Literature?, such as Roget‘s Thesaurus,almanacs, and a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries. (A more
detailedclassification was created later on.)
?Light Literature? was the main section in number of ebooks. Asexplained on the website in 1998: ?The
Light Literature Collection isdesigned to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether theperson
may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when wehear about kids or grandparents taking
each other to an etext of PeterPan when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when
theyread Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been toldthat nearly every Star Trek
movie has quoted current Project Gutenbergetext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Khan; a Peter
Pan quotefinishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference toThrough the Looking-Glass in
JFK. This was a primary concern when wechose the books for our libraries. We want people to be able to
look upquotations 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's goal is more about selecting books intended for thegeneral public than providing
authoritative editions. As explained onthe website in 1998: ?We do not write for the reader who cares
whethera 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% accuratein the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences
ourproofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the publicis currently reported to have, we
probably exceed those requirements bya significant amount. However, for the person who wants
an=authoritative edition‘ we will have to wait some time until thisbecomes more feasible. We do, however,
intend to release many editionsof Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on ascholarly
level.?
The etexts, later called ebooks, were stored in the simplest way, usingthe low set of ASCII, called Plain
Vanilla ASCII, for them to be readon any hardware and software. As a text file, a book could be
easilycopied, indexed, searched, analyzed, and compared with other books.
As explained by Michael Hart in August 1998 in an email interview: ?Weconsider 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 canpossibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way toetexts, especially in
schools. () My own personal goal is to put10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached in October
2003] and ifI can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000and to also expand our
potential audience for the average etext from1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our
goal fromgiving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as many, a trillionand a quadrillion in U.S.
terminology.?
# 1,000 to 10,000 ebooks
From 1998 to 2000, the ?output? was an average of 36 new ebooks permonth.
Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. EBook #2000 was DonQuijote (1605), by
Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language.
Distributed Proofreaders was launched in October 2000 by Charles Franksto share the proofreading of
ebooks between many volunteers. Volunteerschoose one of the digitized books available on the website
andproofread a given page, or several pages, as they wish.
Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. EBook #3000was l‘ombre des jeunes filles
en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girlsin Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel Proust, in French, its
originallanguage.
Project Gutenberg Australia was launched in August 2001.
Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. EBook #4000 wasThe French Immortals Series
(1905), in English. This book is ananthology of short fictions by authors from the French
Academy(Académie Française): Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot,Charles de Bernard, Alphonse
Daudet, and others.
The output in 2001 was an average of 104 new ebooks per month.
Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 ebooks in April 2002. EBook #5000 wasThe Notebooks of Leonardo da
Vinci, an English version of Leonardo'searly 16th-century writings in Italian. Since its release, this
ebookhas constantly stayed in the Top 100 of downloaded ebooks.
In 1991, Michael Hart chose to type in Alice‘s Adventures in Wonderlandand Peter Pan because they
would each fit on one 360 K disk, thestandard of the time. In 2002, the standard disk was 1.44 M and
couldbe compressed as a zipped file.
A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than longenough for the average book. The ASCII
version of a 300-page novel is 1M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be downloaded asis or
