Project Gutenberg (1971-2009)
Date: 2010-03-13T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Project Gutenberg

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Project Gutenberg (1971-2009)

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Title: Project Gutenberg (1971-2009)

Author: Marie Lebert

Release date: March 13, 2010 [eBook #31632]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROJECT GUTENBERG (1971-2009) ***

Produced by Al Haines

PROJECT GUTENBERG (1971-2009)

MARIE LEBERT

NEF, University of Toronto, 2009

Copyright © 2009 Marie Lebert

OVERVIEW

The first ebook was available in July 1971, as eText #1 of Project Gutenberg, a visionary project launched by Michael Hart to create electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21st century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital library at no cost. Its critics long considered Project Gutenberg as impossible on a large scale. But Michael went on keying book after book during many years, with the occasional help of some volunteers. Project Gutenberg got its first boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and its second boost with the creation of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help digitizing books from public domain. In 2008, Project Gutenberg had a production rate of 340 new books each month, 40 mirror sites worldwide, and books being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. There have been Project Gutenberg websites in the U.S, in Australia, in Europe and in Canada, with more websites to come in other countries.

FROM 1971 UNTIL NOW

# Beginning

As recalled by Michael Hart in January 2009 in an email interview: "On July 4, 1971, while still a freshman at the University of Illinois (UI), I decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the UI Materials Research Lab, rather than walk miles home in the summer heat, only to come back hours later to start another day of school. I stopped on the way to do a little grocery shopping to get through the night, and day, and along with the groceries they put in the faux parchment copy of 'The U.S. Declaration of Independence' that became quite literally the cornerstone of Project Gutenberg. That night, as it turned out, I received my first computer account—I had been hitchhiking on my brother's best friend's name, who ran the computer on the night shift. When I got a first look at the huge amount of computer money I was given, I decided I had to do something extremely worthwhile to do justice to what I had been given. This was such a serious, and intense thought process for a college freshman, my first thought was that I had better eat something to get up enough energy to think of something worthwhile enough to repay the cost of all that computer time. As I emptied out groceries, the faux parchment Declaration of Independence fell out, and the light literally went on over my head like in the cartoons and comics… I knew what the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be… 'The Information Age.' The rest, as they say, is history."

Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in our libraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books (ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII—called Plain Vanilla ASCII—for them to be read on any hardware and software. A book would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages, with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the print version. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searches is much harder in various markup formats.)

Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put at everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works from public domain as possible for free. Years later, in August 1998, Michael wrote in an email interview: "We consider etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to etexts, especially in schools."

After keying in "The U.S. Declaration of Independence" in 1971, Michael typed in "The U.S. Bill of Rights" in 1972. A volunteer typed in "The United States Constitution" in 1973.

# Persevering

From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the standards of the time—there was no hard disk yet—, making it possible to store larger files. Volunteers began typing in the Bible, with one individual book at a time, and a file for each book. Michael typed in the collected works of Shakespeare, with the help of volunteers, one play at a time, and a file for each play. This edition of Shakespeare was never released, unfortunately, due to changes in copyright law. Shakespeare's works belong to public domain, but comments and notes may be copyrighted, depending on the publication date. Other editions of Shakespeare from public domain were posted a few years later.

# 10 to 1,000 ebooks

In August 1989, Project Gutenberg completed its 10th ebook, "The King James Bible" (1769), both testaments, and 5 M for all files.

In 1990, there were 250,000 internet users. The web was in its infancy.
The standard was 360 K disks.

In January 1991, Michael typed in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), by Lewis Carroll. In July 1991, he typed in "Peter Pan" (1904), by James M. Barrie. These two classics of childhood literature each fit on one disk.

The first browser, Mosaic, was released in November 1993. It became easier to circulate etexts and recruit volunteers. From 1991 to 1996, the number of ebooks doubled every year, with one book per month in 1991, two books per month in 1992, four books per month in 1993, and eight books per month in 1994.

In January 1994, Project Gutenberg released "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as eBook #100. Shakespeare wrote most works between 1590 and 1613.

The steady growth went on, with an average of 8 books per month in 1994, 16 books per month in 1995, and 32 books per month in 1996.

