Now, from the volunteer point of view, the wisest thing to do is to choose a book published before 1923. It is also required that copyright clearance be confirmed prior to working on any eBook by sending a photocopy of the title page and verso page (even if the latter is blank) to Michael. The pages should be sent as scans to be uploaded on the website. For people who cannot create scans, it is possible to send photocopies by postal mail. The pages will then be filed, either on paper or electronically, so that the proof will be available in the future, to demonstrate if necessary that the book is in the public domain under the US law. Project Gutenberg doesn't release any eBook until the book's copyright status has been confirmed. There is nevertheless hope for some books published after 1923. According to Greg Newby, director of PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation), one million books published between 1923 and 1964 could also belong to the public domain, because only 10% of copyrights were actually renewed. Project Gutenberg tries to locate these books. In April 2004, with the help of hundreds of volunteers at Distributed Proofreaders, all Copyright Renewal records were posted for books from 1950 through 1977. So, if a given book published during this period is not on the list, it means the copyright was not renewed, and the book fell into the public domain. 4. THE METHOD ADOPTED BY PROJECT GUTENBERG Whether digitized years ago or now, all the books are digitized in 7-bit plain ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), called Plain Vanilla ASCII. Used since the beginnings of computing, it is the set of unaccented characters present on a standard English-language keyboard (A-Z, a-z, numbers, punctuation and other basic symbols). When 8-bit ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) is used for books with accented characters like French or German, Project Gutenberg also produces a 7-bit ASCII version with the accents stripped. (This doesn't apply for languages that are not "convertible" in ASCII, like Chinese, encoded in Big-5.) Plain Vanilla ASCII is the best format by far. It is "the lowest common denominator". It can be read, written, copied and printed by any simple text editor or word processor on every computer in the world. It is the only format compatible with 99% of hardware and software. It can be used as it is or to create versions in many other formats. It will still be used while other formats will be obsolete (or are already obsolete, like formats of a few short-lived reading devices launched between 1999 and 2003). It is the assurance collections will never be obsolete, and will survive future technological changes. The goal is to preserve the texts not only over decades but over centuries. There is no other standard as widely used as ASCII right now, even Unicode, a "universal" encoding system created in 1991.