Marie Lebert

“ According to Michael Hart, and Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby, "as of January 2009, the total number of separate public domain books in the world is between 20 and 30 million, and that 5 million are already on the internet, and we expect another million per year from now until all the easy-to-find books are done. 10 million or so will be done before people start to think about the facts telling them the rate cannot continue to double as they come up to the point of already having done half. ”

“ We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. ”

“ Projekt Gutenberg-DE was the first German digital library of books from public domain, created in 1994 as a partner of Project Gutenberg. Texts were available for online reading, with one webpage for short texts and with several webpages—one per chapter—for longer works. There was an alphabetic list of authors and titles, and a short biography and bibliography for each author.
Project Gutenberg keeps its administrative and financial structure to the bare minimum. Its motto fits into three words: "Less is more." The minimal rules give much space to volunteers and to new ideas. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ So, as you can see, this is a serious degrading of the public domain, as a matter of continuing policy."
John Mark Ockerbloom, founder of The Online Books Page in 1993, got also deeply concerned by the 1998 amendment. He wrote in August 1999: "I think it is important for people on the web to understand that copyright is a social contract that is designed for the public good—where the public includes both authors and readers. This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. ”

“ Works created from 1978 on enter the public domain 95 years after publication or 120 years after creation if the author is a corporate one: nothing will enter the public domain until 2074.
Each copyright legislation is more restrictive than the previous one. A major blow for digital libraries was the amendment to the 1976 Copyright Act signed on October 27, 1998. As explained by Michael Hart in July 1999: "Nothing will expire for another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. ”

“ Project Gutenberg etexts—the term used originally—have been renamed ebooks, to use the recent terminology in the field.
In July 1971, sending a 5K file to 100 people would have crashed the network of the time. In November 2002, Project Gutenberg could post the 75 files of the "Human Genome Project", with files of dozens or hundreds of megabytes, shortly after its initial release in February 2001 as a work from public domain. In 2004, a computer hard disk costing US $140 could potentially hold the entire Library of Congress. ”

“ The section Project Gutenberg PrePrints was set up in January 2006 to collect items submitted to Project Gutenberg which were interesting enough to be available online, but not ready yet to be added to the main Project Gutenberg collections, the reason being missing data, low-quality files, formats which were not handy, etc. ”

“ From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collections doubled, going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly average of 300 new ebooks. The fast growth was the work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of books between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the books available on the site and proofread a given page. It is recommended they do a page per day if possible. ”