In July 1971, sending a 5K file to 100 people would have crashed the network of the time. In November 2002, Project Gutenberg could post the 75 files 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.
In September 2003, Project Gutenberg launched Project Gutenberg Audio eBooks. As of 2005, there are 391 computer-generated audio books and a few human-read audio books. The number of human-read eBooks should greatly increase over the next few years. As for computer-generated eBooks, it seems 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 eBooks 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 (July 24-31), and 1,154,765 downloads for the month. This only for transfers from ibiblio.org (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), the main eBook 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 44 mirror sites in many countries and is looking for new ones. It also encourages the use of P2P for sharing its eBooks. The "Top 100" lists the top 100 eBooks and the top 100 authors for the previous day, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.
Project Gutenberg eBooks can also help bridge the "digital divide." They can be read on a computer or a secondhand PDA costing just a few dollars. Solar-powered PDAs offer a good solution in remote regions and developing countries.