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title: Administrivia | Project Gutenberg
permalink: /background/administrivia.html
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Administrivia, by Michael Hart
==============================
Project Gutenberg does not want to get bogged down in administrivia, thus we have administrators who have no desire for political powers, financial rewards, or to write more than the most minimal guidelines for the Project Gutenberg volunters. (See FAQ #0 for the freedom of the volunteers to do what they want as much as possible.)
The minimal powers wielded by these Project Gutenberg administrators are divided into a traditional "Separation of Powers" between a CEO, Board of Directors and the intellectual property holder. The Board, as a requirement of the 501(c)(3) regulations must have a minimum of three members with certain oversight responsibilities, and we are in unanimous agreement that this board should remain minimal, both from the perspective of size and of responsibilities. We have no need of a large board that writes lengthy reports, multitudes of regulations and bylaws, or other administrivia; we try to have one reserve Board member in the wings, pre-approved by the rest of the Board in case a member becomes unavailable, and our CEO tries to never vote on Board decisions unless absolutely required as a tiebreaker.
The holders of these positions have traditionally been with us for a period of over 10 years and understand the Project's history and the developmental process that has taken place since its origin; none of them have any political or financial aspirations via their work with Project Gutenberg and they unanimously agree that there should **not** be power of that nature connected with Project Gutenberg.
However, groups within Project Gutenberg are more than welcome to do their own creation of administrations and guidelines for themselves, as long as they fall within our minimal legal requirements and self-imposed quidelines.
Yes, it would be nice to receive a billion dollars from Bill Gates--but--even then we would want to use that only to support a volunteer effort, not to create a plethora of paid positions or create more of a physical plant than is necessary. Project Gutenberg is a virtual, not physical, entity; run by volunteers, not by those who would make it a career, other than perhaps the one truly paid position of those who oversee the entire process in the most limited manner for future generations of our volunteers.
If we **do** receive large grants or donations, these should not change the nature of Project Gutenberg in any manners that would prevent any of us from continuing Project Gutenberg if that money disappeared.
No one should be able threaten Project Gutenberg financially.
Having money is fine ... becoming dependent on it should be avoided.
Our clear position on adminstrative, political and financial power:
Less is more.
We want Project Gutenberg to stand for opening, not closing, doors.
Written by Michael S. Hart
June 20, 2004. Updated October 23, 2004.

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How eTexts Will Become the "Killer App" of the Computer Revolution by Michael Hart
by Michael S. Hart, Founder of Project Gutenberg
Electronic text has been with us virtually a long as the Internet and has been growing at the same rate, a rate that will soon make an impression on the average person, especially young people, and those involved in education, reading, and research.
10 years ago, in 1991, there were 18 eText/eBook files available, free for the taking, as the Internet was preparing to take off.
Today there are about 18,000 listed in just one index, called The Internet Public Library and all are free for the taking.
Without any increase in the rate of growth due to the advances we certainly expect over the next 10 years that number will increase to 18,000,000 ... eventually covering virtually every work in the public domain.
This will eventually become the primary driving force in a reason to buy computers ... who wouldn't consider it worthwhile to buy a collection of 18,000,000 titles for $1,000 in a box that fits any desk, on top or underneath, or even in laptop computers.
Can this be true, you might ask?
The average 300 page novel uses only 1 megabyte in plain eText!!!
Thus the 18,000 such books listed today would take 18 gigabytes--at costs of much less than $100 ... which can buy 40 gigabytes of drive today. Of course, most of the materials listed in Internet Public Library catalgues are well under 1 megabyte in size, so it is actually much cheaper.
10 years ago most people were using 40 MEGAbyte drives which cost $1500 when they were originally introduced, and Moore's Law seems to barely be holding drive size in check, so we already see drive systems containing terabytes in computers costing under $10,000--which will be antiques in only a couple years. In fact drives of 100M have already fallen to under $300 as I proofread this, so an extra terabyte of space could be added to a $1,000 computer for a total of now under $5,000.
10 years from now, according to the current rate of drive prices, 40 terabyte systems will be around the various price range listed above, and will hopefully be continuing to fall. Our plan is for the Project Gutenberg collection to continue to fit approximately within 10% of the current drive standard.
