In July 1971, Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg with the goal of makingavailable for free, and electronically, literary works belonging to publicdomain. A pioneer site in a number of ways, Project Gutenberg was the firstinformation provider on the internet and is the oldest digital library. When theinternet became popular, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and aninternational dimension. The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (inAugust 1997) to 5,000 (in April 2002), 10,000 (in October 2003), 15,000 (inJanuary 2005), 20,000 (in December 2006) and 25,000 (in April 2008), with acurrent production rate of around 340 new books each month. With 55 languagesand 40 mirror sites around the world, books are being downloaded by the tens ofthousands every day. Project Gutenberg promotes digitization in “text format”,meaning that a book can be copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared withother books. Contrary to other formats, the files are accessible forlow-bandwidth use. The main source of new Project Gutenberg eBooks isDistributed Proofreaders, launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to help inthe digitizing of books from public domain.
