Projekt Runeberg was the first Swedish digital library of books from
public domain, and a partner of Project Gutenberg. It was created by
the students' computer club Lysator, in cooperation with Linköping
University, as a volunteer project to produce and organize free
electronic editions of classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature. Around
200 ebooks were available in 1998, with 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, and also a partner of Project Gutenberg. A number of
texts were available for online reading in 1998, with one web page for
short texts and several web pages - one per chapter - for longer works.
There was an alphabetic list of authors and titles, with a short
biography and bibliography for each author.
# In 1997
French was the second language of Project Gutenberg, and still is in
2010.
The first ebooks released in French were six works by Stendhal and two
works by Jules Verne, all released in early 1997.
The six works by Stendhal were four short novels: L'Abbesse de Castro
(published in 1837), Les Cenci (1837), Vittoria Accoramboni (1837) and
La Duchesse de Palliano (1838), and two novels: Le Rouge et le Noir
(1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).
The two novels by Jules Verne were: De la terre à la lune (1865) and Le
tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (1873).
Three novels by Jules Verne were already available in English: From the
Earth to the Moon (original title: De la terre à la lune), released in
September 1993; Around the World in 80 Days (original title: Le tour du
monde en quatre-vingts jours), released in January 1994; and 20,000
Leagues Under the Seas (original title: Vingt mille lieues sous les
mers, 1869-70), released in September 1994.
Since then, Jules Verne has constantly been in the most downloaded
authors, at 11 in the “Top 20” available on the website of Project
Gutenberg in December 1999, and at 6 in the “Top 100 during the last 30
days”, on October 7, 2010.
As a side remark, the first pictures ever made available in Project
Gutenberg were French Cave Paintings, released in April 1995 as eBook
#249, with an XHTML version available in November 2000. This ebook
offers four copyrighted photographs of paleolithic paintings found in a
grotto in Ardèche, a region of south-western France. The photographs
were sent to Project Gutenberg by Jean Clottes, a general curator for
cultural heritage (conservateur général du patrimoine), for everyone to
enjoy them.
Released in August 1997, eBook #1000 was La Divina Commedia (1321) de
Dante Alighieri, in Italian, its original language.
# In 1998
In October 1997, Michael Hart expressed his intention to produce more
ebooks in other languages. In early 1998, there were a few titles in
French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Latin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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