volunteers around the world making 350 new books available
every month. These 10,000 books are also available on DVD for US$1 each. Michael
hopes to have a million available by 2015.

The books are digitized in "text" format, with caps for terms in italic, bold or
underlined, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or
software. Digitization is done by scanning. The book is then proofread twice by
two different people, who make any corrections necessary. When the original is
in poor condition, as with very old books, it is typed in manually, word by
word.

Digitization in text format means a book can be copied, indexed, searched,
analyzed and compared with other books. It also makes a smaller and more easily
sendable computer file, unlike with scanning each page, which produces a bulky
"photo" file.

Hart describes himself as a workaholic who is devoting his entire life to the
project, which he sees as the start of a new Industrial Revolution. He considers
himself as a pragmatic and farsighted altruist. For years he was regarded as a
nut but now he is respected. He wants to change the world through
freely-available e-books that can be used and copied endlessly. Reading and
culture for everyone at minimal cost, on a computer or a secondhand PDA costing
just a few dollars, or even on a solar-powered PDA, which are starting to
appear.

In early 2004, after a stay on the US west coast, in San Francisco and Berkeley,
Hart went off to Europe, first Brussels and then Paris. He gave his first
lecture in France on 12 February at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, organised with
APRIL (Association pour la promotion et la recherche en informatique libre /
Association for Promotion and Research in Free Computing) and AFUL (Association
francophone des utilisateurs de Linux et des logiciels libres / French-speaking
Linux and Free Software Users' Association). He chaired a discussion at the
French National Assembly on 13 February at the invitation of the discussion
group "Produire et gerer les savoirs" (Producing and Managing Knowledge), a
branch of the "Les temps nouveaux" (New Times) group.

What about books in French? The first digitized books were mostly in English but
now there are works in 25 different languages. Of the 11,340 e-books available
as of 13 February 2004, 181 were in French. The launch of Project Gutenberg
Europe in the next few weeks should see the number grow considerably, and so
much the better.