= [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."
= From the past to the future
The bet made by Michael Hart in 1971 succeeded. But 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.