the renowned French Academy (Academie
francaise), notably Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot, Charles de
Bernard and Alphonse Daudet.

Available in April 2002, the 5000th eText was The Notebooks of Leonardo da
Vinci, which he wrote at the beginning of the 16th century. A text that is still
in the Top 100 of downloaded texts in 2005.

In 1988, Michael Hart chose to digitize Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and
Peter Pan because they each fitted on one 360 K disk, the standard of the time.
Fifteen years later, in 2002, 1.44 M is the standard disk and ZIP is the
standard compression. The practical file size is about 3 million characters,
more than long enough for the average book. The digitized 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 eText selected, copyright-cleared,
scanned, proofread, formatted and assembled.

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

In 2002, around 100 eTexts were released per month. In Spring 2002, Project
Gutenberg's eTexts represented 1/4 of all the public domain works freely
available on the web and listed nearly exhaustively by The Internet Public
Library (IPL). An impressive result thanks to the relentless work of 1,000
volunteers in several countries.

= 10,000 eBooks in October 2003

1,000 eTexts in August 1997, 2,000 eTexts in May 1999, 3,000 eTexts in December
2000, 4,000 eTexts in October 2001, 5,000 eTexts in April 2002, 10,000 eTexts in
October 2003. eText number 10000 is The Magna Carta, the first English
constitutional text, signed at the beginning of the 13th century.

From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the number of eTexts doubled,
going from 5,000 to 10,000, with a monthly average of 300 new digitized books.
In December 2003, most of the titles (9,400 eBooks) were also burned on a DVD to
celebrate the landmark of 10,000 eTexts, renamed as eBooks, according to the
latest terminology in the field. A few months before, in August 2003, a "Best of
Gutenberg" CD was made available containing 600 eBooks (as a follow-up to other
CDs in the past). People could request the CD and DVD for free, and were then
encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. (In 2005, C