om politicians or economic interests. The aim is
also to ensure respect for the volunteers, who can be confident their work will
be used not just for decades but for centuries. Volunteers can network through
mailing lists and weekly or monthly newsletters. Donations are used to buy
equipment and supplies, mostly computers and scanners. Founded in 2000, the
PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time
employees.

More generally, Michael should be given more credit as the real inventor of the
eBook. If we consider the eBook in its etymological sense, that is to say a book
that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file, it is now 34
years old and was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. This is a much more
comforting paternity than the various commercial launchings in proprietary
formats that peppered the early 2000s. There is no reason for the term "eBook"
to be the monopoly of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gemstar and others. The
non-commercial eBook is a full eBook, and not a "poor" version, just as
non-commercial ePublishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and as valuable
as commercial ePublishing. Project Gutenberg eTexts are now called eBooks, to
use the recent terminology in the field.

In July 1971, sending a 5K file to 100 people would have crashed the network of
the time. In November 2002, Project Gutenberg could post the 75 files of the
Human Genome Project, with files of dozens or hundreds of megabytes, shortly
after its initial release in February 2001, because it was public domain. In
2004, a computer hard disk costing US$140 could potentially hold the entire
Library of Congress. And we probably are only a few years away from a storage
disk capable of holding all the print media of our planet.

What about documents other than text?

In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks. As
of 2005, there are 391 computer-generated audio books and a few human-read audio
books. The number of human-read eBooks should greatly increase over the next few
years. As for computer-generated eBooks, it seems they won't be stored in a
specific section any more, but "converted" when requested from the existing
electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be
possible, as a useful tool for visually impaired readers.

Launched at the same time, The Sheet Music Subproject is dedicated to digitized
music sheet. It also c