2004: Project Gutenberg Europe
[Overview]
In January 2004, Project Gutenberg spread across the Atlantic with the launching of Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) and Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko, a non-governmental cultural and educational project located in Belgrade, Serbia. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders. DP Europe is 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 European languages. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread eBooks in numerous languages. Unicode is an encoding system that gives a unique number for every character in any language. DP Europe finished processing its 100th book in May 2005 and its 500th book in October 2008. DP Europe operates under “life +50” copyright laws. When it gets up to speed, DP Europe will provide eBooks for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries.
[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
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 books for several national and/or linguistic digital libraries. 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 launched such a difficult and exciting project for Europe, and catalyzed 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.