As stated on DP's website in 2005, "Remember that there is no commitment expected on this site. Proofread as often or as seldom as you like, and as many or as few pages as you like. We encourage people to do 'a page a day', but it's entirely up to you! We hope you will join us in our mission of 'preserving the literary history of the world in a freely available form for everyone to use'." # Distributed Proofreaders Europe Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) was launched in early 2004 by Project Rastko in Belgrade, Serbia, as well as Project Gutenberg Europe. DP Europe uses the software of the original Distributed Proofreaders. Since its beginning, DP Europe has been a multilingual website, with its main pages translated into the main national European languages by volunteer translators. DP Europe was available in 12 languages as early as April 2004. The long-term goal is 60 languages representing most European languages. In May 2005, DP Europe finished processing its 100th ebook. Ebooks were in several languages to reflect European linguistic diversity. 600 ebooks were ready in February 2009, and 732 ebooks on 15 October 2010. DP Europe supports Unicode to be able to proofread ebooks in numerous languages. Unicode is an encoding system created in 1991 that gives a unique number for every character in any language. Unicode is meant to replace ASCII, an encoding system dating back from 1968 that can only handle English and Latin in its “original” version, and a few European languages with accents in its “extended” version. In 2008, half of the files available on the internet were Unicode files. # Distributed Proofreaders Canada Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DPC) started production in December 2007, to digitize and proofread ebooks for Project Gutenberg Canada (PGC), founded on July 1st, 2007, on Canada Day, by Michael Shepard and David Jones. There were 100 ebooks in March 2008, in English, French and Italian. 250 ebooks were available in February 2009, and 427 books on October 15, 2010. # A few numbers = Over 33,000 high-quality proofread ebooks in Project Gutenberg, in several languages. (Quality more than quantity is what really matters to the reader, believe me.) = 18,961 ebooks processed by Distributed Proofreaders (the original website) on November 1st, 2010, since its creation in October 2000, with 2,352 active volunteers in October 2010. = 739 ebooks processed by Distributed Proofreaders Europe on November 1st, 2010, since its creation on January 2004. = 433 ebooks processed by Distributed Proofreaders Canada on November 1st, 2010, since its creation in December 2007, with 127 active volunteers in October 2010. # A few links Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/ with 33,000 high-quality proofread ebooks. Distributed Proofreaders, http://www.pgdp.net/c/ launched in October 2000.