1,000 eTexts in August 1997, 2,000 eTexts in May 1999, 3,000 eTexts in December 2000, 4,000 eTexts in October 2001, 5,000 eTexts in April 2002, 10,000 eTexts in October 2003. eText number 10000 is The Magna Carta, the first English constitutional text, signed at the beginning of the 13th century.
From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the number of eTexts doubled, going from 5,000 to 10,000, with a monthly average of 300 new digitized books. In December 2003, most of the titles (9,400 eBooks) were also burned on a DVD to celebrate the landmark of 10,000 eTexts, renamed as eBooks, according to the latest terminology in the field. A few months before, in August 2003, a "Best of Gutenberg" CD was made available containing 600 eBooks (as a follow-up to other CDs in the past). People could request the CD and DVD for free, and were then encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. (In 2005, CD and DVD files are also periodically generated as ISO files. When downloaded, they can be used to make a CD or DVD using a CD or DVD writer.)
10,000 eBooks. An impressive number if we think about all the scanned and proofread pages this number represents. A fast growth thanks to Distributed Proofreaders, a website designed in 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of eBooks between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the eBooks listed on the site and proofread a given page. They don't have any quota to fulfill, but it is recommended they do a page per day if possible. It doesn't seem much, but with hundreds of volunteers it really adds up.
In December 2003, there were 11,000 eBooks digizited in several formats, most of them in ASCII, and some of them in HTML or XML. This represented 46,000 files, and 110 G. On 13 February 2004, the day of Michael Hart's presentation at UNESCO, in Paris (see below), there were exactly 11,340 eBooks in 25 languages. In May 2004, the 12,581 eBooks represented 100,000 files in 20 different formats, and 135 gigabytes. With 400 new eBooks added per month (and more in the years to come), the number of gigabytes is expected to double every year.
In January 2005, Project Gutenberg had 15,000 eBooks. eBook number 15000 is The Life of Reason, by George Santayana (published in 1906). On June 16, 2005 there were 16,481 eBooks in 42 languages. On August 3, 2005, besides English (14,590 eBooks), the six main languages were French (578 eBooks), German (349 eBooks), Finnish (225 eBooks), Dutch (130 eBooks), Spanish (105 eBooks) and Chinese (69 eBooks).