of the
Human Genome Project, with files of dozens or hundreds of megabytes, shortly
after its initial release in February 2001, because it was public domain. In
2004, a computer hard disk costing US$140 could potentially hold the entire
Library of Congress. And we probably are only a few years away from a storage
disk capable of holding all the print media of our planet.

What about documents other than text? In September 2003, Project Gutenberg
launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks. As of December 2006, there are 367
computer-generated audio books and 132 human-read audio books. The number of
human-read books should greatly increase over the next few years. There were 412
books in May 2008. As for computer-generated books, they won't be stored in a
specific section any more, but "converted" when requested from the existing
electronic files in the main collections. Voice-activated requests will be
possible, as a useful tool for visually impaired readers.

Launched at the same time, The Sheet Music Subproject is dedicated to digitized
music sheet. It also contains a few music recordings. Some still pictures and
moving pictures are also available. These new collections should take off in the
future.

But digitizing books remains the priority, and there is a big demand, as
confirmed by the tens of thousands of books that are downloaded every day. For
example, on July 31, 2005, there were 37,532 downloads for the day, 243,808
downloads for the week, and 1,154,765 downloads for the month. On May 6, 2007,
there were 89,841 downloads for the day, 697,818 downloads for the week, and
2,995,436 downloads for the month. A few days later, the number of downloads for
the month hit the landmark of 3 million downloads. On May 8, 2008, there were
115,138 downloads for the day, 714,323 downloads for the week, and 3,055,327
downloads for the month. This only for transfers from ibiblio.org (University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill), the main book distribution site (which also
hosts the website). The Internet Archive is the backup distribution site and
provides unlimited disk space for storage and processing.

Project Gutenberg has 40 mirror sites in many countries and is looking for new
ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its books.

The "Top 100" lists the top 100 books and the top 100 authors for the previous
day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.

Project Gutenberg books can also help bridge the "digital di