Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.
Project Gutenberg Mission Statement: To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.
The Project Gutenberg Philosophy
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:
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 ...
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 ...