In June 1997, Project Gutenberg released "The Merry Adventures of Robin
Hood" (1883), by Howard Pyle.

Project Gutenberg had 1,000 ebooks in August 1997. eBook #1000 was "La Divina Commedia" de Dante Alighieri (1321), in Italian, its original language.

As there were more and more ebooks, they got classified in three main sections: (a) "Light Literature", such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", "Through the Looking-Glass", "Peter Pan" and "Aesop's Fables"; (b) "Heavy Literature", such as the Bible, Shakespeare's works, "Moby Dick" and "Paradise Lost"; (c) "Reference Literature", such as "Roget's Thesaurus", almanacs, and a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries. (This classification in three sections was replaced later with a more detailed one.)

"Light Literature" was the main section in number of ebooks. As explained on the website in 1998, "The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etext of 'Peter Pan' when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read 'Alice in Wonderland' after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext releases (from 'Moby Dick' in 'The Wrath of Khan'; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to 'Through the Looking-Glass' in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries. We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy-to-find etext format."

Project Gutenberg has selected books intended for the general public. It has not focused on providing authoritative editions. "We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level."

In August 1998, Michael Hart wrote in an email interview: "My own personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached in October 2003] and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in U.S. terminology."

# 1,000 to 10,000 ebooks

From 1998 to 2000, the "output" was an average of 36 books per month.

Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. eBook #2000 was "Don Quijote" (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. eBook #3000 was "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel Proust, in French, its original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. eBook #4000 was "The French Immortals Series" (1905), in English. This book is an anthology of short fictions by authors from the French Academy (Académie française): Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot, Charles de Bernard, Alphonse Daudet, and others.

Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 ebooks in April 2002. eBook #5000 was "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" (early 16th century). Since its release, this ebook has stayed in the Top 100 of downloaded books.

In 1988, Michael Hart chose to type in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" because they would each fit on one 360 K disk, the standard of the time. In 2002, the standard disk was 1.44 M and could be compressed as a ZIP file.

A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than long enough for the average book. The ASCII version of a 300-page novel is 1 M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be downloaded as is or in ZIP format. An average of 50 hours is necessary to get an ebook selected, copyright-cleared, scanned, proofread, formatted and assembled.

A few numbers are reserved for "special" books. For example, eBook #1984 is reserved for George Orwell's classic, published in 1949, and still a long way from falling into public domain.

The "output" in 2001 and 2002 was an average of 100 books per month.

In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg's ebooks represented 25% of all the public domain works freely available on the web, an impressive result if we think of all the pages that were scanned and proofread by thousands of volunteers in several countries.

1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000 ebooks in December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000 ebooks in April 2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. eBook #10000 was The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 and known as the first English constitutional text.

From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collections doubled, going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly average of 300 new ebooks. The fast growth was the work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of books between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the books available on the site and proofread a given page. It is recommended they do a page per day if possible.

Books were also copied on CDs and DVDs. As blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing, Project Gutenberg began burning and sending a free CD or DVD to anyone asking for it. People were encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of Gutenberg" CD contained 600 ebooks. The first Project Gutenberg DVD was released in December 2003 to celebrate the first 10,000 ebooks, with the burning of most titles (9,400 ebooks).

# 10,000 to 20,000 ebooks

In December 2003, there were 11,000 ebooks, which represented 110 G, in several formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF and others, as is or zipped). In May 2004, there were 12,600 ebooks, with represented 135 G. With more than 300 new books added per month (338 books per month in 2004), the number of gigabytes was expected to double every year.

The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was affiliated with Project Gutenberg in 2003, and became an official Project Gutenberg site. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering collections of existing ebooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg focusing on the production of ebooks.

In January 2005, Project Gutenberg had 15,000 ebooks. eBook #15000 was "The Life of Reason" (1906), by George Santayana.

