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."

= From the past to the future

The bet made by Michael Hart in 1971 succeeded. But Project Gutenberg's results are not only measured in numbers. The results can also be measured in the major influence the project has had. As the oldest producer of free books 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, to name only two, 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 Linköping University, 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.

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 and others. 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, weekly or monthly newsletters, discussion lists, forums and wikis.

Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers, scanners and blank CDs and DVDs. Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time employees.

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 - that is to say a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file - it 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 electronic publishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and is as valuable as commercial electronic publishing. Project Gutenberg etexts - the term used originally - have been renamed 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 as a work from 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 USB drive - or an equivalent storage disk - capable of holding all the books on our planet.

What about documents other than text? In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks, with human-read ebooks. Computer-generated ebooks are "converted" when requested from the existing electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be possible in the future. Launched at the same time, the Sheet Music Subproject contains digitized music sheet, as well as a few music recordings. Some still pictures and moving pictures are also available. These 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 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 May 8, 2008, there were 115,138 downloads for the day, 714,323 downloads for the week, and 3,055,327 downloads for the month.

These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), 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 in many countries and is seeking new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its books.

People can also choose ebooks from the "Top 100", i.e. the top 100 ebooks and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.

Project