# 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."