Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of "normal computing", that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given… so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. He immediately announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. He then proceeded to type in the Declaration of Independence and tried to send it to everyone on the networks. Project Gutenberg was born.
There are three sections in the Project Gutenberg, basically described as:
- Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass,
Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.;
- Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare,
Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.; and
- References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.
"The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an Etext to Peter Pan when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg Etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Kahn; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries.
We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy to find Etext format.
With Plain Vanilla ASCII you will be easily able to search an entire library, without any program more sophisticated than a plain search program. In fact, these Project Gutenberg Etext files are so plain that you can do a search on them without even using an intermediate search program (i.e. a program between you and the disk). Norton's and other direct disk access programs can search every one of your files without you even naming them, pointing to an Etext directory, or whatever. You can simply search a raw output from the disk. . .I do this on a half gigabyte disk partition, containing all our editions."
In this same spirit, Project Gutenberg selects Etexts that large portions of the audience will want and use frequently. It has also avoided requests, demands, and pressures to create authoritative editions.
"We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release Etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level, before the end of the year 2001, when we are scheduled to complete our 10,000 book Project Gutenberg Electronic Public Library."