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 – i.e. a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file – it was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971, 30 years before the various commercial launchings that peppered the early 2000s, with the ebooks of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gemstar, and others. # Tens of thousands of downloads per day 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 November 15, 2010, there were 130,524 downloads for the day, 888,520 downloads for the week, and 3,582,153 downloads for the month. These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, United States), 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 worldwide, and seeks new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its ebooks. Readers can choose ebooks from the “Top 100?, i.e. the top 100 ebooks and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last seven days and the last thirty days. Project Gutenberg ebooks can also help bridge the “digital divide”. They can be read on an outdated computer or a second-hand netbook costing just a few dollars. # Towards the future It is hoped machine translation software will be able to convert the ebooks from one to another of 100 languages. In ten years from now, machine translation may be judged 99% satisfactory – research is active on that front, and software is improving fast – 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. 40 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. DESDE EL PASADO HACIA EL FUTURO [ES]