July 4, 1971, saw the creation of the world’s first e-book when Michael Hart, typed the American Declaration of Independence into a mainframe computer at the University of Illinois and sent it off to about a hundred users via ARPANAET, the precursor to the Internet. With this, was born Hart’s vision of making literature “as free as the air we breathe” which took shape as Project Gutenberg.
Fifty-five years on, Project Gutenberg offers readers over 75,000 free e-books, all of which are in the public domain and are available in a wide variety of formats and languages. What Hart envisioned in 1971 was e-books that would be like printed books, only they were digitised, so unlimited number of copies could be made and distributed and they would never go out of print. And they would be freely available to anyone who wanted to read them, so long as they were in the public domain.
In the first couple of decades, Hart typed in most of the books himself in his spare time. The 10th e-book, released in 1989, was the King James Bible. By 1994, there were a hundred e-books at Project Gutenberg. The 100th e-book was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Just three years later came the 1000th e-book, Dante’s Divina Commedia in Italian.
The spread of the Internet allowed for a vast international expansion in interest. The project grew to include hundreds and then thousands of volunteers around the world, and the number of public works scanned or transcribed grew steadily: to 10,000 books in 2003, 20,000 books in 2006, 40,000 books in 2011 and more than 75,000 today. And with the coming of e-readers, smart phones and tablets, the number of readers using Project Gutenberg’s resources grew dramatically.
By the year 2000, Project Gutenberg’s online library had become large enough and popular enough to warrant a more formal organization to ensure its smooth operation. So, the non-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created. In the same year, one of Project Gutenberg’s volunteers, Charles Franks, founded Distributed Proofreaders (DP), an organisation designed to produce a large number of high-quality e-books by means of an early use of crowdsourcing.
The DP system divided the workload into individual pages, so that many volunteers could work on a book at the same time, thereby speeding up the creation process – essentially “preserving history one page at a time.” Aside from DP, Project Gutenberg also has a sizeable contingent of devoted independent e-book producers who contribute to its growing library.
A dedicated errata team fixes typos, replaces straight quotes with curly quotes, updates HTML, and so forth. Project Gutenberg has gone well beyond the plain-text formats of the early years, and nearly every title is now offered in text, HTML, epub, and mobi formats. Unlike outlets like Google Books and the Internet Archive, which produce scanned facsimiles of printed books, the books you will find at Project Gutenberg are true e-books with fully searchable and resizeable text that has been carefully checked for scanning errors.
Michael Hart passed away in 2011 at the age of 64, but his legacy is as vigorously alive as ever. Project Gutenberg has become a worldwide phenomenon. There are sister sites in Australia and Canada. Projekt Gutenberg-DE is dedicated to German literature, and Project Runeberg to Nordic literature.
The vast majority of works in the Project Gutenberg library are in English, though the addition of works in other languages was started in 1997. In 2004 Project Gutenberg Europe and Distributed Proofreaders Europe were formed to facilitate the process of adding more non-English works. The Project Gutenberg archive now includes works in more than 50 languages.
All of this was accomplished without ever charging the public for any of the books that the project has made available to them. While the PGLAF takes donations to help with expenses, the e-books are and always will be completely free of charge, created by the tens of thousands of volunteers in the last half-century whose only compensation, as it was for Michael Hart, is the sheer joy of sharing books.
…
Sources:
Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org)
Hot off the Press (www.blog.pgdp.com)
Encyclopaedia Britannica (britannica.com)
between the pages 