30,000 English eBooks from Project Gutenberg

by Michael Hart on April 13, 2011
PG News

Distributed Proofreaders

Today, just six weeks after Project Gutenberg posted its 40,000th internally created book, the 30,000th English ebook has now been placed online: The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, by Archibald Henry Sayce.

Thanks go out to Delphine Lettau, David King and the Online Distributed Proofreaders Team; who by the way, recently created their 20,000th free ebook for PG, and to Al Haines for doing the final preparations and publication.

A quick look at our numbers indicates that about one quarter of the internally produced Project Gutenberg books are non-English and it should be noted that more than half the PDF ebooks mentioned below are in languages other than English.

Project Gutenberg started the Internet Information Age by making The United States Declaration of Independence available for download on July 4, 1971. Since then we’ve had upward of a quarter million volunteers helping us release more than 40,000 items, which doesn’t include the 75,000 or so ebooks donated by other eLibraries.

Most of the 40,000 are indexed and downloadable from gutenberg.org (available in multiple formats such as EPUB and PDF), and the additional 75,000 ebooks (in PDF format) available from the Project Gutenberg Consortium; gutenberg.cc.

Please also search out Project Gutenberg of Australia, Project Gutenberg of Canada and Project Gutenberg of Europe.

If you’d like to start your own Project Gutenberg; in any language, or devoted to any subject(s), please let us know.

Many thanks to all the volunteers who helped us make ebooks fly!

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg

[Please note: this is an edited version of the email sent by Michael — Ed.]

If you liked this post, say thanks by sharing it.