The Project Gutenberg EBook of Project Gutenberg (1971-2009), by Marie Lebert

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Title: Project Gutenberg (1971-2009)

Author: Marie Lebert

Release Date: March 13, 2010 [EBook #31632]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROJECT GUTENBERG (1971-2009) ***

Produced by Al Haines

PROJECT GUTENBERG (1971-2009)

MARIE LEBERT

NEF, University of Toronto, 2009

Copyright © 2009 Marie Lebert

OVERVIEW

The first ebook was available in July 1971, as eText #1 of Project Gutenberg, a visionary project launched by Michael Hart to create electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21st century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital library at no cost. Its critics long considered Project Gutenberg as impossible on a large scale. But Michael went on keying book after book during many years, with the occasional help of some volunteers. Project Gutenberg got its first boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and its second boost with the creation of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help digitizing books from public domain. In 2008, Project Gutenberg had a production rate of 340 new books each month, 40 mirror sites worldwide, and books being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. There have been Project Gutenberg websites in the U.S, in Australia, in Europe and in Canada, with more websites to come in other countries.

FROM 1971 UNTIL NOW

# Beginning

As recalled by Michael Hart in January 2009 in an email interview: "On July 4, 1971, while still a freshman at the University of Illinois (UI), I decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the UI Materials Research Lab, rather than walk miles home in the summer heat, only to come back hours later to start another day of school. I stopped on the way to do a little grocery shopping to get through the night, and day, and along with the groceries they put in the faux parchment copy of 'The U.S. Declaration of Independence' that became quite literally the cornerstone of Project Gutenberg. That night, as it turned out, I received my first computer account—I had been hitchhiking on my brother's best friend's name, who ran the computer on the night shift. When I got a first look at the huge amount of computer money I was given, I decided I had to do something extremely worthwhile to do justice to what I had been given. This was such a serious, and intense thought process for a college freshman, my first thought was that I had better eat something to get up enough energy to think of something worthwhile enough to repay the cost of all that computer time. As I emptied out groceries, the faux parchment Declaration of Independence fell out, and the light literally went on over my head like in the cartoons and comics… I knew what the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be… 'The Information Age.' The rest, as they say, is history."

Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in our libraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books (ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII—called Plain Vanilla ASCII—for them to be read on any hardware and 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. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searches is much harder in various markup formats.)

Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put at everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works from public domain as possible for free. Years later, in August 1998, Michael wrote in an email interview: "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."

After keying in "The U.S. Declaration of Independence" in 1971, Michael typed in "The U.S. Bill of Rights" in 1972. A volunteer typed in "The United States Constitution" in 1973.

# Persevering

From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the standards of the time—there was no hard disk yet—, making it possible to store larger files. Volunteers began typing in the Bible, with one individual book at a time, and a file for each book. Michael typed in the collected works of Shakespeare, with the help of volunteers, one play at a time, and a file for each play. This edition of Shakespeare was never released, unfortunately, due to changes in copyright law. Shakespeare's works belong to public domain, but comments and notes may be copyrighted, depending on the publication date. Other editions of Shakespeare from public domain were posted a few years later.

# 10 to 1,000 ebooks

In August 1989, Project Gutenberg completed its 10th ebook, "The King James Bible" (1769), both testaments, and 5 M for all files.

In 1990, there were 250,000 internet users. The web was in its infancy.
The standard was 360 K disks.

In January 1991, Michael typed in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), by Lewis Carroll. In July 1991, he typed in "Peter Pan" (1904), by James M. Barrie. These two classics of childhood literature each fit on one disk.

The first browser, Mosaic, was released in November 1993. It became easier to circulate etexts and recruit volunteers. From 1991 to 1996, the number of ebooks doubled every year, with one book per month in 1991, two books per month in 1992, four books per month in 1993, and eight books per month in 1994.

In January 1994, Project Gutenberg released "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as eBook #100. Shakespeare wrote most works between 1590 and 1613.

The steady growth went on, with an average of 8 books per month in 1994, 16 books per month in 1995, and 32 books per month in 1996.

In June 1997, Project Gutenberg released "The Merry Adventures of Robin
Hood" (1883), by Howard Pyle.

Project Gutenberg had 1,000 ebooks in August 1997. eBook #1000 was "La Divina Commedia" de Dante Alighieri (1321), in Italian, its original language.

As there were more and more ebooks, they got classified in three main sections: (a) "Light Literature", such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", "Through the Looking-Glass", "Peter Pan" and "Aesop's Fables"; (b) "Heavy Literature", such as the Bible, Shakespeare's works, "Moby Dick" and "Paradise Lost"; (c) "Reference Literature", such as "Roget's Thesaurus", almanacs, and a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries. (This classification in three sections was replaced later with a more detailed one.)