n May 1999), 3,000 (in December 2000) and
4,000 (in October 2001).

37 years after its birth, Project Gutenberg is running at full
capacity. It had 5,000 books online in April 2002, 10,000 books in
October 2003, 15,000 books in January 2005, 20,000 books in December
2006 and 25,000 books in April 2008, with 340 new books available per
month, with 40 mirror sites worldwide, and with books downloaded by the
tens of thousands every day.

Whether they were digitized 30 years ago or digitized now, all the
books are captured in Plain Vanilla ASCII (the original 7-bit ASCII),
with the same formatting rules, so they can be read easily by any
machine, operating system or software, including on a PDA, a cellphone
or an eBook reader. Any individual or organization is free to convert
them to different formats, without any restriction except respect for
copyright laws in the country involved.

In January 2004, Project Gutenberg had spread across the Atlantic with
the creation of Project Gutenberg Europe. On top of its original
mission, it also became a bridge between languages and cultures, with a
number of national and linguistic sections. While adhering to the same
principle: books for all and for free, through electronic versions that
can be used and reproduced indefinitely. And, as a second step, the
digitization of images and sound, in the same spirit.

1974: INTERNET

[Overview]

When Project Gutenberg began in July 1971, the internet was not even
born. On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United
States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the
mainframe he was using. In upper case, because there was no lower case
yet. But to send a 5K file to the 100 users of the embryonic internet
would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where the eText
was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still
20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. The internet was born
in 1974 with the creation of TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol /
Internet Protocol) by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in
1983. It got a boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and of the
first browser in 1993. At the end of 1997, there were 90 to 100 million
users, with one million new users every month. At the end of 2000,
there were over 300 million users.

1977: UNIMARC

[Overview]

In 1977, the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations)
pu