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Project Gutenberg reached 25,000 books in April 2008. eBook #25000 was
"English Book Collectors" (1902), by William Younger Fletcher.

If Gutenberg allowed everyone to get print books at little cost,
Project Gutenberg has allowed everyone to get a library of electronic
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In February 2009, there were 32,500 Project Gutenberg (PG) ebooks,
including the ebooks at PG Australia (1,750 ebooks), PG Europe (600
ebooks) and PG Canada (250 ebooks), with more Project Gutenberg
websites to come in other countries. Ten new ebooks have been added per
day.

As explained by Michael Hart: "In addition, there is 'PrePrints' where
we put anything we don't know for sure will qualify as a PG ebook. This
gets instant exposure, and was created to help keep things flowing.
There are 2,020 ebooks available at PrePrints. The Project Gutenberg
Consortia Center (PGCC) has over 75,000 ebooks rendered as PDF files.
The difference? These files were prepared by other eLibraries, not
Project Gutenberg, and are using our worldwide distribution network to
be seen. Thus, counting these 75,000+ along with our over 32,500 other
ebooks, has generated a grand total of over 100,000 ebooks."

SHRINKING OF PUBLIC DOMAIN

Michael Hart created Project Gutenberg in July 1971 to make electronic
versions of literary works and disseminate them for free. In 2009,
Project Gutenberg has had tens of thousands of downloads every day. As
recalled by Michael in January 2009, "I knew [in July 1971] that the
future of computing, and the internet, was going to be... 'The
Information Age.' That was also the day I said we would be able to
carry quite literally the entire Library of Congress in one hand and
the system would certainly make it illegal... too much power to leave
in the hands of the masses."

As defined by Project Gutenberg, "public domain is the set of cultural
works that are free of copyright, and belong to everyone equally", i.e.
for books, the ones that can be digitized and released on the internet
for free. But the task of Project Gutenberg hasn't be made any easier
by the increasing restrictions to public domain. In former times, 50%
of works belonged to public domain, and could be freely used by
everybody. A much tougher legislation was set in place over the
centuries, step by step, especially during the 20th century, despite
our so-called "i