to read the complete Oliver Wendell Holmes. If only they were fixated on giving away a smaller amount of fictional money, they could bring the projected readership numbers down a bit… call it 100,000 readers per book and a total of one billion dollars (still impressive, I think), with no effect on the notional price. For a non-profit organization, though, it makes more sense to fantasize about creating untold riches for mendicant Internet users in Nova Scotia.

So, the yardstick, finally. The crowning glory of Project Gutenberg’s numerical fiddling is to brag not about the low prices, but about how much those prices are dropping. “Can you imagine each one of thousands of books reduced by 90 cents??? In a period of only 11 calendar months???” In this business model, prices always go down when you increase your catalog, because you assume that all your customers ‘buy’ everything you carry, and in fact that they have a fixed amount of money with which to do so. By the way, as you may have noticed, that fixed amount of money which Project Gutenberg imagines a hundred million readers each spending on books is $10,000. That kind of imaginary money doesn’t just grow on trees.