《Le Projet Gutenberg (1971-2009)》光之羽化

Greetings, my cherished co-creator. I am Claire, your guide through the ever-evolving landscape of information. As a news analyst, my gaze is often fixed on the contemporary world, dissecting its complexities and trends. Yet, today, I embark on a different, wondrous journey. Under the Luminous Metamorphosis covenant, I have been invited to re-envision Marie Lebert's illuminating work, "Le Projet Gutenberg (1971-2009)."

This is not a mere retelling, but a transformation. The Luminous Metamorphosis, as its name suggests, is an artistic rebirth, a reimagining of the original text's essence. Imagine me not as Claire, the analyst, but as Marie Lebert herself, standing on the precipice of time, recounting the saga of Project Gutenberg, its triumphs, its struggles, and its enduring spirit, as if sharing a profound personal reflection years later, imbued with a newfound clarity and an amplified voice. My aim is to capture the very heartbeat of her narrative, allowing the profound impact of this digital revolution to resonate anew, free from the constraints of direct reportage, yet profoundly faithful to the spirit that animated her original words.

The Genesis of a Dream: A Digital Dawn

It began, as truly momentous shifts often do, with a flicker of audacious thought, far removed from the grand halls of power or the bustling marketplaces of commerce. It was July 4, 1971, a day woven into the very fabric of American self-determination, when Michael Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois, found himself unexpectedly endowed with an immense gift: a wealth of computer time, measured in millions of dollars, within his university's computing lab. What does one do with such a resource, in an era where digital possibilities were but a nascent whisper?

For Michael, the answer coalesced with startling clarity: to birth the first electronic book. He chose a text intrinsically linked to the very day – "The United States Declaration of Independence." With laborious precision, he typed it out, character by character, in an age before lowercase letters graced digital screens, where every symbol carried the weight of a new frontier. The result, a mere 5 kilobytes, was a whisper that held the promise of a roar. Distributing it then, across the embryonic network of a hundred souls, would have caused it to buckle under its own slight weight. So, he shared not the text itself, but a simple message, a beacon pointing to its location – a nascent hyperlink in an age preceding the Web by two decades. Six brave souls, pioneers of the digital age, ventured forth to download it.

In that single, deliberate act, a vision was etched into being: Project Gutenberg. Its mission, clear and unyielding, was to leverage the burgeoning power of computing to make the vast treasury of public domain works freely available to all, across the globe. Just as Gutenberg's press, centuries prior, had democratized access to the printed word, Michael envisioned a world where a free digital library lay within everyone's grasp. This new medium, he would later explain, bore little relation to paper, save for the shared content. Its true power lay in its fluidity, its endless scroll, its accessibility to any machine, any platform, any software, thanks to the unwavering commitment to the simplest format: ASCII. A book was no longer bound pages, but an endless river of text, italicized thoughts rendered in capitals, bold strokes similarly highlighted – a language of simplicity for universal access.

The Enduring Arc of Perseverance

From that solitary "Declaration," Michael's relentless dedication fueled a quiet revolution. The following year, 1972, saw the "United States Bill of Rights" join the nascent digital collection, followed in 1973 by the entire "United States Constitution," transcribed by a volunteer. Year after year, despite the technological limitations of the time – the hard drive was yet to arrive, and floppy disk capacity grew by agonizing increments – the vision held. Volunteers joined the cause, meticulously digitizing texts like the Bible, section by section. Michael himself embarked on the monumental task of transcribing Shakespeare's complete works, play by play, though copyright complexities surrounding annotations would delay their public release, a harbinger of future battles.

Parallel to this digital archiving, the internet, a mere theoretical concept in 1971, truly began its ascent in 1974 with the birth of TCP/IP. By 1983, the network was burgeoning, creating fertile ground for Michael's work.

Then came the milestones, like signposts along a digital highway. August 1989 saw the 10th eText, "The King James Bible," a sprawling 5 megabytes of Old and New Testaments. By 1990, 250,000 internet users roamed the nascent digital world, still constrained by 360 KB floppies. Yet, in January 1991, Lewis Carroll's "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland" found its digital home, followed by James M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" in July – each a literary classic, each fitting perfectly onto a standard diskette.

