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 times as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in US terminology."

= 1,000 to 10,000 Books

From 1998 to 2000, there was a steadfast average of 36 new books per month. In
May 1999, there were 2,000 books. The 2000th book was Don Quijote, by Cervantes
(published in 1605), in Spanish, its original language.

Released in December 2000, the 3000th book was the third volume of A l'ombre des
jeunes filles en fleurs (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), by Marcel
Proust (published in 1919), in French, its original language. Around 104 books
per month were released in 2001.

Released in October 2001, the 4000th book was The French Immortals Series, in
English. Published in 1905 by Maison Mazarin, Paris, this book is an anthology
of short fictions by authors belonging to the renowned French Academy (Academie
francaise), notably Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot, Charles de
Bernard and Alphonse Daudet.

Available in April 2002, the 5000th book was The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,
which he wrote at the beginning of the 16th century. A text that is steadily in
the Top 100 of downloaded texts.

In 1988, Michael Hart chose to digitize Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and
Peter Pan because they each fitted on one 360 K disk, the standard of the time.
Fifteen years later, in 2002, 1.44 M is the standard disk and ZIP is the
standard compression. The practical file size is about 3 million characters,
more than long enough for the average book. The digitized ASCII version of a
300-page novel is 1 M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be
downloaded as is or in ZIP format.

An average of 50 hours is necessary to get an eText selected, copyright-cleared,
scanned, proofread, formatted and assembled.

A few numbers are reserved for "special" books. For example, eBook number 1984
is reserved for George Orwell's classic, published in 1949, and still a long way
from falling into the public domain.

In 2002, around 100 books were released per month. In Spring 2002, Project
Gutenberg's books represented 1/4 of all the public domain works freely
available on the web and listed nearly exhaustively by the Internet Public
Library (IPL). An impressive result thanks to the relentless work of thousands
of volunteers in several countries.