What about languages? There were ebooks in 25 languages in February 2004, and in 42 languages in July 2005, including Sanskrit and the Mayan languages. The seven top languages—with more than 50 books—were English (with 14,548 ebooks on July 27, 2005), French (577 ebooks), German (349 ebooks), Finnish (218 ebooks), Dutch (130 ebooks), Spanish (103 ebooks), and Chinese (69 ebooks). There were ebooks in 50 languages in December 2006. The ten top languages were English (with 17,377 books on December 16, 2006), French (966 books), German (412 books), Finnish (344 books), Dutch (244 books), Spanish (140 books), Italian (102 books), Chinese (69 books), Portuguese (68 books), and Tagalog (51 books).

Project Gutenberg was also spreading worldwide.

In July 2005, Project Gutenberg Australia (launched in 2001) had 500 ebooks.

In Europe, Project Rastko, based in Belgrade, Serbia, launched Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) in December 2003 and Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) in January 2004. Project Gutenberg Europe released its first 100 ebooks in June 2005. These books were in several languages, as a reflection of European linguistic diversity, with 100 languages planned for the long term.

New teams were working on launching Project Gutenberg Canada, Project
Gutenberg Portugal and Project Gutenberg Philippines.

In December 2006, Project Gutenberg had 20,000 ebooks. eBook #20000 was the audiobook of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869), by Jules Verne, in its English version.

If 32 years were necessary to digitize the first 10,000 books—between July 1971 and October 2003—, 3 years and 2 months were necessary to digitize the following 10,000 books—between October 2003 and December 2006.

The section Project Gutenberg PrePrints was set up in January 2006 to collect items submitted to Project Gutenberg which were interesting enough to be available online, but not ready yet to be added to the main Project Gutenberg collections, the reason being missing data, low-quality files, formats which were not handy, etc. This new section had 379 files in December 2006.

# Tens of thousands of ebooks

In December 2006, Mike Cook launched Project Gutenberg News as "the news portal for gutenberg.org", a website to complement the existing weekly and monthly newsletters. It has showed for example the weekly, monthly and yearly production stats since 2001.

The weekly production was 24 ebooks in 2001, 47 ebooks in 2002, 79 ebooks in 2003, 78 ebooks in 2004, 58 ebooks in 2005, 80 ebooks in 2006, and 78 ebooks in 2007.

The monthly production was 104 ebooks in 2001, 203 ebooks in 2002, 348 ebooks in 2003, 338 ebooks in 2004, 252 ebooks in 2005, 345 ebooks in 2006, and 338 books in 2007.

The yearly production was 1,244 ebooks in 2001, 2,432 ebooks in 2002, 4,176 ebooks in 2003, 4,058 ebooks in 2004, 3,019 ebooks in 2005, 4,141 ebooks in 2006, and 4,049 ebooks in 2007.

Project Gutenberg Australia reached 1,500 ebooks in April 2007.

Project Gutenberg Canada (PGC) was founded on July 1st, 2007, on Canada
Day, by Michael Shepard and David Jones. Distributed Proofreaders
Canada (DPC) started production in December 2007. There were 100 ebooks
in March 2008, in English, French and Italian.

Project Gutenberg sent out 15 million ebooks via CDs and DVDs by snail mail in 2007. A new DVD released in July 2006 included 17,000 ebooks. CD and DVD files have also been generated as ISO files (since 2005) to be downloaded for burning CDs or DVDs on a CD or DVD writer.

Project Gutenberg reached 25,000 books in April 2008. eBook #25000 was "English Book Collectors" (1902), by William Younger Fletcher.

If Gutenberg allowed everyone to get print books at little cost, Project Gutenberg has allowed everyone to get a library of electronic books at no cost on a cheap device like a USB drive.

In February 2009, there were 32,500 Project Gutenberg (PG) ebooks, including the ebooks at PG Australia (1,750 ebooks), PG Europe (600 ebooks) and PG Canada (250 ebooks), with more Project Gutenberg websites to come in other countries. Ten new ebooks have been added per day.

As explained by Michael Hart: "In addition, there is 'PrePrints' where we put anything we don't know for sure will qualify as a PG ebook. This gets instant exposure, and was created to help keep things flowing. There are 2,020 ebooks available at PrePrints. The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) has over 75,000 ebooks rendered as PDF files. The difference? These files were prepared by other eLibraries, not Project Gutenberg, and are using our worldwide distribution network to be seen. Thus, counting these 75,000+ along with our over 32,500 other ebooks, has generated a grand total of over 100,000 ebooks."

