Release of Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitise and distribute books that are in the public domain, and it is generally regarded as the oldest digital library. It was started by Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, who typed the United States Declaration of Independence into the computer system there and shared it with other users, believing that computers would eventually make books available to everyone at almost no cost. The collection grew slowly at first, and then rapidly once the World Wide Web arrived. It now offers tens of thousands of free ebooks in many languages, mostly older literature, in plain text and other formats, and relies on volunteers who proofread scanned pages.

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