unteers. 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.
Books were also copied on CDs and DVDs. As blank CDs and DVDs cost next
to nothing, Project Gutenberg began burning and sending a free CD or
DVD to anyone asking for it. People were encouraged to make copies for
a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of
Gutenberg" CD contained 600 ebooks. The first Project Gutenberg DVD was
released in December 2003 to celebrate the first 10,000 ebooks, with
the burning of most titles (9,400 ebooks).
# 10,000 to 20,000 ebooks
In December 2003, there were 11,000 ebooks, which represented 110 G, in
several formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF and others, as is or zipped). In May
2004, there were 12,600 ebooks, with represented 135 G. With more than
300 new books added per month (338 books per month in 2004), the number
of gigabytes was expected to double every year.
The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was affiliated with
Project Gutenberg in 2003, and became an official Project Gutenberg
site. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering collections of
existing ebooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg focusing on the
production of ebooks.
In January 2005, Project Gutenberg had 15,000 ebooks. eBook #15000 was
"The Life of Reason" (1906), by George Santayana.
What about languages? There were ebooks in 25 languages in February
2004, and in 42 languages in July 2005, including Sanskrit and the
Mayan languages. The seven top languages--with more than 50
books--were English (with 14,548 ebooks on July 27, 2005), French (577
ebooks), German (349 ebooks), Finnish (218 ebooks), Dutch (130 ebooks),
Spanish (103 ebooks), and Chinese (69 ebooks). There were ebooks in 50
languages in December 2006. The ten top languages were English (with
17,377 books on December 16, 2006), French (966 books), German (412
books), Finnish (344 books), Dutch (244 books), Spanish (140 books),
Italian (102 books), Chinese (69 books), Portuguese (68 books), and
Tagalog (51 books).
Project Gutenberg was also spreading worldwide.
In July 2005, Project Gutenberg Australia (launched in 2001) had 500
ebooks.
In Europe, Project Rastko, based in Belgrade, Serbia, launched
Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) in December 2003 and
Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) in January 2004. Project Gutenberg
Europe released its fi
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