About the books

NotQuiteTher has about 15k titles in its database, comprising about a quarter of the Project Gutenberg library. The abridgment is to save memory. Titles were included (and excluded) at random, save that the 79 most-popular titles were all included, and more popular books were generally more likely to be included than less popular books. A small percentage of titles were excluded for text-format/UTF-8 incompatibility. No consideration was made for content.

The books that a user ultimately sees are picked at random from one of six categories. These are the six categories, along with the number of books in each:

• +5k downloads/month (79 books)
• +1k downloads/month (426 books)
• +100 downloads/month (5050 books)
• -5 downloads/month (7294 books)
• uploaded in 2021 (2799 books)
• uploaded in 2022 (441 books)

The user can switch from one category to another. The default category is +5k dls/mo. Note that download numbers aren't current. See Project Gutenberg for up-to-date stats. NotQuiteTher categories are based on data from a 30-day period ending in March 2022. These were the top 10 titles:

1. "Frankenstein" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
2. "Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen
3. "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll
4. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle
5. "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services
6. "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald
7. "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
9. "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville
10. "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens

Top titles are mostly from the English-language literary canon. Project Gutenberg focuses on older books whose U.S. copyrights have expired, which generally happens after 95 years. Other public-domain works are also collected. New books are added every day. In early July 2022, for example, books by Bear Bryant and George Kennan and a speech by Teddy Roosevelt were posted, among others. "The Great Gatsby" was added in 2021. Project Gutenberg has 2 of Kafka's works in English (many more in German). Still years to wait for "Catcher in the Rye."

NotQuiteTher is grateful for the Project Gutenberg library. No affiliation between Project Gutenberg and NotQuiteTher.