2000 > PROJECT GUTENBERG AND LANGUAGES
[Summary] Project Gutenberg is a visionary project launched by Michael Hart in July 1971 to create free electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In 2010, Project Gutenberg offered more than 33,000 high-quality ebooks being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day, and websites in the United States, Australia, Europe and Canada, with 40 mirror sites worldwide. Project Gutenberg mainly offers ebooks in English, but multilingualism has been one of its priorities since the late 1990s. French is the second language of the project. There were ebooks in 60 languages in December 2010, thanks to the patient work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website created in 2000 to share the proofreading of ebooks between hundreds of volunteers in many countries.
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Project Gutenberg is a visionary project launched in July 1971 by Michael Hart to create free electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In the 15th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21th century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital library at no cost.
Michael worked from Illinois, typing in books from public domain, for example the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, first alone, then with the help of a few volunteers.
His project got a major boost with the invention of the web in 1990. 95% of internet users were native English speakers in the mid-1990s, so most books were in English.
Project Gutenberg was also inspiring other digital libraries in
Europe. Projekt Runeberg was launched in Sweden in 1994 to
digitize Nordic (Scandinavian) literature from public domain.
Projekt Gutenberg-DE was launched in Germany in 1994 to digitize
German literature from public domain.
French was the second language of Project Gutenberg, and still is now. The first ebooks released in French were six works by Stendhal and two works by Jules Verne, all released in early 1997. Three novels by Jules Verne were already available in English in 1994. Since then, Jules Verne has always stayed on the top list of the most downloaded authors.
In October 1997, Michael Hart wrote about producing more works in other languages than English in the Project Gutenberg newsletter. In early 1998, on top of ten French ebooks, there were a few ebooks in German, Italian, Spanish and Latin. Released in May 1999, eBook #2000 was “Don Quijote” (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language. In July 1999, Michael wrote in an email interview: "I am publishing in one new language per month right now, and will continue as long as possible."
The project got a new boost with the launching of Distributed Proofreaders, a website created in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of ebooks between hundreds of volunteers living in many countries.