there were books in Esperanto (45 books), Swedish (40 books), Danish
(20 books), Catalan (19 books), Welsh (10 books), Norwegian (10 books), Russian
(7 books), Icelandic (7 books), Hungarian (7 books), Middle English (6 books),
Greek (6 books) and Bulgarian (6 books).

3. THE METHOD

Whether digitized years ago or now, all the books are digitized in 7-bit plain
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), called Plain Vanilla
ASCII. Used since the beginnings of computing, it is the set of unaccented
characters present on a standard English-language keyboard (A-Z, a-z, numbers,
punctuation and other basic symbols). When 8-bit ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or
ISO-Latin) is used for books with accented characters like French or German,
Project Gutenberg also produces a 7-bit ASCII version with the accents stripped.
(This doesn't apply for languages that are not "convertible" in ASCII, like
Chinese, encoded in Big-5.)

Plain Vanilla ASCII is the best format by far. It is "the lowest common
denominator". It can be read, written, copied and printed by any simple text
editor or word processor on any electronic device. It is the only format
compatible with 99% of hardware and software. It can be used as it is or to
create versions in many other formats. It will still be used while other formats
will be obsolete (or are already obsolete, like formats of a few short-lived
reading devices launched since 1999). It is the assurance collections will never
be obsolete, and will survive future technological changes. The goal is to
preserve the texts not only over decades but over centuries. There is no other
standard as widely used as ASCII right now, even Unicode, a "universal" encoding
system created in 1991.

Project Gutenberg also publishes books in well-known formats like HTML, XML or
RTF. There are Unicode files too. Any other format provided by volunteers (PDF,
LIT, TeX and many others) is usually accepted, as long as they also supply an
ASCII version where possible.

But a large scale conversion into other formats is handed over to other
organizations. For example Blackmask Online, which uses Project Gutenberg's
collections to offer thousands of free books in eight different formats based on
the Open eBook (OeB) format. Or Manybooks.net, which converts Project
Gutenberg's books into formats readable on PDAs. Or Mobilebooks, with 5,000
books in Java (.jar) format that can be downloaded from the website to be