version where possible.

Initially, the books were mostly in English. As the original Project
Gutenberg is based in the United States, its first focus was the
English-speaking community in the country and worldwide. In October
1997, Michael Hart expressed his intention to digitize ebooks in other
languages. In early 1998, the catalog had a few titles in French (10
titles), German, Italian, Spanish and Latin. In July 1999, Michael
wrote: "I am publishing in one new language per month right now, and
will continue as long as possible."

In the 2000s, multilingualism became a priority for Project Gutenberg,
like internationalization, with Project Gutenberg Australia (created in
August 2001), Project Gutenberg Europe (created in January 2004),
Project Gutenberg Canada (created in July 2007), and others to come.

The launching of Project Gutenberg Europe and Distributed Proofreaders
Europe (DP Europe) by Project Rastko was an important step. Founded in
1997, Project Rastko is a non-governmental cultural and educational
project. One of its goals is the online publishing of Serbian culture.
It is part of the Balkans Cultural Network Initiative, a regional
cultural network for the Balkan peninsula in south-eastern Europe.

DP Europe has used the software of the original Distributed
Proofreaders, launched in 2000 to share proofreading among a number of
volunteers. Since the beginning, DP Europe has been a multilingual
website, with its main pages translated into several European languages
by volunteer translators. In April 2004, DP Europe was available in 12
languages. The long-term goal was 60 languages and 60 linguistic teams
in the main European languages. DP Europe supports Unicode instead of
ASCII, to be able to proofread ebooks in numerous languages.

First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique number for
every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the
program, no matter what the language" (excerpt from the website). This
double-byte platform-independent encoding provides a basis for the
processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language, and
any modern software and information technology protocols. Unicode is
maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and is a component of the W3C
(World Wide Web Consortium) specifications. In 2008, 50% of available
documents on the internet were encoded in Unicode, with the other 50%
encoded in ASCII.

In the original Project Gutenberg in