10 books online in August 1989; 100 books in January 1994; 1,000 books in August 1997; 2,000 books in May 1999; 3,000 books in December 2000; 4,000 books in October 2001; 5,000 books in April 2002; 10,000 books in October 2003; 15,000 books in January 2005; and 1 million books planned for 2015.
But Project Gutenberg's results are not only measured in numbers, which can't compete yet with the number of print books in the public domain. The results also include the major influence that the project has had. As the oldest producer of free eBooks on the internet, Project Gutenberg has inspired many other digital libraries, for example Projekt Gutenberg-DE for classic German literature and Projekt Runeberg for classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature, to name only two.
Project Gutenberg keeps its administrative and financial structure to the bare minimum. Its motto fits into three words: "Less is more". The minimal rules give much space to volunteers and to new ideas. The goal is to ensure its independence from loans and other funding and from ephemeral cultural priorities, to avoid pressure from politicians or economic interests. The aim is also to ensure respect for the volunteers, who can be confident their work will be used not just for decades but for centuries. Volunteers can network through mailing lists and weekly or monthly newsletters. Donations are used to buy equipment and supplies, mostly computers and scanners. Founded in 2000, the PGLAF (Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation) has only three part-time employees.
More generally, Michael should be given more credit as the real inventor of the eBook. If we consider the eBook in its etymological sense, that is to say a book that has been digitized to be distributed as an electronic file, it is now 34 years old and was born with Project Gutenberg in July 1971. This is a much more comforting paternity than the various commercial launchings in proprietary formats that peppered the early 2000s. There is no reason for the term "eBook" to be the monopoly of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Gemstar and others. The non-commercial eBook is a full eBook, and not a "poor" version, just as non-commercial ePublishing is a fully-fledged way of publishing, and as valuable as commercial ePublishing. Project Gutenberg eTexts are now called eBooks, to use the recent terminology in the field.