Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in our libraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books (ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII--called Plain Vanilla ASCII--for them to be read on any hardware and software. A book would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages, with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the print version. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searches is much harder in various markup formats.) Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put at everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works from public domain as possible for free. Years later, in August 1998, Michael wrote in an email interview: "We consider etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to etexts, especially in schools." After keying in "The U.S. Declaration of Independence" in 1971, Michael typed in "The U.S. Bill of Rights" in 1972. A volunteer typed in "The United States Constitution" in 1973. # Persevering From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the standards of the time--there was no hard disk yet--, making it possible to store larger files. Volunteers began typing in the Bible, with one individual book at a time, and a file for each book. Michael typed in the collected works of Shakespeare, with the help of volunteers, one play at a time, and a file for each play. This edition of Shakespeare was never released, unfortunately, due to changes in copyright law. Shakespeare's works belong to public domain, but comments and notes may be copyrighted, depending on the publication date. Other editions of Shakespeare from public domain were posted a few years later. # 10 to 1,000 ebooks In August 1989, Project Gutenberg completed its 10th ebook, "The King James Bible" (1769), both testaments, and 5 M for all files. In 1990, there were 250,000 internet users. The web was in its infancy. The standard was 360 K disks. In January 1991, Michael typed in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), by Lewis Carroll. In July 1991, he typed in "Peter Pan" (1904), by James M. Barrie. These two classics of childhood literature each fit on one disk. The first browser, Mosaic, was released in November 1993. It became easier to circulate etexts and recruit volunteers. From 1991 to 1996, the number of ebooks doubled every year, with one book per month in 1991, two books per month in 1992, four books per month in 1993, and eight books per month in 1994. In January 1994, Project Gutenberg released "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as eBook #100. Shakespeare wrote most works between 1590 and 1613.