The first book digitization project, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois. Hart's goal was to make the most often queried books in the public domain available free of charge to the public in electronic format. As of 2020, more than 60,000 titles were digitized, including literature, religious texts and reference works. Downloads are in one or several of plain text, HTML, PDF and various e-book formats. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, founded in 2000, manages the all-volunteer effort
Project Gutenberg affiliates have been undertaken in Canada, Europe, Australia and other parts of the world, focusing on works native to the respective countries. See
Google Books.