Chapter 2
Project Gutenberg's results are not only measured in numbers. The results can also be measured in the major influence the project has had. As the oldest producer of free books on the internet, Project Gutenberg has inspired many other digital libraries, for example Projekt Runeberg for classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature and Projekt Gutenberg-DE for classic German literature, to name only two, which started respectively in 1992 and 1994.
Projekt Runeberg was the first Swedish digital library of books from public domain, and a partner of Project Gutenberg. It was initiated in December 1992 by the students' computer club Lysator, in cooperation with Linkoeping University, as a volunteer project to create and collect free electronic editions of classic Nordic literature and art. Around 200 ebooks were available in full text in 1998. There was also a list of 6,000 Nordic authors as a tool for further collection development.
Projekt Gutenberg-DE was the first German digital library of books from public domain, created in 1994 as a partner of Project Gutenberg. Texts were available for online reading, with one webpage for short texts and with several webpages--one per chapter--for longer works. There was an alphabetic list of authors and titles, and a short biography and bibliography for each author.
Project Gutenberg keeps its administrative and financial structure to the bare minimum. Its motto fits into three words: "Less is more." The minimal rules give much space to volunteers and to new ideas. The goal is to ensure its independence from loans and other funding and from ephemeral cultural priorities, to avoid pressure from politicians and others. The aim is also to ensure respect for the volunteers, who can be confident their work will be used not just for decades but for centuries. Volunteers can network through mailing lists, weekly or monthly newsletters, discussion lists, forums and wikis.
Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers, scanners and blank CDs and DVDs. Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time employees.
More generally, Michael Hart should be given more credit as the inventor of the electronic book (ebook). If we consider the ebook in its etymological sense--that is to say a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file--it was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. This is a much more comforting paternity than the various commercial launchings in proprietary formats that peppered the early 2000s. There is no reason for the term "ebook" to be the monopoly of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gemstar, and others. The non-commercial ebook is a full ebook, and not a "poor" version, just as non-commercial electronic publishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and is as valuable as commercial electronic publishing. Project Gutenberg etexts--the term used originally--have been renamed ebooks, to use the recent terminology in the field.
In July 1971, sending a 5K file to 100 people would have crashed the network of the time. In November 2002, Project Gutenberg could post 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. In 2004, a computer hard disk costing US $140 could potentially hold the entire Library of Congress. And we probably are only a few years away from a USB drive--or an equivalent storage disk--capable of holding all the books on our planet.
What about documents other than text? In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks, with human-read ebooks. Computer-generated ebooks are "converted" when requested from the existing electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be possible in the future. Launched at the same time, the Sheet Music Subproject contains digitized music sheet, as well as a few music recordings. Some still pictures and moving pictures are also available. These collections should take off in the future.
But digitizing books remains the priority, and there is a big demand, as confirmed by the tens of thousands of books that are downloaded every day.
For example, on July 31, 2005, there were 37,532 downloads for the day, 243,808 downloads for the week, and 1,154,765 downloads for the month.
On May 6, 2007, there were 89,841 downloads for the day, 697,818 downloads for the week, and 2,995,436 downloads for the month.
On May 8, 2008, there were 115,138 downloads for the day, 714,323 downloads for the week, and 3,055,327 downloads for the month.
These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), the main distribution site, which also hosts the website gutenberg.org. The Internet Archive is the backup distribution site and provides unlimited disk space for storage and processing. Project Gutenberg has 40 mirror sites in many countries and is seeking new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its books.
People can also choose ebooks from the "Top 100", i.e. the top 100 ebooks and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg ebooks can also help bridge the "digital divide". They can be read on an outdated computer or a second-hand PDA costing just a few dollars. Solar-powered PDAs offer a good solution in remote regions.
It is hoped machine translation software will be able to convert the books from one to another of 100 languages. In ten years from now (August 2009), machine translation may be judged 99% satisfactory--research is active on that front--allowing for the reading of literary classics in a choice of many languages. Project Gutenberg is also interested in combining translation software and human translators, somewhat as OCR software is now combined with the work of proofreaders.
38 years after the beginning of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart describes himself as a workaholic who has devoted his entire life to his project. He considers himself a pragmatic and farsighted altruist. For years he was regarded as a nut but now he is respected. He wants to change the world through freely-available ebooks that can be used and copied endlessly, and reading and culture for everyone at minimal cost.
Project Gutenberg's mission can be stated in eight words: "To encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks," by everybody, and by every possible means, while implementing new ideas, new methods and new software.
Copyright (C) 2009 Marie Lebert
End of Project Gutenberg's Project Gutenberg (1971-2009), by Marie Lebert