ours is necessary to get an ebook selected, copyright-cleared,
scanned, proofread, formatted and assembled.

A few numbers are reserved for "special" books. For example,
eBook #1984 is reserved for George Orwell's classic, published
in 1949, and still a long way from falling into public domain.

The "output" in 2001 and 2002 was an average of 100 books per
month.

In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg's ebooks represented 25% of
all the public domain works freely available on the web, an
impressive result if we think of all the pages that were
scanned and proofread by thousands of volunteers in several
countries.

1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000
ebooks in December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000
ebooks in April 2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. eBook
#10000 was The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 and known as the
first English constitutional text.

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.

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