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 keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence to the mainframe he was using, in upper case, because there was no lower case yet. The file was 5 K. To send a 5 K file to the 100 users of the pre- internet of the time 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 the huge amount of computer time he had been given to search the literary works that were stored in libraries, and to digitize these works. A book would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages. Project Gutenberg’s mission would be the following: to put at everyone’s disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works as possible for free.

After keying in The United States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) in 1971, Michael typed in a longer text, The United States Bill of Rights, in 1972, i.e. the first ten amendments added in 1789 to the Constitution (dated 1787) and defining the individual rights of the citizens and the distinct powers of the federal government and the States. A volunteer typed in The United States Constitution in 1973.

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 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 released a few years later.

# 10 to 1,000 ebooks

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 help of some volunteers.

In August 1989, Project Gutenberg completed its 10th ebook, The King James Bible (1769), both testaments, and 5M 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 ebook per month in 1991, two ebooks per month in 1992, four ebooks per month in 1993, and eight ebooks per month in 1994.

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

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

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

Project Gutenberg reached 1,000 ebooks in August 1997. EBook #1000 was La Divina Commedia (1321), by Dante Alighieri, in Italian, its original language.

With the number of ebooks on the rise, three main sections were set up: (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. (A more detailed classification was created later on.)

“Light Literature” was the main section in number of ebooks. As explained on the website in 1998: “The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etext of Peter Pan when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Khan; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries. We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy-to- find etext format.”

Project Gutenberg's goal is more about selecting books intended for the general public than providing authoritative editions. As explained on the website in 1998: “We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ‘:’ or a ‘;’ between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an ‘authoritative edition’ we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level.”

The etexts, later called ebooks, were stored in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII, called Plain Vanilla ASCII, for them to be read on any hardware and software. As a text file, a book could be easily copied, indexed, searched, analyzed, and compared with other books.

As explained by Michael Hart in August 1998 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