These eTexts can be improved literally overnight as readers email in reports of typographical errors that would never ever be fixed in paper editions. Think of the billions of hours students spend correcting errors in their textbooks when school starts each year of the 10-20 years we expect them to spend in school.
How much is a billion student hours worth?
Enough to promote eText?
The first country to create an educational system based on eTexts will enjoy a huge advantage while other countries scramble to get a comparable system going ... while some students are researching millions of online books, taking copious notes that are both fast and accurate, and easily footnoted, while others continue to file endless stacks of 3x5 notecards the same way it was done in 1900.
Remember the 18,000,000 books that will be easily available?
Look up the largest library collections in the world, and you may be amazed at just where a collection of 18,000,000 books would be ranked, even among the best city, university and national library collections in the world. Right now the only way to get your kid access to 18,000,000 books is to send them to a university with a tuition of over $25,000 per year. ...
And the eTexts are never checked out when you need them, never in for rebinding, never sitting on a cart waiting to be reshelved or reshelved in the wrong location. Their pages are never missing--they are never lost or stolen--and the library is never closed.
Meanwhile, the cost to maintain such a library is vanishingly low ... did you know the costs to put a book on the shelf of average add up to nearly $100 ... and that average book is checked out an average of only 6 times??? The cost of the shelving alone is $3, for a book that only takes 1 inch.
The average college student goes through hundreds of pounds of an assortment of textbooks, and you don't want to know the price/lb, I assure you. Looking up a quotation in these books can be a big task, energy better spent between the ears, rather than lugging a hundred pounds of books home each year, and paging through 1,000s of pages seeking knowledge. ...
Knowledge doesn't come from climbing up and down marble stairs to hunt for books in the dozen or so libraries of large universities or wading through the stacks looking for that obscure volume your bibliography absolutely requires. ...
With an electronic library the time spent searching, researching, and copying materials could literally be reduced by 90%. ...
Students used to spend 90% of their hours on research papers in a physical search for the data they needed, and only 10% in writing the actual paper ... not a good ratio of research to thinking.
With electronic libraries this could be easily reversed to 90% on thinking and only 10% doing the research ... and I think that may be a conservative estimate.
This should allow some combination of 10 times more research or a research paper that is 10 times better ... either way, when these new papers enter the electronic library, a feedback loop is going to take place, because not only will the libraries have more data that is easier to find and use, but they will actually contain an assortment of newer and better data than we could have expected a similar population of scholars to produce with paper libraries.
So, every computer could easily contain as many books as in major university libraries, with remote access to as many more. ...
For these reasons and more, eText is going to be the "killer app," the Fountain of Youth, as it were, for the computer industry.
As the average computer falls further and further below $1,000, a buyer becomes more and more likely to buy such a computer simply, even completely, to hold a library that will soon reach 20,000 of the books many people value as the most important in the world.
Project Gutenberg was the first creator of eTexts on the Internet and has moved from producing about 10 titles in the year ending a decade ago to over 1,000 titles this year.
With your help we can continue this growth rate and produce about 100,000 eTexts per year 10 years from today.
There isn't a better investment you could make in Microsoft or in the Seattle-Tacoma area, Washington State, or even the country or the world, than to invest in making Project Gutenberg eTexts.
So get out your favorite checkbook ... !

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title: No Cost, or Freedom? | Project Gutenberg
permalink: /background/free_ebook.html
---
No Cost, or Freedom?
====================
The word free in the English language does not distinguish between free of charge and freedom.
Free of charge means that you don't have to pay for the book you received.
Freedom denotes that you may do as you like with the book you received.
This distinction is immaterial if you just want to read a book privately, but it becomes of utmost importance if you want to work with the book:
- you are a teacher and want to use the book in class,
- you wrote a thesis about the book and want to distribute the book along with your thesis,
- you have a literary web site and want to distribute the book to your audience,
- or you are a writer and want to adapt the book for the stage.
If the book you got is just free of charge but protected under U.S. copyright law, you may do none of the above things. You may not even make a copy of the book and give it to your best friend. But if the book you got is free as in freedom you may do anything you like with that book. Clearly free as in freedom beats free of charge.
