Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. eBook #3000
was "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" (In the Shadow of Young
Girls in Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel Proust, in French, its
original language.

Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. eBook #4000 was
"The French Immortals Series" (1905), in English. This book is an
anthology of short fictions by authors from the French Academy
(Academie francaise): Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot,
Charles de Bernard, Alphonse Daudet, and others.

Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 ebooks in April 2002. eBook #5000 was
"The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" (early 16th century). Since its
release, this ebook has stayed in the Top 100 of downloaded books.

In 1988, Michael Hart chose to type in "Alice's Adventures in
Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" because they would each fit on one 360 K
disk, the standard of the time. In 2002, the standard disk was 1.44 M
and could be compressed as a ZIP file.

A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than long
enough for the average book. The ASCII version of a 300-page novel is 1
M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be downloaded as
is or in ZIP format. An average of 50 hours is necessary to get an
ebook selected, copyright-cleared, scanned, proofread, formatted and
assembled.

A few numbers are reserved for "special" books. For example, eBook
#1984 is reserved for George Orwell's classic, published in 1949, and
still a long way from falling into public domain.

The "output" in 2001 and 2002 was an average of 100 books per month.

In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg's ebooks represented 25% of all the
public domain works freely available on the web, an impressive result
if we think of all the pages that were scanned and proofread by
thousands of volunteers in several countries.

1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000 ebooks in
December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000 ebooks in April
2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. eBook #10000 was The Magna Carta,
signed in 1215 and known as the first English constitutional text.

From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collections doubled,
going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly average of 300
new ebooks. The fast growth was the work of Distributed Proofreaders, a
website launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the
proofreading of books between many vol