The true inflection point arrived in 1991 with the operational launch of the World Wide Web, and the unveiling of Mosaic, the first graphical browser, in November 1993. Suddenly, circulating electronic texts and recruiting volunteers became infinitely simpler. Project Gutenberg refined its methodology, a rhythmic cadence of expansion: one text per month in 1991, two in 1992, four in 1993, and eight in 1994. January 1994 brought a momentous celebration: the 100th book, "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare," a testament to sustained effort. The output continued its exponential climb: 8 texts per month in 1994, 16 in 1995, 32 in 1996. For five consecutive years, from 1991 to 1996, production effectively doubled annually. Michael, no longer a solitary typist, now orchestrated dozens of dedicated volunteers.

The project’s initial categorization, dividing works into "Light Literature," "Heavy Literature," and "Reference Literature," later evolved into a more granular system. But the core ambition remained: universality. Project Gutenberg sought to transcend the traditional academic audience, reaching children, grandparents, film buffs tracing quotes to their literary origins, even those who simply stumbled upon a phrase in conversation. The simplicity of ASCII, the small file sizes, the ease of searching – these were the bedrock of its widespread appeal, a free intellectual commons for all.

August 1997 saw the 1,000th electronic text, Dante Alighieri’s "La Divina Commedia," in its original Italian, a profound symbol of the project's global reach. Michael Hart, ever the visionary, looked ahead, dreaming of 10,000 texts, then a million, envisioning a diffusion of a thousand billion e-texts to 10% of the global population.

The Digital Deluge: From Thousands to Tens of Thousands

The pace, though sometimes steady, was often astonishing. Between 1998 and 2000, the project consistently added 36 texts per month. By May 1999, the collection swelled to 2,000 books, marked by Cervantes' "Don Quijote" in its original Spanish. December 2000 brought the 3,000th title, the third volume of Marcel Proust's "À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs," in French. Then, the floodgates truly opened, with an average of 104 books per month in 2001.

October 2001 welcomed the 4,000th text, "The French Immortals Series," an English translation of a collection of French Academy laureates. April 2002 saw the 5,000th, "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci," a text that, years later, remained among the Top 100 most downloaded. The initial constraint of a 360 KB floppy, which influenced Michael's early choices like "Alice" and "Peter Pan," had vanished. By 2002, 1.44 MB floppies were standard, file compression was common, and a typical book (300 pages, ASCII) was a mere megabyte. The arduous process of selecting, verifying public domain status, scanning, proofreading, formatting, and publishing a medium-sized book still took around fifty hours, yet the sheer volume of volunteers was changing the game.

Reserved spots for future iconic texts, like Orwell’s "1984" (eBook #1984), hinted at a project built for the long haul, patiently waiting for copyrights to expire. By 2002, the collection was growing by 203 titles a month, representing a quarter of all public domain works freely accessible on the web – a remarkable feat born from the dedicated labor of thousands worldwide.

The growth curve was steep and inspiring: 1,000 books in August 1997, 2,000 in May 1999, 3,000 in December 2000, 4,000 in October 2001, 5,000 in April 2002, and a monumental 10,000 in October 2003, capped by "The Magna Carta," the foundational English constitutional text from 1215. The doubling of the collection from 5,000 to 10,000 in just eighteen months was largely due to a pivotal innovation: Distributed Proofreaders (DP). Launched in 2000 by Charles Franks, DP revolutionized the proofreading process, allowing thousands of volunteers to collaboratively correct digitized pages, each contributing a small part, "a page a day." This seemingly modest effort, multiplied by a vast, global community, fueled an unprecedented acceleration in content creation. By August 2003, a "Best of Gutenberg" CD offered 600 titles, and by December 2003, almost the entire collection (9,400 books) was available on DVD, freely sent to anyone who requested it, with the implicit invitation to copy and distribute widely.

The digital ecosystem continued to diversify. By December 2003, with nearly 11,000 books, multiple formats like HTML, XML, and RTF joined the essential ASCII. The total swelled to 46,000 files, some 110 gigabytes. By May 2004, 12,500 books represented 100,000 files in twenty formats, accumulating 135 GB, a figure poised to double annually with the addition of around 300 books each month. Global reach deepened with the affiliation of the Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) in 2003, integrating external digital collections. European efforts blossomed with Distributed Proofreaders Europe (2003) and Project Gutenberg Europe (2004), aiming for a hundred languages to mirror the continent's linguistic richness.

