people each find their own comfortable way to etexts, especially in schools. (…) My own personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached in October 2003] and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as many, a trillion and 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 per month.

Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. EBook #2000 was Don Quijote (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language.

Distributed Proofreaders was launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of ebooks between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the digitized books available on the website and proofread a given page, or several pages, as they wish.

Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. EBook #3000 was À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel Proust, in French, its original language.

Project Gutenberg Australia was launched in August 2001.

Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. EBook #4000 was The French Immortals Series (1905), in English. This book is an anthology 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 was The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, an English version of Leonardo's early 16th-century writings in Italian. Since its release, this ebook has constantly stayed in the Top 100 of downloaded ebooks.

In 1991, Michael Hart chose to type in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Peter Pan because they would each fit on one 360 K disk, the standard of the time. In 2002, the standard disk was 1.44 M and could be compressed as a zipped file.

A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than long enough for the average book. The ASCII version of a 300-page novel is 1 M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be downloaded as is or zipped. An average of 50 hours is necessary to get an ebook selected, copyright-cleared, scanned, proofread, formatted, and assembled.

A few numbers are reserved for “special” books. For example, eBook #1984 is reserved for George Orwell’s classic, published in 1949, and still a long way from falling into public domain.

In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg’s ebooks represented 25% of all the public domain works freely available on the web and listed in the Internet Public Library (IPL). The output in 2002 was an average of 203 new ebooks per month.

In November 2002, Project Gutenberg released 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.

1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000 ebooks in December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000 ebooks in April 2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. EBook #10000 was The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 and known as the first English constitutional text.

From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collection of ebooks doubled, going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly average of 348 new ebooks in 2003. The fast growth was the work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 to share the proofreading of ebooks between many volunteers.

EBooks were also copied on CDs and DVDs. As blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing, Project Gutenberg began burning and sending a free CD or DVD to anyone asking for it. People were encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the Best of Gutenberg CD contained 600 ebooks. The first Project Gutenberg DVD was released in December 2003 to celebrate the first 10,000 ebooks, with the burning of most titles (9,400 ebooks).

In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio
eBooks, a collection of human-read ebooks, as well as the Sheet Music
Subproject, a collection of digitized music sheet and music recordings.
A collection of still and moving pictures was also available.

# 10,000 to 20,000 ebooks

In December 2003, there were 11,000 ebooks, which represented 110 G, in several formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF, and others, as is or zipped). In May 2004, there were 12,600 ebooks, which represented 135 G. With more than 300 new ebooks added per month (338 ebooks per month in 2004), the number of gigabytes was expected to double every year.

The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was affiliated with Project Gutenberg in 2003, and became an official Project Gutenberg site. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering collections of existing ebooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg working on producing ebooks. As explained by Michael Hart in February 2009: “The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center has over 75,000 ebooks rendered as PDF files, and some are really quite stunning. The difference? These files were prepared by other eLibraries, not Project Gutenberg, and are using our worldwide distribution network to be seen.”

In Europe, Project Rastko, based in Belgrade, Serbia, launched Project
Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP
Europe) in January 2004. 100 ebooks were available in June 2005, in
several languages, as a reflection of European linguistic diversity.

In January 2005, Project Gutenberg reached 15,000 ebooks. EBook #15000 was The Life of Reason (1906), by George Santayana.

What about languages? There were ebooks in 25 languages in February 2004, and in 42 languages in July 2005, including Sanskrit and the Mayan languages. The seven main languages – with more than 50 ebooks – were English (with 14,548 ebooks on July 27, 2005), French (577 ebooks), German (349 ebooks), Finnish (218 ebooks), Dutch (130 ebooks), Spanish (103 ebooks), and Chinese (69 ebooks).

In July 2005, Project Gutenberg Australia (launched in August 2001) reached 500 ebooks.

Project Gutenberg PrePrints was launched in January 2006 to collect items submitted to Project Gutenberg which were interesting enough to be available online, but not ready yet to be added to the main Project Gutenberg collection, because of missing data, low-quality files, formats which were not handy, etc. 379 ebooks were available in December 2006, and 2,020 ebooks in February 2009.

In December 2006, Project Gutenberg reached 20,000 ebooks. EBook #20000 was the audiobook of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869), by Jules Verne, in its English version.

If 32 years and 3 months, from July 1971 to October 2003, were necessary to produce the first 10,000 ebooks, 3 years and 2 months, from October 2003 to December 2006, were necessary to produce the following 10,000 ebooks. There were ebooks in 50 languages in December 2006.

# 20,000 to 30,000 ebooks

In December 2006, Mike Cook launched the blog Project Gutenberg News as “the news portal for gutenberg.org”, to complement the existing weekly and monthly newsletters. For example, the blog gave a table of the weekly, monthly and yearly