Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit organization (since 2000) that maintains an electronic library of public domain works that have been digitized, or converted into e-books, by volunteers and archived for download from the organization’s website, www.gutenberg.org. The project got its start on July 4, 1971, when Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, began typing the U.S. Declaration of Independence into the school’s computer system for distribution free of charge. He soon followed with the works of William Shakespeare and the Bible. Thus began Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library. The copyright on any book published before 1923 in the United States expired no more than 75 years later, at which point it entered the public domain. Any work published between 1923 and 1977 retains its copyright for 95 years. The copyright on any work published in later years expires 70 years after the author’s death or 95 years after publication in the case of a corporate work.

Over the next 20 years, Hart transcribed about 100 books before the spread of the Internet allowed for a vast international expansion in interest. The project grew to include hundreds and then thousands of volunteers around the world, and Hart took on more administrative duties, including fundraising to maintain a website. The number of public works scanned (beginning in the 1990s) or transcribed steadily grew: to 1,000 (1997), 10,000 (2003), 20,000 (2006), 40,000 (2011), and 60,000 (2022). In addition, dozens of “mirror” websites were created around the world, where the e-books were also stored and available for downloading. All works are available in plain text, using simple ASCII characters with limited typography and no images, though versions in HTML (hypertext markup language) or Adobe Systems Incorporated’s PDF (portable document format) exist for some works.

In 2000 Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, a Web-based program for parsing the difficult task of proofreading scanned texts for Project Gutenberg. In 2002 Distributed Proofreaders became part of Project Gutenberg. The ability to distribute the proofreading task among volunteer teams was reported in 2002 by Slashdot, a popular technology website. As word spread, hundreds of teams formed to scan and proofread new works. By 2009 roughly half of all Project Gutenberg books had been handled by using Distributed Proofreaders.

The vast majority of works in the Project Gutenberg library are in English, though the addition of works in other languages was started in 1997. In 2004 Project Gutenberg Europe and Distributed Proofreaders Europe were formed to facilitate the process of adding more non-English works. Project Gutenberg now includes works in more than 60 languages.