SHRINKING OF PUBLIC DOMAIN

Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg in July 1971 to make electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them for free. In 2009, Project Gutenberg has had tens of thousands of downloads every day. As recalled by Michael in January 2009, "I knew [in July 1971] that the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be… 'The Information Age.' That was also the day I said we would be able to carry quite literally the entire Library of Congress in one hand and the system would certainly make it illegal… too much power to leave in the hands of the masses."

As defined by Project Gutenberg, "public domain is the set of cultural works that are free of copyright, and belong to everyone equally", i.e. for books, the ones that can be digitized and released on the internet for free. But the task of Project Gutenberg hasn't be made any easier by the increasing restrictions to public domain. In former times, 50% of works belonged to public domain, and could be freely used by everybody. A much tougher legislation was set in place over the centuries, step by step, especially during the 20th century, despite our so-called "information society". In 2100, 99% of works might be governed by copyright, with a meager 1% for public domain.

In the "Copyright HowTo" section of its website, Project Gutenberg explains how to confirm the public domain status of books according to U.S. copyright laws. Here is a summary: (a) Works published before 1923 entered the public domain no later than 75 years from the copyright date: all these works belong to public domain; (b) Works published between 1923 and 1977 retain copyright for 95 years: no such works will enter the public domain until 2019; (c) Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the author if the author is a natural person: nothing will enter the public domain until 2049; (d) Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation if the author is a corporate one: nothing will enter the public domain until 2074.

Each copyright legislation is more restrictive than the previous one. A major blow for digital libraries was the amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act signed on October 27, 1998. As explained by Michael Hart in July 1999: "Nothing will expire for another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. Now it is 95 years. And it was 28 years (+ a possible 28-year extension, only on request) before that, and 14 years (+ a possible 14-year extension) before that. So, as you can see, this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter of continuing policy."

John Mark Ockerbloom, founder of The Online Books Page in 1993, got also deeply concerned by the 1998 amendment. He wrote in August 1999: "I think it is important for people on the web to understand that copyright is a social contract that is designed for the public good—where the public includes both authors and readers. This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once copyright expires. In the U.S. now, there are various efforts to take rights away from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the 'database copyright' proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. (…) Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality, and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance of principles, rather than as the power play it is too often ends up being ('big money vs. rogue pirates'), we may be able to come up with some reasonable accommodations."

Michael Hart wrote in July 1999: "No one has said more against copyright extensions than I have, but Hollywood and the big publishers have seen to it that our Congress won't even mention it in public. The kind of copyright debate going on is totally impractical. It is run by and for the 'Landed Gentry of the Information Age.' 'Information Age'? For whom?"

Sure enough. We regularly hear about the great "information age" we live in, while seeing the tightening of laws relating to dissemination of information. The contradiction is obvious. This problem has also affected several European countries, where the copyright law switched from "author's life plus 50 years" to "author's life plus 70 years", following pressure from content owners who successfully lobbied for "harmonization" of national copyright laws as a response to "globalization of the market". To regulate the copyright of digital editions in the wake of the relevant WIPO international treaties, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was ratified in October 1998 in the United States, and the European Union Copyright Directive (EUCD) was ratified in May 2001 by the European Commission.

According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby, "as of January 2009, the total number of separate public domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot continue to double as they come up to the point of already having done half. New copyrights lasting virtually for ever in the U.S. will bring the growth process to a screeching halt when The Mickey Mouse copyright laws, literally, copyright laws on Mickey Mouse, and Winnie-the-Pooh, etc., stop all current copyright from expiring for the forseeable future."

FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE

Project Gutenberg's results are not only measured in numbers. The results can also be measured in the major influence the project has had. As the oldest producer of free books on the internet, Project Gutenberg has inspired many other digital libraries, for example Projekt Runeberg for classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature and Projekt Gutenberg-DE for classic German literature, to name only two, which started respectively in 1992 and 1994.

Projekt Runeberg was the first Swedish digital library of books from public domain, and a partner of Project Gutenberg. It was initiated in December 1992 by the students' computer club Lysator, in cooperation with Linköping University, as a volunteer project to create and collect free electronic editions of classic Nordic literature and art. Around 200 ebooks were available in full text in 1998. There was also a list of 6,000 Nordic authors as a tool for further collection development.