Fortunately almost all Project Gutenberg eBooks are free of charge and free as in freedom for readers within the United States (if you are not in the United States, you will need to determine what copyright law protects where you are located).
Here are some real world examples of what people did with Project Gutenberg eBooks.
A few Project Gutenberg eBooks are protected by U.S. copyright law. You can tell by reading the license inside the book. You may download our copyrighted books and give copies away, but might be limited in commercial uses and derivative works.
## Why are these books free?
[Copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright) For the most part, copyright protection under U.S. law on the materials distributed by Project Gutenberg has expired. (They may still be copyrighted in other countries). So anybody located in the United States may make verbatim or non-verbatim copies of those works.
## Read More About Copyrights
- [Wikipedia: Copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright)
- [Wikipedia: Public Domain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Domain)
- [Wikipedia: United States Copyright Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_copyright_law)

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title: History and Philosophy | Project Gutenberg
permalink: /background/history_and_philosophy.html
---
The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg, by Michael Hart
================================================================
© August 1992
## The Beginning
Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an
operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the
operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research
Lab at the University of Illinois.
This was totally serendipitous, as it turned out that two of a four
operator crew happened to be the best friend of Michael's and the best
friend of his brother. Michael just happened "to be at the right place
at the right time" at the time there was more computer time than
people knew what to do with, and those operators were encouraged to do
whatever they wanted with that fortune in "spare time" in the hopes
they would learn more for their job proficiency.
At any rate, Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way
of "normal computing," that would repay the huge value of the computer
time he had been given ... so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of
value in some other ma nner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he
announced that the greatest value created by computers would not be
computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and s earching of what
was stored in our libraries. </p><p>He then proceeded to type in the
"Declaration of Independence" and tried to send it to everyone on the
networks ... which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss
at creating an early version of what was later called the "Internet
Virus."
A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a
document i n electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as
Michael stated that he had "earned" the $100,000,000 because a copy of
the Declaration of Independence woul d eventually be an electronic
fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 o f the computer
users of the future.
## The Beginning of the Gutenberg Philosophy
The premise on which Micheal Hart based Project Gutenberg was:
anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced
indefinitely ... what Micheal termed "Replicator Technology" The
concept of Replicator Technology is simple; once a book or any other
item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in
a computer), then any number of copies can and will be
available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given
satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been
entered into a computer.
This philosophical premise has created several offshoots: 1.Electronic
Texts (Etexts) created by Project Gutenberg are to be made available
in the simplest, easiest to use forms available.
Suggestions to make them less readily available are not to be treated
lightly. Therefore, Project Gutenberg Etexts are made available in
what has become known as "Plain Vanilla ASCII," meaning the low set of
the American Standard Code for Information Interchange: ie the same
kind of character you read on a normal printed page — italics,
underlines, and bolds have been capitalized.
The reason for this is that 99% of the hardware and software a person
is likely to run into can read and search these files.
Any other system of etext storage is going to fall short of an
audience of 99%.
This does not mean there are not other valid mean of doing the etext
business ... after all, over half the computers are DOS, so one could
address a wide audience by just doing DOS. Plain Vanilla ASCII,
however, addresses the audience with Apples and Ataris all the way to
the old homebrew Z80 computers, while an audience of Mac, UNIX and
mainframers is still included.
In this same vein, Project Gutenberg selects etexts targeted a bit on
the "bang for the buck" philosophy ... we choose etexts we hope
extremely large portions of the audience will want and use
frequently. We are constantly asked to prepare etext from out of print
editions of esoteric materials, but this does not provide for usage by
the audience we have targeted, 99% of the general public.
Also in the same vein, Project Gutenberg has avoided requests,
demands, and pressures to create "authoritative editions." We do not
write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare
has a ":" or a ";" between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to
release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general
reader. Given the preferences your proofreaders have, and the general
lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we
probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However,
for the person who wants an "authoritative edition" we will have to
wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however,
intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics
for the comparative study on a scholarly level, before the end of the
year 2001, when we are scheduled to complete our 10,000 book Project
Gutenberg Electronic Public Library.