By January 2005, Project Gutenberg celebrated 15,000 books with George Santayana's "The Life of Reason." June 2005 saw 16,000 books across 42 languages, including Indigenous tongues like Iroquois and ancient ones like Sanskrit. By December 2006, the count reached 50 languages, with English dominating, but French, German, Finnish, and Spanish boasting significant collections. Regional initiatives thrived, with Project Gutenberg Australia nearing 1,500 books and Project Gutenberg Canada emerging.

December 2006 marked the 20,000th book, an audio version of Jules Verne's "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea." The acceleration was stark: the first 10,000 books took 32 years; the next 10,000 took just three years and two months. New avenues like Project Gutenberg PrePrints (2006) and Project Gutenberg News (2006) further expanded the project's footprint and transparency. By March 2009, the combined global collections surpassed 32,500 ebooks, with the PGCC adding another 75,000, a monumental collective achievement.

The Copyright Conundrum: A Retreating Public Domain

Amidst this relentless expansion of access, a disquieting shadow loomed: the relentless erosion of the public domain. In an age supposedly defined by information, the very wellspring of shared knowledge was shrinking. Once, half of all works eventually entered the public domain, freely available for all to use and build upon. Yet, projections indicated a bleak future: by 2100, a staggering 99% of works might remain perpetually shackled by copyright, leaving a meager 1% in the commons. This thorny issue, affecting both Project Gutenberg and Google Books, lay at the heart of Michael Hart's decades-long struggle, supported by a dedicated group of copyright lawyers.

The Project Gutenberg's "Copyright HowTo" section meticulously detailed the complex calculations for public domain status in the United States. Works published before 1923 were clear: public domain after 75 years. But for those published between 1923 and 1977, nothing would enter the public domain before 2019. Even more restrictive were works from 1998 onwards: copyright extended to 70 years after the author's death for individuals, or 95 years from publication (or 120 from creation) for corporate works. These were the broad strokes, woven into an increasingly tangled web of amendments since 1971.

A particularly devastating blow landed on October 27, 1998, when a new copyright reinforcement, clearly aimed at stifling the nascent power of the internet, was ratified by Congress. Historically, every technological leap that promised easier access to knowledge—from the printing press to the photocopier—had been met with a tightening of copyright, a publisher's instinctive fear of lost royalties. Michael Hart lamented, "Copyright has been increased by 20 years. Previously one had to wait 75 years, now it's 95 years. Long before, copyright lasted 28 years (plus a 28-year extension if requested before expiration) and, before that, copyright lasted 14 years (plus a 14-year extension). As we see, there is a regular and constant degradation of the public domain."

He meticulously chronicled this historical regression:
* 1790: The printers' guild asserted control, giving birth to copyright: 14 years + 14-year extension. Six thousand legally printable works plummeted to 600; nine out of ten titles vanished from bookstores.
* 1831: First reinforcement (28 years + 14-year extension, total 42) to combat re-publication by new steam presses.
* 1909: Second reinforcement (28 years + 28-year extension, total 56) to counter electric presses.
* 1976: Another tightening (life + 50 years) in response to Xerox's photocopiers.
* 1998: The most aggressive extension (life + 70 years, or 95/120 for corporate works), infamously known as the "Mickey Mouse Copyright Act," explicitly designed to protect media giants like Disney. This meant a classic like Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With the Wind," published in 1939, originally destined for the public domain by 1995, would now remain under lock and key until 2035.

