te 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.
We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare
and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly
level."

In August 1998, Michael Hart wrote in an email interview: "My
own personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal
was reached in October 2003] and if I can get some major
support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also
expand our potential audience for the average etext from 1.x%
of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal
from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as
many, a trillion and a quadrillion in U.S. terminology."

# 1,000 to 10,000 ebooks

From 1998 to 2000, the "output" was an average of 36 books per
month.

Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. eBook #2000
was "Don Quijote" (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its
original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. eBook
#3000 was "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" (In the
Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel
Proust, in French, its original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. eBook
#4000 was "The French Immortals Series" (1905), in English.
This book is an anthology of short fictions by authors from the
French Academy (Academie francaise): Emile Souvestre, Pierre
Loti, Hector Malot, Charles de Bernard, Alphonse Daudet, and
others.

Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 ebooks in April 2002. eBook
#5000 was "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" (early 16th
century). Since its release, this ebook has stayed in the Top
100 of downloaded books.

In 1988, Michael Hart chose to type in "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" because they would each fit on one
360 K disk, the standard of the time. In 2002, the standard
disk was 1.44 M and could be compressed as a ZIP file.

A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than
long enough for the average book. The ASCII version of a 300-
page novel is 1 M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files,
that can be downloaded as is or in ZIP format. An average of 50
h