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 May 8, 2008, there were 115,138 downloads for the day, 714,323 downloads for the week, and 3,055,327 downloads for the month. These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), 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 in many countries and is seeking new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its books. People can also choose ebooks from the "Top 100", i.e. the top 100 ebooks and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days. Project Gutenberg ebooks can also help bridge the "digital divide". They can be read on an outdated computer or a second-hand PDA costing just a few dollars. Solar-powered PDAs offer a good solution in remote regions. It is hoped machine translation software will be able to convert the books from one to another of 100 languages. In ten years from now (August 2009), machine translation may be judged 99% satisfactory--research is active on that front--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. 38 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. Copyright © 2009 Marie Lebert End of Project Gutenberg's Project Gutenberg (1971-2009), by Marie Lebert