Project Gutenberg has been a part of celebrations of the 100th
Anniversary of Public Libraries, starting in 1995. Project Gutenberg
hopes to found "The Public Domain Register," after the 100th
Anniversary of The U.S. Copyright Register in 1997.
We hope you will be part of it, too. You are all invited.
Footnote:
Our eventual goal is to provide Public Domain Etext editions a short
time after they enter the Public Domain. Of course, the period before
a copyrighted work entered the Public Domain was extended from 28
years (with a 28 year extension available) to 50 years more than the
life of the author, so this put a kink, to put it mildly, into our
plans. (The original copyright was for 14 years, in the U.S.) Thus, a
person could originally do a reasonable prediction that anything under
copyright would be in the Public Domain while it could be used, under
the new law it is impossible to predict the length of a copyright, and
the likelihood of a new book entering the Public Domain during the
lifetime of the average reader is minimal. (Suppose you might be 25
when you read a new book and the author is 50: wait the average 25
years for the author to die (what a thought!*) Now you have to wait
another 50 years to have access to that book; it doesn't matter when
it was written (unless it is an old one ... before the period the law
retroacted to) ... so you would have to wait (on the average) until
you were 100 years old. A 25-year-old under the original law would
only have to wait for 14 years ... until the age of 39. Quite a
difference; between the ages of 39 and 100. Not only that, but the
copyright laws would have to stay the same for all that time
... something in serious doubt, seeing how much they have changed in
the recent century.
## The Project Gutenberg Philosophy (continued)
The Project Gutenberg Philosophy is to make information, books and
other materials available to the general public in forms a vast
majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use,
quote, and search.
This has several ramifications:
1. The Project Gutenberg Etexts should cost so little that no one will
really care how much they cost. They should be a general size that
fits on the standard media of the time ...
2. The Project Gutenberg Etexts should be so easily used that no one
should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them
...
## The Project Gutenberg Philosophy (continued)
[...] This has several ramifications:
1. The Project Gutenberg Etexts should cost so little that no one will
really care how much they cost. They should be a general size that
fits on the standard media of the time.
i.e. when we started, the files had to be very small as a normal 300
page book took one meg of space which no one in 1971 could be expected
to have (in general). So doing the U.S. Declaration of Independence
(only 5K) seemed the best place to start. This was followed by the
Bill of Rights — then the whole US Constitution, as space was getting
large (at least by the standards of 1973). Then came the Bible, as
individual books of the Bible were not that large, then Shakespeare (a
play at a time), and then into general work in the areas of light and
heavy literature and references.
By the time Project Gutenberg got famous, the standard was 360K disks,
so we did books such as Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan because they
could fit on one disk. Now 1.44 is the standard disk and ZIP is the
standard compression; the practical filesize is about three million
characters, more than long enough for the average book.
However, pictures are still so bulky to store on disk that it will
still be a while before we include even the lowres Tenniel
illustrations in Alice and Looking-Glass. However we ARE very
interested in doing them, and are only waiting for advances in
technology to release a test edition. The market will have to
establish SOME standards for graphics, however, before we can attempt
to reach general audiences, at least on the graphics level.
To illustrate our faith in graphics, and in the future, we have gone
one step further in our pursuit of what we named "Replicator
Technology" TM a few years ago. We would like the end of this phase of
Project Gutenberg (with a first 3D application of Replicator
Technology), by doing CAT, MRI and XRAY Fluoroscopy scans of
something, perhaps a painting, and printing 3D copies. If anyone can
get us access to a hundred year old masterpiece ... the average book.
## The Project Gutenberg Philosophy (continued, 2)
[...] This has several ramifications:
2. The Project Gutenberg Etexts should so easily used that no one
should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search
them.
This has created a need to present these Project Gutenberg Etexts in
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" as we have come to call it over the years.
The reason for this is simple ... it is the only text mode that is
easy on both the eyes and the computer.
