The Project Gutenberg FAQ 2002

Before Project Gutenberg became the world's largest free digital library, it was a scrappy volunteer operation run from spare rooms and church basements by people who believed literature should be free. This 2002 FAQ captures the movement at its pivotal moment: when digitizing books meant wrestling with scanners, training proof-readers one by one, and convincing a skeptical world that free e-books were worth the effort. Jim Tinsley documents the technical hurdles, the community-building struggles, and the fierce commitment to quality over convenience that defined the early years. It's a historical snapshot of digital pioneers figuring out how to preserve human knowledge in a new medium, long before anyone used the word 'ebook.' For anyone curious about where our digital literary culture came from, this is an artifacts worth exploring.