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Project Gutenberg (often abbreviated as PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works. Founded in 1971, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. The project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer.

History

Project Gutenberg was started by Michael Hart in 1971. Hart, a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. Through friendly operators, he received an account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; its value at that time has since been variously estimated at $100,000 or $100,000,000. Hart has said he wanted to "give back" this gift by doing something that could be considered to be of great value.

This particular computer was one of the 15 nodes on the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed that computers would one day be accessible to the general public and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. He used a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, and this became the first Project Gutenberg e-text. He named the project for Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable-type printing press revolution.

By the mid-1990s, Hart was running Project Gutenberg from Illinois Benedictine College. More volunteers had joined the effort. Most text was entered manually until image scanners and optical character recognition software improved and became more widely available, which made book scanning more feasible. Hart later came to an arrangement with Carnegie Mellon University, which agreed to administer Project Gutenberg's finances. As the volume of e-texts increased, volunteers began to take over the project's day-to-day operations that Hart had run.

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Pietro Di Miceli, an Italian volunteer, developed and administered the first Project Gutenberg website and started the development of the Project online Catalog. In his ten years in this role (1994–2004), the Project web pages won a number of awards, often being featured in "best of the Web" listings, and contributing to the Project popularity [1].

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• Project Gutenberg Europe [3] is a project run by Project Rastko in Serbia-Montenegro. It aims at being a Project Gutenberg for all of Europe, and has started to post its first projects in 2005. It is running the Distributed Proofreaders software to quickly produce etexts.
• Project Gutenberg Luxembourg [4] publishes mostly, but not exclusively, books that are written in Luxembourgish.
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For a list of other similar projects, some of which have been inspired by Project Gutenberg, see the list of digital library projects.

Notes

(Project Gutenberg calls its products "ebooks," and that term is used here. The corresponding Wikipedia term is e-texts)

See also

• Google Book Search
• Open Content Alliance

External links

• Official website
• Distributed Proofreaders a worldwide group of volunteer editors which are now the main source of ebooks for Project Gutenberg
• HTML Writers Guild provides guidance in using XHTML and XML markup for Project Gutenberg
• Works by Project Gutenberg at Project Gutenberg (note that many of these have been renamed to Project Gutenberg for trademark concerns, and are not original with the Project)
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