However, this encourages others to improve our etexts in a variety of
ways and to distribute them in a variety of the available media, as
follows: Once an etext is created in Plain Vanilla ASCII, it is the
foundation for as many editions as anyone could hope to do in the
future. Anyone desiring an etext edition matching, or not matching, a
particular paper edition can readily do the changes they like without
having to prepare that whole book again. They can use the Project
Gutenberg Etext as a foundation, and then build in any direction they
like.
Thus any complaints about how we do italics, bold, and the
underscoring, or whether we should use this or that markup formula are
sent back with encouragement to do it any ways any person wants it,
and with the basic work already done, with our compliments. The same
goes for media. We have had a long-standing work ethic of providing
our etexts in any medium people wanted: Amiga, Apple, Atari ... to
IBM, to Mac, to TRS-80 ... However, now that our etexts are carried
in so many BBS's, networks and other locations, it is easier to
download the file in a manner that puts them in your format than we
can make and mail a disk, so we don't really do that too much.
The major point of all this is that years from now Project Gutenberg
Etexts are still going to be viable, but program after program, and
operating system after operating system are going to go the way of the
dinosaur, as will all those pieces of hardware running them. Of
course, this is valid for all Plain Vanilla ASCII etexts ... not just
those your access has allowed you to get from Project Gutenberg. The
point is that a decade from now we probably won't have the same
operating systems, or the same programs and therefore all the various
kinds of etexts that are not Plain Vanilla ASCII will be obsolete. We
need to have etexts in files a Plain Vanilla search/reader program can
deal with; this is not to say there should never be any markup
... just those forms of markup should be easily convertible into
regular, Plain Vanilla ASCII files so their utility does not expire
when programs to use them are no longer with us. Remember all the
trouble with CONVERT programs to get files changed from old word
processor programs into Plain Vanilla ASCII?
Do you want to go through all that again with every book a whole world
ever puts into etext?
The value of Plain Vanilla ASCII is obvious ... so is very much of the
value of most of the various markup systems we have in the world. But
until some real standards arrive — we would be limiting our options a
great deal if we do not keep copies of all etexts in Plain Vanilla
ASCII as well. We don't have anything against markup. Not vice versa.
Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others
will be with us as long as civilization ... an operating system, a
program, a markup system ... will not.
This includes the many requests we have for compression in particular
formats. There are only two formats we know of that are suitable for
transfer to a wide general audience: Plain Vanilla ASCII (.txt files)
and ZIPped files of them, (.zip files). Requests for other compression
formats must be ignored as they are appropriate only for small
portions of our target audience. However, (programmers take note: we
will need help) we are planning to put some compression links on our
files so they can be transmitted in any of an assortment compression
formats on the fly. i.e. we should be able to generate any kind of
file asked for, but we can keep only one copy of each etext on our
servers ... as the .Z compression format does in a similar manner
today.
## The Selection of Project Gutenberg Etexts
There are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library, basically
be described as:
Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the
Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.
Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents,
Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.
References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of
encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.
The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the
computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler
or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or
grandparents taking each other to an etexts to Peter Pan when they
come back from watching HOOK at the movies, or when they read Alice in
Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly
every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext
releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Khan; a Peter Pan quote
finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to
Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we
chose the books for our libraries.
We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in
conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library
containing all these quotations in an easy to find etext format.
With Plain Vanilla ASCII you will be easily able to search an entire
library, without any program more sophisticated than a plain search
program. In fact, these Project Gutenberg Etext files are so plain
that you can do a search on them without even using an intermediate
search program (i.e. a program between you and the disk) Norton's and
other direct disk access programs can search every one of your files
without you even naming them, pointing to an etext directory, or
whatever. You can simply search a raw output from the disk ... I do
this on a half gigabyte disk partition, containing all our editions.

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layout: default
title: Background, History and Philosophy | Project Gutenberg
permalink: /background/
---
Background, History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg
=======================================================
How did Project Gutenberg begin, and grow? What motivated
its founder, Michael Hart? What are some of the core beliefs?
Project Gutenberg has a long history, which predates the modern
Internet and continues until today. The essays and documents in this
section provide some of the background of Project Gutenberg, and also
describe the basis for how Project Gutenberg operates.
