Electronic Public Library."

"Anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely."
The Project Gutenberg Philosophy uses this premise to make information, books
and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of
the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search.
Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in what has become known as 'Plain
Vanilla ASCII', meaning the low set of the American Standard Code for
Information Interchange (ASCII). The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware
and software a person is likely to run into can read and search these files."
Plain Vanilla ASCII thus addresses the audience with Apples and Ataris all the
way to the old homebrew Z80 computers, not to mention the audience of Mac, UNIX
and mainframers. Michael Hart explains:

"When we started, the files had to be very small .... So doing the U.S.
Declaration of Independence (only 5K) seemed the best place to start. This was
followed by the Bill of Rights - then the whole U.S. Constitution, as space was
getting large (at least by the standards of 1973). Then came the Bible, as
individual books of the Bible were not that large, then Shakespeare (a play at a
time), and then into general work in the areas of light and heavy literature and
references...By the time Project Gutenberg got famous, the standard was 360K
disks, so we did books such as Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan because they
could fit on one disk. Now 1.44 is the standard disk and ZIP is the standard
compression; the practical file size is about three million characters, more
than long enough for the average book.

However, pictures are still so bulky to store on disk that it will still be a
while before we include even the lowres Tenniel illustrations in Alice and
Looking-Glass. However we are very interested in doing them, and are only
waiting for advances in technology to release a test edition. The market will
have to establish some standards for graphics, however, before we can attempt to
reach general audiences, at least on the graphics level."

The On-Line Books Page is a directory of books that can be freely read right on
the Internet. It was founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom, a graduate student
in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who
remains the editor of the pages. It includes: an index of more than 7,000
on-line books on the Internet, which