is to say a book that
has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file - it
was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. This is a much
more comforting paternity than 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