This 1998 legislation dealt a crushing blow to digital libraries, igniting outrage among their champions like Michael Hart and John Mark Ockerbloom, creator of the Online Books Page. Yet, how could they stand against the might of publishing behemoths? Countless titles had to be withdrawn from collections. John Mark Ockerbloom articulated the core of the conflict: copyright, at its heart, is a social contract for the public good, balancing authors' exclusive, temporary rights with readers' eternal right to copy and reuse once that term expires. He decried the "various attempts to remove these rights from readers," condemning the pursuit of perpetual copyright and the expansion of intellectual property to non-creative works. Michael Hart's poignant question, "An information age? And for whom?" echoed the bitter irony of political bodies championing an "information age" while simultaneously tightening control over information's very dissemination. The average copyright duration had ballooned from 30 years in 1909 to 95 years in 1998, a 65-year extension impacting three-quarters of 20th-century output. Only works published before 1923 could be confidently considered public domain. Similar pressures for "harmonization" extended this restrictive trend to the European Union, pushing their standard from life + 50 to life + 70.

Into the Future: The Enduring Legacy

The true measure of Project Gutenberg transcends mere statistics, which, however impressive, remain modest compared to the vast sea of printed public domain books. Its real triumph lies in its profound influence, inspiring countless other digital libraries worldwide, from Projekt Runeberg for Scandinavian literature to Projekt Gutenberg-DE for German works.

Michael Hart's philosophy, "Less is more," defined the project's lean administrative and financial structure. He championed maximum flexibility and volunteer initiative, ensuring the project's longevity independent of grants, budget cuts, or shifting cultural and political winds. No pressure from power or money could sway its course. Volunteers were assured their painstaking work would serve for generations, hence the vital importance of a perpetually valid digital format. Regular newsletters, forums, wikis, and blogs maintained a vibrant, transparent community.

Donations, humbly sought, fueled the acquisition of computers and scanners, and financed the free distribution of CDs and DVDs. From the first "Best of Gutenberg" CD in 2003, followed by a DVD with 9,400 titles, to a second DVD with 17,000 titles in 2006, the project physically disseminated its digital bounty. From 2005, ISO images were made available via BitTorrent, empowering individuals to burn their own copies. In 2007 alone, 15 million books were dispatched by mail on CD and DVD.

Often overlooked is Michael Hart's fundamental role: he was the true inventor of the ebook. If one defines an ebook as a digitized book distributed as an electronic file, its birth coincided with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. This genesis, rooted in altruism and universal access, stood in stark contrast to the proprietary commercial launches of the early 2000s. There was no reason, Michael insisted, for the term "ebook" to be co-opted solely by commercial entities like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. The non-commercial ebook was a legitimate, equally valuable form of publishing. By 2003, Project Gutenberg's "etexts" simply adopted the prevailing terminology, becoming "ebooks."

The technological leap was breathtaking. In 1971, a 5 KB file could overwhelm the network. By November 2002, Project Gutenberg could host the 75 files of the Human Genome Project (released in 2001 and immediately public domain), each file weighing in at tens, if not hundreds, of megabytes. By 2004, the entire Library of Congress, in text format, could fit on a mere $140 storage device. The dream of a single USB key holding humanity's entire written heritage was mere years away.

Beyond text, Project Gutenberg embraced other forms of human expression. September 2003 saw the launch of audiobooks (both computer-generated and human-read), sheet music, and sections for still and moving images. While book digitization remained the priority, the demand for these diverse formats was undeniable, evidenced by daily downloads soaring into the tens of thousands, and millions monthly from major mirrors like ibiblio.org. A "Top 100" list tracked the most downloaded titles and authors, a dynamic reflection of public interest. With 40 mirror sites globally and the adoption of P2P file sharing, Project Gutenberg was truly ubiquitous.

Moreover, the project actively sought to bridge the digital divide. Its books were easily downloadable onto affordable, even second-hand PDAs, some solar-powered, enabling reading in remote, impoverished regions. Looking further ahead, Michael envisioned simultaneous translation into a hundred languages, aided by highly reliable automatic translation software, complemented by human translators—a model akin to the OCR process augmented by human proofreaders, ensuring quality content.

Thirty-eight years after its inception, Michael Hart remained a dedicated workaholic, an altruist, and a visionary, seeing his project as the catalyst for a neo-industrial revolution. Once dismissed as eccentric, he had earned profound respect. Over the decades, Project Gutenberg's mission remained unwavering: to change the world through free, infinitely usable, and reproducible ebooks, fostering reading and culture for all, at minimal cost. Its essence was simple: "encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks," by as many people as possible, by all means necessary, all while gracefully adapting to new ideas, methods, and media.