[The History and Philosophy of Project Gutenberg by Michael Hart](/background/history_and_philosphy.html) (1992)
[Mission Statement](/background/mission_statement.html) (2004)
[Principal of Minimal regulation](/background/minimal_regulation.html) (2004)
[Administrativia](/background/administrivia.html) (2004)
[No Cost, or Freedom?](/background/free_ebook.md) (2012)
### Other items about Project Gutenberg
- eBook: [Project Gutenberg (1971-2008)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27045) by Marie Lebert, covering the history of Project Gutenberg. Other titles by Marie Lebert cover other aspects of eBooks, in English, French and Spanish. Two of these are translations. A third is an album celebrating Project Gutenberg's 40th anniversary:
- [Le Projet Gutenberg (1971-2008)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27046) [in French]
- [El Proyecto Gutenberg (1971-2009)](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31633) [in Spanish]
- [Project Gutenberg 4 July 1971 - 4 July 2011](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36616). Album with pictures in PDF.
- Article: [The Second Gutenberg Interview with Michael Hart](http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb29.html) by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. (May 2002).
- Article: [Project Gutenberg's Anabasis](http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb39.html) by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. (January 5, 2004).
- Interview: [The Ubiquitous Project Gutenberg Interview](http://samvak.tripod.com/busiweb46.html) with Michael Hart, its Founder by Sam Vaknin, Ph.D. (November 11, 2005).

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title: Principle of Minimal Regulation | Project Gutenberg
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---
Project Gutenberg Principle of Minimal Regulation/ Administration, by Michael Hart and Greg Newby
=================================================================================================
Project Gutenberg is founded on the principle of Minimal supervision of our volunteers in their effort to promote our mission:
To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.
We have found the best thing Project Gutenberg can do to achieve the mission is often to simply get out of the way and let our volunteers do what they like best, and then help them make any adjustments that might be necessary to get their work to the most readers.
These non-interference principles mean the Project Gutenberg's staff and the organization as a whole can do the most good by setting up a set of tools and infrastructure to create and distribute eBooks, and then let creative and energetic volunteers do work as they see fit.
One of the outcomes of this principle is free experimentation with a lot of new ideas, even if these ideas break with past traditions and methods - or even common sense! Rather than saying, "NO," to people with new ideas, Project Gutenberg strives to say, "YES," and to back it up with assistance to get these new ideas into practical output.
Another outcome of this principle of non-interference is a lack of a need for perfectionism. Project Gutenberg has always been a work in progress, a new way of doing things. Rather than trying to find the one "right way to create and distribute eBooks," we believed in lots of ways, as many different "right" ways as people want to have.
As Project Gutenberg operates on the principle of non-interference--our mission includes keeping the door open to people or projects for the creation of many a different ways of seeing things. The project recognizes a big role for people with more focused interests, or who prefer to work with a specific emphasis. When these interests match with the Gutenberg mission, these people and projects are welcome to function entirely or partially as part of Project Gutenberg, or in a mutually beneficial but non-exclusive way. When interests don't get perfectly matched, Project Gutenberg is a supportive and encouraging force behind any efforts that help fulfill any similar missions.
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Break Down the Bars of Ignorance and Illiteracy.
Written by Michael S. Hart and Gregory B. Newby
June 25, 2004. Updated October 23, 2004.

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The Project Gutenberg Mission Statement, by Micheal Hart
========================================================
The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple:
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Project Gutenberg is powered by ideas, ideals, and by idealism.
Project Gutenberg is **not** powered by financial or political power.
Because we are totally powered by volunteers we are hesitant to be very bossy about what our volunteers should do, or how to do it.
We offer as many freedoms to our volunteers as possible, in choices of what books to do, what formats to do them in, or any other ideas they may have concerning "the creation and distribution of eBooks."
Project Gutenberg is not in the business of establishing standards. If we were, we would have gladly accepted the request to convert an exemplary portion of our eBooks into HTML when World Wide Web was a brand new idea in 1993; we are happy to bring eBooks to our readers in as many formats as our volunteers wish to make.
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Written by Michael S. Hart
June 20, 2004. Updated October 23, 2004; December 25, 2007.