the U.S., there were ebooks in 25
languages in February 2004, in 42 languages in July 2005, including
Sanskrit and the Mayan languages, and in 50 languages in December 2006.
The ten top languages were English, French, German, Finnish, Dutch,
Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Portuguese and Tagalog.

[Many thanks to Russon Wooldridge and Mike Cook for revising previous
versions of this section.]

FIRST MULTILINGUAL PROJECTS

= [Quote]

Tyler Chambers, who created the Human-Languages Page and the Internet
Dictionary Project, wrote in September 1998: "Online, my work has been
with making language information available to more people through a
couple of my web-based projects. While I'm not multilingual, nor even
bilingual, myself, I see an importance to language and multilingualism
that I see in very few other areas. The internet has allowed me to
reach millions of people and help them find what they're looking for,
something I'm glad to do. (...) Overall, I think that the web has been
great for language awareness and cultural issues -- where else can you
randomly browse for 20 minutes and run across three or more different
languages with information you might potentially want to know?"

= Travlang

Travlang is a website dedicated to both travel and languages, created
in 1994 by Michael C. Martin on his university's website when he was a
student in physics. Travlang included one section called Foreign
Languages for Travelers, with links to online tools to learn 60
languages. Another section, Translating Dictionaries, gave access to
free dictionaries in a number of languages (Afrikaans, Czech, Danish,
Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Frisian, German, Hungarian, Italian,
Latin, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish). Other sections offered links to
language dictionaries, translation services, language schools, and
multilingual bookstores. In 1998, Travlang was still maintained by its
founder, who had become a researcher in experimental physics at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, California.

Michael C. Martin wrote in August 1998: "I think the web is an ideal
place to bring different cultures and people together, and that
includes being multilingual. Our Travlang site is so popular because of
this, and people desire to feel in touch with other parts of the world.
(...) The internet is really a great tool for communicating with people
you wouldn't have the opportunity to interact with otherwise. I truly
enjoy th