ontains a few music recordings. Some still pictures and
moving pictures are also available. These new collections should take off in the
future.
But digitizing books remains the priority, and there is a big demand, as
confirmed by the tens of thousands of eBooks that are downloaded every day. For
example, on July 31, 2005, there were 37,532 downloads for the day, 243,808
downloads for the week (July 24-31), and 1,154,765 downloads for the month. This
only for transfers from ibiblio.org (University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill), the main eBook distribution site (which also hosts the website). The
Internet Archive is the backup distribution site and provides unlimited disk
space for storage and processing. Project Gutenberg has 44 mirror sites in many
countries and is looking for new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for
sharing its eBooks. The "Top 100" lists the top 100 eBooks and the top 100
authors for the previous day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks can also help bridge the "digital divide." They can be
read on a computer or a secondhand PDA costing just a few dollars. Solar-powered
PDAs offer a good solution in remote regions and developing countries.
eBooks are also copied on CDs and DVDs. Blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing,
as does their burning on a CD or DVD writer. Project Gutenberg sends a free CD
or DVD to anyone who asks for it, and people are encouraged to make copies for a
friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of Gutenberg"
CD contains over 600 eBooks. Released in December 2003, the first Project
Gutenberg DVD contains 9,400 eBooks. A new DVD is in preparation. The current
prototype contains nearly 26,000 eBooks (with some titles in different versions
and formats), and is about 3/4 full.
By the time the collections hit one million eBooks in 2015 or before, it is
hoped machine translation software will be able to convert them from one to
another of 100 languages. In ten years from now, it is possible that machine
translation will be judged 99% satisfactory (research is very active on that
front, but there is still a lot to do), allowing for the reading of literary
classics in a choice of many languages. In 2004, Project Gutenberg was in touch
with a European project studying how to combine translation software and human
translators, somewhat as OCR software is now combined with the work of
proofreaders.
34 years after the begi
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