Projekt Gutenberg-DE was the first German digital library of books from public domain, created in 1994 as a partner of Project Gutenberg. Texts were available for online reading, with one webpage for short texts and with several webpages—one per chapter—for longer works. There was an alphabetic list of authors and titles, and a short biography and bibliography for each author.

Project Gutenberg keeps its administrative and financial structure to the bare minimum. Its motto fits into three words: "Less is more." The minimal rules give much space to volunteers and to new ideas. The goal is to ensure its independence from loans and other funding and from ephemeral cultural priorities, to avoid pressure from politicians and others. The aim is also to ensure respect for the volunteers, who can be confident their work will be used not just for decades but for centuries. Volunteers can network through mailing lists, weekly or monthly newsletters, discussion lists, forums and wikis.

Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers, scanners and blank CDs and DVDs. Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time employees.

More generally, Michael Hart should be given more credit as the inventor of the electronic book (ebook). If we consider the ebook in its etymological sense—that is to say a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file—it was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. This is a much more comforting paternity than the various commercial launchings in proprietary formats that peppered the early 2000s. There is no reason for the term "ebook" to be the monopoly of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gemstar, and others. The non-commercial ebook is a full ebook, and not a "poor" version, just as non-commercial electronic publishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and is as valuable as commercial electronic publishing. Project Gutenberg etexts—the term used originally—have been renamed ebooks, to use the recent terminology in the field.

In July 1971, sending a 5K file to 100 people would have crashed the network of the time. In November 2002, Project Gutenberg could post the 75 files of the "Human Genome Project", with files of dozens or hundreds of megabytes, shortly after its initial release in February 2001 as a work from public domain. In 2004, a computer hard disk costing US $140 could potentially hold the entire Library of Congress. And we probably are only a few years away from a USB drive—or an equivalent storage disk—capable of holding all the books on our planet.

What about documents other than text? In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks, with human-read ebooks. Computer-generated ebooks are "converted" when requested from the existing electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be possible in the future. Launched at the same time, the Sheet Music Subproject contains digitized music sheet, as well as a few music recordings. Some still pictures and moving pictures are also available. These collections should take off in the future.

But digitizing books remains the priority, and there is a big demand, as confirmed by the tens of thousands of books that are downloaded every day.

For example, on July 31, 2005, there were 37,532 downloads for the day, 243,808 downloads for the week, and 1,154,765 downloads for the month.

On May 6, 2007, there were 89,841 downloads for the day, 697,818 downloads for the week, and 2,995,436 downloads for the month.

On May 8, 2008, there were 115,138 downloads for the day, 714,323 downloads for the week, and 3,055,327 downloads for the month.

These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), the main distribution site, which also hosts the website gutenberg.org. The Internet Archive is the backup distribution site and provides unlimited disk space for storage and processing. Project Gutenberg has 40 mirror sites in many countries and is seeking new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its books.

People can also choose ebooks from the "Top 100", i.e. the top 100 ebooks and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.

Project Gutenberg ebooks can also help bridge the "digital divide". They can be read on an outdated computer or a second-hand PDA costing just a few dollars. Solar-powered PDAs offer a good solution in remote regions.

It is hoped machine translation software will be able to convert the books from one to another of 100 languages. In ten years from now (August 2009), machine translation may be judged 99% satisfactory—research is active on that front—allowing for the reading of literary classics in a choice of many languages. Project Gutenberg is also interested in combining translation software and human translators, somewhat as OCR software is now combined with the work of proofreaders.

38 years after the beginning of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart describes himself as a workaholic who has devoted his entire life to his project. He considers himself a pragmatic and farsighted altruist. For years he was regarded as a nut but now he is respected. He wants to change the world through freely-available ebooks that can be used and copied endlessly, and reading and culture for everyone at minimal cost.

Project Gutenberg's mission can be stated in eight words: "To encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks," by everybody, and by every possible means, while implementing new ideas, new methods and new software.

Copyright © 2009 Marie Lebert

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