Marie Lebert

“ A few lines now on Project Rastko, which launched such a difficult and exciting project for Europe, and catalysed volunteers' energy in both Eastern and Western Europe (and anywhere else: as the internet has no boundaries, there is no need to live in Europe to register) . Founded in 1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture. It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe. ”

“ Project Gutenberg is convinced that proofreading by human beings is a very important step, and that this step makes all the difference. The use of scanned books as is —converted to text format by OCR software with no proofreading— gives a much lower quality result. ”

“ In 2004, Project Gutenberg was in touch with a European project studying how to combine translation software and human translators, somewhat as OCR software is now combined with the work of proofreaders.
37 years after the beginnings of Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart describes himself as a workaholic who devotes his entire life to his project, because he thinks electronic books will become the "killer ap (plication) " of the computer revolution. He considers himself a pragmatic and farsighted altruist. ”

“ With 55 languages and 40 mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. Project Gutenberg promotes digitization in “text format”, meaning that a book can be copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. Contrary to other formats, the files are accessible for low-bandwidth use. The main source of new Project Gutenberg eBooks is Distributed Proofreaders, launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to help in the digitizing of books from public domain. ”

“ Any individual or organization is free to convert them to different formats, without any restriction except respect for copyright laws in the country involved.
In January 2004, Project Gutenberg had spread across the Atlantic with the creation of Project Gutenberg Europe. On top of its original mission, it also became a bridge between languages and cultures, with a number of national and linguistic sections. While adhering to the same principle: books for all and for free, through electronic versions that can be used and reproduced indefinitely. ”

“ In July 2005, there were works in 42 languages, including Iroquoian, Sanskrit and the Mayan languages. The seven main languages — with more than 50 books — were English, French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Spanish and Chinese. In December 2006, there were books in 50 languages. They were ten main languages, the above ones plus Italian, Portuguese and Tagalog. In April 2008, there were books in 55 languages, with eleven main languages, the above ones plus Latin. Esperanto was not far with 45 books, and Swedish followed with 40 books.
French is the second main language after English. ”

“ As the web was becoming a popular medium, it became easier to circulate eTexts and recruit volunteers. Project Gutenberg gradually got into its stride, with the digitization of 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 celebrated its 100th book by releasing The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. ”

“ OCR is usually 99% accurate, which makes for about 10 corrections a page. The proofreader saves each page as it is completed and can then either stop work or do another. The books are proofread twice, and the second time only by experienced proofreaders. All the pages of the book are then formatted, combined and assembled by post-processors to make an eBook. ”

“ The minimal rules give much space to volunteers and to new ideas. The goal is to ensure its independence from loans and other funding and from ephemeral cultural priorities, to avoid pressure from politicians or economic interests. The aim is also to ensure respect for the volunteers, who can be confident their work will be used not just for decades but for centuries. Volunteers can network through mailing lists, weekly or monthly newsletters, discussion lists, wikis and forums. ”

“ Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers and scanners. Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time employees.
More generally, Michael should be given more credit as the real inventor of the electronic book (eBook) . If we consider the eBook in its etymological sense, that is to say a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file, it is now 37 years old and was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. ”

“ Half of these 20,000 books were produced by Distributed Proofreaders since October 2000, with a monthly average of 346 new digitized books in 2006. If 32 years were necessary to digitize the first 10,000 books, between July 1971 and October 2003, 3 years and 2 months were necessary to digitize the following 10,000 books, between October 2003 and December 2006. Project Gutenberg of Australia was about to reach 1,500 books (this goal was achieved in April 2007) and Project Gutenberg Europe reached 500 books. ”

“ In 2004, the average was 300-400 proofreaders participating each day, and finishing 4,000-7,000 pages per day, the equivalent of four pages a minute. The number of books that have been processed through Distributed Proofreaders has grown fast, with a total of 3,000 books in February 2004, 5,000 books in October 2004 and 7,000 books in May 2005, 8,000 books in February 2006 and 10,000 books in March 2007, with five books produced per day and 52,000 volunteers in December 2007. ”

“ As of December 2006, there are 367 computer-generated audio books and 132 human-read audio books. The number of human-read books should greatly increase over the next few years. There were 412 books in May 2008. As for computer-generated books, they won't be stored in a specific section any more, but "converted" when requested from the existing electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be possible, as a useful tool for visually impaired readers. ”

“ 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. This only for transfers from ibiblio.org (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) , the main book distribution site (which also hosts the website) . 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 looking for new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its books. ”

“ It doesn't seem much, but with hundreds of volunteers it really adds up. In 2003, about 250-300 people were working each day all over the world, producing a daily total of 2,500-3,000 pages, the equivalent of two pages a minute. ”