Produced by Al Haines
NEF, University of Toronto, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Marie Lebert
Dated August 15, 2005, this long article (following a short version published inJune 2004 [and copied at the end of this file]) is a paper for the thirdInternational Colloquium on ICT-enhanced French Studies: Dialogues acrosslanguages and cultures, October 2005, York University, Toronto, Canada. Thisarticle is dedicated to all Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreadersvolunteers on the five continents, who offer us a free library of 16,000high-quality eBooks, mainly classics of world literature, with a goal of onemillion eBooks in ten years.
With many thanks to Russon Wooldridge, who kindly edited this long article. Theoriginal version is available on the NEF, University of Toronto:http://www.etudes-francaises.net/dossiers/gutenberg_eng.htm
The French version is: Le Projet Gutenberg (1971-2005). The updated
English version is: Project Gutenberg (1971-2008).
1. Summary
2. History, From the Origins to Today
3. The Public Domain, an Endless Topic
4. The Method Adopted by Project Gutenberg
5. Distributed Proofreaders, to Handle Shared Proofreading
6. eBooks in More and More Languages
7. From the Past to the Future
8. Chronology [updated in 2006]
9. Links
10. Short Version [dated 2004]
My fascination for Project Gutenberg is not new, but it doesn't wane. Nobody hasdone a better job of putting the world's literature at everyone's disposal. Andto create a vast network of volunteers all over the world, without wastingpeople's skills or energy.
Here is the story in a few lines.
In July 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg with the goal of makingavailable for free, and electronically, literary works belonging to the publicdomain. A project that has long been considered by its critics as impossible ona large scale. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was thefirst information provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library.Michael himself keyed in the first hundred books.
When the internet became popular, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost andan international dimension. Michael still typed and scanned in books, but nowcoordinated the work of dozens and then hundreds of volunteers in manycountries. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to2,000 (in May 1999), 3,000 (in December 2000) and 4,000 (in October 2001).
30 years after its birth, Project Gutenberg is running at full capacity. It had5,000 books online in April 2002, 10,000 books online in October 2003, and15,000 books online in January 2005, with 400 new books available per month, 40mirror sites in a number of countries, and books downloaded by the tens ofthousands every day.
Whether they were digitized 20 years ago or they are digitized now, all thebooks are captured in Plain Vanilla ASCII (the original 7-bit ASCII), with thesame formatting rules, so they can be read easily by any machine, operatingsystem or software, including on a PDA or an eBook reader. Any individual ororganization is free to convert them to different formats, without anyr