explained:

"We consider Etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other
than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly
compete once people each find their own comfortable way to Etexts, especially in
schools. [...] My own personal goal is to put 10,000 Etexts on the Net, 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 time as many... a trillion and a quadrillion
in US terminology."

The Etext # 1000 was Dante's Divine Comedy, in both English and Italian, and
Michael Hart dreams about Etext # 2000 for January 1st, 2000. In the Project
Gutenberg Newsletter of February 1998, he wrote: "If we do 36 per month for the
next 23 month period, we should be able to reach 2,000 Etexts by January 1 of
the year 2000. . . [...] I think it would be kind of nice to do our 2,000th
Etext during the big celebration..."

An average of 50 hours is necessary to get any Etext selected, entered,
proofread, edited, copyright-searched, analyzed, etc.

How did Project Gutenberg begin?

Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's
account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox
Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois.
Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of "normal computing",
that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given... so he
had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. He immediately
announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing,
but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our
libraries. He then proceeded to type in the Declaration of Independence and
tried to send it to everyone on the networks. Project Gutenberg was born.

There are three sections in the Project Gutenberg, basically described as:

- Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass,
Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.;

- Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare,
Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.; and

- References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia,
dictionaries, etc.

"The Light Literature Collection i