1971: Project Gutenberg
[Overview]
In July 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg with the goal of making available for free, and electronically, literary works belonging to public domain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library. When the internet became popular in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and gained an international dimension. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 5,000 (in April 2002), 10,000 (in October 2003), 15,000 (in January 2005), 20,000 (in December 2006) and 25,000 (in April 2008), with a current production rate of around 340 new books each month. With 55 languages and 40 mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. Project Gutenberg promotes digitization in “text format”, meaning that a book can be copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. Contrary to other formats, the files are accessible for low-bandwidth use. The main source of new Project Gutenberg eBooks is Distributed Proofreaders, conceived in October 2000 by Charles Franks to help in the digitizing of books from public domain.
[In Depth (published in 2005, updated in 2008)]
The electronic book (eBook) is now 37 years old, which is still a short life comparing to the five and a half century print book. eBooks were born with Project Gutenberg, created by Michael Hart in July 1971 to make available for free electronic versions of literary books belonging to public domain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the first information provider on an embryonic internet and is the oldest digital library. Long considered by its critics as impossible on a large scale, Project Gutenberg had 25,000 books in April 2008, with tens of thousands downloads daily. To this day, nobody has done a better job of putting the world’s literature at everyone’s disposal, while creating a vast network of volunteers all over the world, without wasting people’s skills or energy.
During the first twenty years, Michael Hart himself keyed in the first hundred books, with the occasional help of others. When the internet became popular, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and gained an international dimension. Michael still typed and scanned in books, but now coordinated the work of dozens and then hundreds of volunteers across many countries. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 2,000 (in May 1999), 3,000 (in December 2000) and 4,000 (in October 2001).
Whether they were digitized 30 years ago or digitized now, all the books are captured in Plain Vanilla ASCII (the original 7-bit ASCII), with the same formatting rules, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or software, including on a PDA, a cellphone or an eBook reader. Any individual or organization is free to convert them to different formats, without any restriction except respect for copyright laws in the country involved.