002; 10,000 books in October 2003; 15,000
books in January 2005; 20,000 books in December 2006 and 25,000 books in April
2008.

But Project Gutenberg's results are not only measured in numbers, which can't
compete yet with the number of print books in the public domain. The results
also include the major influence that the project has had. As the oldest
producer of free books on the internet, Project Gutenberg has inspired many
other digital libraries, for example Projekt Gutenberg-DE for classic German
literature and Projekt Runeberg for classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature, to
name only two, which started respectively in 1992 and 1994.

Project Gutenberg keeps its administrative and financial structure to the bare
minimum. Its motto fits into three words: "Less is more". The minimal rules give
much space to volunteers and to new ideas. The goal is to ensure its
independence from loans and other funding and from ephemeral cultural
priorities, to avoid pressure from politicians or economic interests. The aim is
also to ensure respect for the volunteers, who can be confident their work will
be used not just for decades but for centuries. Volunteers can network through
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Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers and scanners.
Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has
only three part-time employees.

More generally, Michael should be given more credit as the real inventor of the
electronic book (eBook). If we consider the eBook in its etymological sense,
that is to say a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic
file, it is now 37 years old and was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971.
This is a much more comforting paternity than the various commercial launchings
in proprietary formats that peppered the early 2000s. There is no reason for the
term "eBook" to be the monopoly of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others. The
non-commercial eBook is a full eBook, and not a "poor" version, just as
non-commercial electronic publishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and
as valuable as commercial electronic publishing. Project Gutenberg eTexts are
now called eBooks, to use the recent terminology in the field.

In July 1971, sending a 5K file to 100 people would have crashed the network of
the time. In November 2002, Project Gutenberg could post the 75 files