the various commercial launchings in proprietary formats that peppered
the early 2000s. There is no reason for the term "ebook" to be the
monopoly of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gemstar, and others. The
non-commercial ebook is a full ebook, and not a "poor" version, just as
non-commercial electronic publishing is a fully-fledged way of
publishing, and is as valuable as commercial electronic publishing.
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.
And we probably are only a few years away from a USB drive--or an
equivalent storage disk--capable of holding all the books on our
planet.

What about documents other than text? In September 2003, Project
Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks, with human-read
ebooks. Computer-generated ebooks are "converted" when requested from
the existing electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated
requests will be possible in the future. Launched at the same time, the
Sheet Music Subproject contains digitized music sheet, as well as a few
music recordings. Some still pictures and moving pictures are also
available. These collections should take off in the future.

But digitizing books remains the priority, and there is a big demand,
as confirmed by the tens of thousands of books that are downloaded
every day.

For example, on July 31, 2005, there were 37,532 downloads for the day,
243,808 downloads for the week, and 1,154,765 downloads for the month.

On May 6, 2007, there were 89,841 downloads for the day, 697,818
downloads for the week, and 2,995,436 downloads for the month.

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.

These numbers are the downloads from ibiblio.org (at University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill), the main distribution site, which also
hosts the website gutenberg.org. The Internet Archive is the backup
distribution site and provides unlimited disk space for storage and
processing.