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the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a
great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking
each other to an Etext to Peter Pan when they come back from watching Hook at
the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have
also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project
Gutenberg Etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Kahn; a Peter Pan quote
finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the
Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our
libraries.

We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation,
movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these
quotations in an easy to find Etext format.

With Plain Vanilla ASCII you will be easily able to search an entire library,
without any program more sophisticated than a plain search program. In fact,
these Project Gutenberg Etext files are so plain that you can do a search on
them without even using an intermediate search program (i.e. a program between
you and the disk). Norton's and other direct disk access programs can search
every one of your files without you even naming them, pointing to an Etext
directory, or whatever. You can simply search a raw output from the disk. . .I
do this on a half gigabyte disk partition, containing all our editions."

In this same spirit, Project Gutenberg selects Etexts that large portions of the
audience will want and use frequently. It has also avoided requests, demands,
and pressures to create authoritative editions.

"We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in
Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal
to release Etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader.
Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading
ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those
requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an
'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more
feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the
other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level, before the end of the
year 2001, when we are scheduled to complete our 10,000 book Project Gutenberg