Assembly on February 13. The following week, he addressed the European Parliament, in Brussels. He also met with the team of Project Rastko, in Belgrade, to support the creation of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (launched in January 2004) and Project Gutenberg Europe (conceived at the same time, and launched in June 2005).

The launching of Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko was indeed a very important step. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders and is dedicated to the proofreading of eBooks for Project Gutenberg Europe. Since its very beginnings, DP Europe has been a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into several European languages by volunteer translators. In April 2004, DP Europe was available in 12 languages. The long-term goal is 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams representing all the European languages. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide eBooks for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries, for example Projet Gutenberg France for France. The goal is for every country to have its own digital library (according to the country copyright limitations), within a continental network (for France, the European network) and a global network (for the whole planet).

A few lines now on Project Rastko, which had the boldness to launch such a difficult and exciting project for Europe, and catalysed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need to live in Europe to register). Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe.

In May 2005, Distributed Proofreaders Europe finished processing its 100th eBook. In June 2005 Project Gutenberg Europe was launched with these first 100 eBooks. PG Europe operates under "life +50" copyright laws. On August 3, 2005, 137 books were complete (processed through the site and posted to Project Gutenberg Europe), 418 books were in progress (processed through the site but not yet posted, because currently going through their final proofreading and assembly), and 125 books were being proofread (currently being processed). DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages. Unicode is an encoding system created in 1991 that gives a unique number for every character in any language. From the Past to the Future

10 books online in August 1989; 100 books in January 1994; 1,000 books in August 1997; 2,000 books in May 1999; 3,000 books in December 2000; 4,000 books in October 2001; 5,000 books in April 2002; 10,000 books in October 2003; 15,000 books in January 2005; and 1 million books planned for 2015.

But Project Gutenberg's results are not only measured in numbers, which can't compete yet with the number of print books in the public domain. The results also include the major influence that the project has had. As the oldest producer of free eBooks on the internet, Project Gutenberg has inspired many other digital libraries, for example Projekt Gutenberg-DE for classic German literature and Projekt Runeberg for classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature, to name only two.

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 or economic interests. 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 and weekly or monthly newsletters. Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers and scanners. Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time employees.

More generally, Michael should be given more credit as the real inventor of the 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 is now 34 years old and 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 ePublishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and as valuable as commercial ePublishing. Project Gutenberg eTexts are now called 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, because it was 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 storage disk capable of holding all the print media of our planet.

What about documents other than text?

In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks. As of 2005, there are 391 computer-generated audio books and a few human-read audio books. The number of human-read eBooks should greatly increase over the next few years. As for computer-generated eBooks, it seems they won't be stored in a specific section any more, but "converted" when requested from the existing electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be possible, as a useful tool for visually impaired readers.

Launched at the same time, The Sheet Music Subproject is dedicated to digitized music sheet. It also contains a few music recordings. Some still pictures and moving pictures are also available. These new 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 eBooks 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 (July 24-31), and 1,154,765 downloads for the month. This only for transfers from ibiblio.org (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), the main eBook distribution site (which also hosts the website). The Internet Archive is the backup distribution site and provides unlimited disk space for storage and processing. Project Gutenberg has 44 mirror sites in many countries and is looking for new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its eBooks. The "Top 100" lists 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 a computer or a secondhand PDA costing just a few dollars. Solar-powered PDAs offer a good solution in remote regions and developing countries.

eBooks are also copied on CDs and DVDs. Blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing, as does their burning on a CD or DVD writer. Project Gutenberg sends a free CD or DVD to anyone who asks for it, and people are encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of Gutenberg" CD contains over 600 eBooks. Released in December 2003, the first Project Gutenberg DVD contains 9,400 eBooks. A new DVD is in preparation. The current prototype contains nearly 26,000