The results of Project Gutenberg are not only measured in numbers. The
results can also be measured in the major influence the project has
had.
# Other digital libraries
As the oldest producer of free ebooks 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, 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 the Linköping University (Sweden), 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.
# “Less is more.”
Project Gutenberg has kept its administrative and financial structure
to the bare minimum. Its motto fits into three words: “Less is more.”
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 goal is also to ensure respect for the
volunteers, who can be confident their work will be used for decades.
Volunteers can network through mailing lists, weekly or monthly
newsletters, discussion lists, forums, and wikis. Founded in 2000, the
PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three
part-time employees.
Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers,
scanners, and blank CDs and DVDs. CDs and DVDs are sent for free to
those who request them. After the CD Best of Gutenberg available in
August 2003 with a selection of 600 ebooks, and a first DVD available
in December 2003 with 9,400 ebooks, a second DVD is available in July
2006 with 17,000 ebooks. Since 2005, CDs and DVDs have been both
available on the website of BitTorrent as ISO images that can be
downloaded to burn CDs and DVDs for personal use. In 2007, the Project
Gutenberg sent 15 million books by snail mail on CDs and DVDs.
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 – i.e. a book that has been digitized to be
distributed as an electronic file – it was born with Project Gutenberg
in July 1971, 30 years before the various commercial launchings that
peppered the early 2000s, with the ebooks of Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
Gemstar, and others.
# Tens of thousands of downloads per day
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 November 15, 2010, there were 130,524 downloads for the day, 888,520
downloads for the week, and 3,582,153 downloads for the month.
These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at the University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States), 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
worldwide, and seeks new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for
sharing its ebooks.
Readers can choose ebooks from the “Top 100?, i.e. the top 100 ebooks
and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last seven days and
the last thirty days.
Project Gutenberg ebooks can also help bridge the “digital divide”.
They can be read on an outdated computer or a second-hand netbook
costing just a few dollars.
# Towards the future
It is hoped machine translation software will be able to convert the
ebooks from one to another of 100 languages. In ten years from now,
machine translation may be judged 99% satisfactory – research is active
on that front, and software is improving fast – 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.
40 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.