tion is free to convert them to different formats, without
any restriction except respect for copyright laws in the country involved.

In January 2004, Project Gutenberg had spread across the Atlantic with the
creation of Project Gutenberg Europe. On top of its original mission, it also
became a bridge between languages and cultures, with a number of national and
linguistic sections. While adhering to the same principle: books for all and for
free, through electronic versions that can be used and reproduced indefinitely.
And, as a second step, the digitization of images and sound, in the same spirit.

= Beginning and Persevering

Let us get back to the beginnings of the project. When he was a student at the
University of Illinois (USA), Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 of computer
time at the Materials Research Lab of his university. On July 4, 1971, on
Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence
(signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was using. In upper case, because
there was no lower case yet. But to send a 5 K file to the 100 users of the
embryonic internet would have crashed the network. So Michael mentioned where
the eText was stored (though without a hypertext link, because the web was still
20 years ahead). It was downloaded by six users. Project Gutenberg was born.

Michael decided to use this huge amount of computer time to search the public
domain books that were stored in our libraries, and to digitize these books. He
also decided to store the electronic texts (eTexts) in the simplest way, using
the plain text format called Plain Vanilla ASCII, so they can be read easily by
any machine, operating system or software. A book would become a continuous text
file instead of a set of pages, with caps for the terms in italic, bold or
underlined of the print version.

Soon afterwards he defined Project Gutenberg's mission: to put at everyone's
disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works of the public domain as
possible for free. As he stated years later, in August 1998, "We consider eText
to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other than presenting
the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people
each find their own comfortable way to eTexts, especially in schools."

After he keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence in 1971, Michael
went on in 1972 and typed in a longer text, The United States Bill