1,000 books in August 1997, 2,000 books in May 1999, 3,000 books in December
2000, 4,000 books in October 2001, 5,000 books in April 2002, 10,000 books in
October 2003. eBook number 10000 is The Magna Carta, the first English
constitutional text, signed in 1215. From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18
months, the number of books doubled, going from 5,000 to 10,000, with a monthly
average of 300 new digitized books.

10,000 books. An impressive number if we think about all the scanned and
proofread pages this number represents. A fast growth thanks to Distributed
Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the
proofreading of books between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the
books listed on the site and proofread a given page. They don't have any quota
to fulfill, but it is recommended they do a page per day if possible. It doesn't
seem much, but with hundreds of volunteers it really adds up.

Books are also copied on CDs and DVDs. Blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing,
as does their burning on a CD or DVD writer. Project Gutenberg sends a free CD
or DVD to anyone who asks for it, and people are encouraged to make copies for a
friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of Gutenberg"
CD contained over 600 books, as a follow-up to other CDs in the past). The first
Project Gutenberg DVD was released in December 2003 to celebrate the landmark of
10,000 books, with most of the existing titles (9,400 books).

= 10,000 to 20,000 Books

In December 2003, there were 11,000 books digizited in several formats, most of
them in ASCII, and some of them in HTML or XML. This represented 46,000 files,
and 110 G. On 13 February 2004, the day of Michael Hart's presentation at
UNESCO, in Paris, there were exactly 11,340 books in 25 languages. In May 2004,
the 12,581 books represented 100,000 files in 20 different formats, and 135
gigabytes. With more than 300 new books added per month (338 books in 2004), the
number of gigabytes is expected to double every year.

The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was officially affiliated to
Project Gutenberg in 2003. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering
collections of existing eBooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg which was
focusing on the production of eBooks.

In December 2003, Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP EUrope) were launched by
Project Rastko, followed by Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) in Jan