The Project Gutenberg EBook of Project Gutenberg (1971-2005), by Marie Lebert

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Title: Project Gutenberg (1971-2005)

Author: Marie Lebert

Release Date: October 26, 2008 [EBook #27039]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROJECT GUTENBERG (1971-2005) ***

Produced by Al Haines

PROJECT GUTENBERG (1971-2005)

MARIE LEBERT

NEF, University of Toronto, 2005

Copyright © 2005 Marie Lebert

Dated August 15, 2005, this long article (following a short version published in June 2004 [and copied at the end of this file]) is a paper for the third International Colloquium on ICT-enhanced French Studies: Dialogues across languages and cultures, October 2005, York University, Toronto, Canada. This article is dedicated to all Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders volunteers on the five continents, who offer us a free library of 16,000 high-quality eBooks, mainly classics of world literature, with a goal of one million eBooks in ten years.

With many thanks to Russon Wooldridge, who kindly edited this long article. The original version is available on the NEF, University of Toronto: http://www.etudes-francaises.net/dossiers/gutenberg_eng.htm

The French version is: Le Projet Gutenberg (1971-2005). The updated
English version is: Project Gutenberg (1971-2008).

TABLE

1. Summary

2. History, From the Origins to Today

3. The Public Domain, an Endless Topic

4. The Method Adopted by Project Gutenberg

5. Distributed Proofreaders, to Handle Shared Proofreading

6. eBooks in More and More Languages

7. From the Past to the Future

8. Chronology [updated in 2006]

9. Links

10. Short Version [dated 2004]

1. SUMMARY

My fascination for Project Gutenberg is not new, but it doesn't wane. Nobody has done a better job of putting the world's literature at everyone's disposal. And to create a vast network of volunteers all over the world, without wasting people's skills or energy.

Here is the story in a few lines.

In July 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg with the goal of making available for free, and electronically, literary works belonging to the public domain. A project that has long been considered by its critics as impossible on a large scale. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library. Michael himself keyed in the first hundred books.

When the internet became popular, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and an international dimension. Michael still typed and scanned in books, but now coordinated the work of dozens and then hundreds of volunteers in many countries. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 2,000 (in May 1999), 3,000 (in December 2000) and 4,000 (in October 2001).

30 years after its birth, Project Gutenberg is running at full capacity. It had 5,000 books online in April 2002, 10,000 books online in October 2003, and 15,000 books online in January 2005, with 400 new books available per month, 40 mirror sites in a number of countries, and books downloaded by the tens of thousands every day.

Whether they were digitized 20 years ago or they are digitized now, all the books are captured in Plain Vanilla ASCII (the original 7-bit ASCII), with the same formatting rules, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or software, including on a PDA or an eBook reader. Any individual or organization is free to convert them to different formats, without any restriction except respect for copyright laws in the country involved.

In January 2004, Project Gutenberg had spread across the Atlantic with the creation of Project Gutenberg Europe. On top of its original mission, it also became a bridge between languages and cultures, with a goal of one million eBooks in 2015, and a number of national and linguistic sections. While adhering to the same principle: books for all and for free, through electronic versions that can be used and reproduced indefinitely. And, as a second step, the digitization of images and sound, in the same spirit.

2. HISTORY, FROM THE ORIGINS TO TODAY

= The Beginnings in 1971

Let us get back to the beginnings of the project. When he was a student at the University of Illinois (USA), Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 of computer time at the Materials Research Lab of his university. On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was using. In upper case, because there was no lower case yet. But to send a 5 K file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still 20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. Project Gutenberg was born.

Michael decided to use this huge amount of computer time to search the public domain books that were stored in our libraries, and to digitize these books. He also decided to store the electronic texts (eTexts) in the simplest way, using the plain text format called Plain Vanilla ASCII, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or 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.

Soon afterwards he defined Project Gutenberg's mission: to put at everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works of the public domain as possible for free. As he stated years later, in August 1998, "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."

= Persevering from 1972 to 1989

After he keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence in 1971, Michael went on in 1972 and typed in a longer text, The United States Bill of Rights, that includes the ten first amendments added in 1789 to the Constitution (dated 1787) and defining the individual rights of the citizens and the distinct powers ot the Federal Government and the States. In 1973, Michael typed in the full text of The United States Constitution.

From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the standards of the time (there was no hard disk yet), so it was possible to plan bigger files. Michael began typing in the Bible, because the individual books of the Bible could be processed separately as different files. He also worked on the collected works of Shakespeare, with one play at a