ed on the website in 1998, "The Light Literature Collection is
designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the
person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we
hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etext of 'Peter
Pan' when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they
read 'Alice in Wonderland' after seeing it on TV. We have also been
told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project
Gutenberg etext releases (from 'Moby Dick' in 'The Wrath of Khan'; a
Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a
reference to 'Through the Looking-Glass' in JFK. This was a primary
concern when we chose the books for our libraries. We want people to be
able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music,
other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in
an easy-to-find etext format."

Project Gutenberg has selected books intended for the general public.
It has not focused on providing authoritative editions. "We do not
write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare
has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to
release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general
reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general
lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we
probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However,
for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to
wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend
to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for
comparative study on a scholarly level."

In August 1998, Michael Hart wrote in an email interview: "My own
personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached
in October 2003] and if I can get some major support, I would like to
expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for
the average etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus
changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000
times as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in U.S. terminology."

# 1,000 to 10,000 ebooks

From 1998 to 2000, the "output" was an average of 36 books per month.

Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. eBook #2000 was
"Don Quijote" (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language.