In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg’s ebooks represented 25% of all the
public domain works freely available on the web and listed in the
Internet Public Library (IPL). The output in 2002 was an average of 203
new ebooks per month.
In November 2002, Project Gutenberg released 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.
1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000 ebooks in
December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000 ebooks in April
2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. EBook #10000 was The Magna Carta,
signed in 1215 and known as the first English constitutional text.
From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collection of ebooks
doubled, going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly
average of 348 new ebooks in 2003. The fast growth was the work of
Distributed Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 to share
the proofreading of ebooks between many volunteers.
EBooks were also copied on CDs and DVDs. As blank CDs and DVDs cost
next to nothing, Project Gutenberg began burning and sending a free CD
or DVD to anyone asking for it. People were encouraged to make copies
for a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the Best
of Gutenberg CD contained 600 ebooks. The first Project Gutenberg DVD
was released in December 2003 to celebrate the first 10,000 ebooks,
with the burning of most titles (9,400 ebooks).
In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio
eBooks, a collection of human-read ebooks, as well as the Sheet Music
Subproject, a collection of digitized music sheet and music recordings.
A collection of still and moving pictures was also available.
# 10,000 to 20,000 ebooks
In December 2003, there were 11,000 ebooks, which represented 110 G, in
several formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF, and others, as is or zipped). In May
2004, there were 12,600 ebooks, which represented 135 G. With more than
300 new ebooks added per month (338 ebooks per month in 2004), the
number of gigabytes was expected to double every year.
The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was affiliated with
Project Gutenberg in 2003, and became an official Project Gutenberg
site. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering collections of
existing ebooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg working on
producing ebooks. As explained by Michael Hart in February 2009: “The
Project Gutenberg Consortia Center has over 75,000 ebooks rendered as
PDF files, and some are really quite stunning. The difference? These
files were prepared by other eLibraries, not Project Gutenberg, and are
using our worldwide distribution network to be seen.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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