Many of my first months on the Internet were spent on the Project Gutenberg site. This project is truly about advancing education, and I am proud to speak of it here.

Project Gutenberg's goal is to provide literature on the Internet for downloading, completely free of charge. They can only post books that no longer are covered by copyright law -- however, here you will find free copies of the greatest works in history. Shakespeare. Homer. Bronte. Dickens.

Furthermore, Project Gutenberg provides these texts in simple text format -- .txt files! Any computer can read them, search them, and print them. Thus, access to the books is truly universal. Project Gutenberg has compiled almost 2,000 "e-texts" so far, and they come out with more every month!

How do they do it? It is completely volunteer run. The director is a man named Michael Hart. With access to a mainframe computer back in the 1970s, he typed in the Declaration of Independence and sent it around to his friends. Then came the Bill of Rights. Then, larger and larger books. Today, you can find everything from the Bible to Peter Pan to Don Quixote.
Here's how it works:

A volunteer picks a book they would like to work on, and sends it on to Michael Hart, who makes doubly sure that it is no longer under copyright. Once cleared, the volunteer methodically scans each page of the book, using their computer and scanner. Once scanned, the volunteer then edits the scanned text, looking for errors the scanning software made. Once the entire book is edited, it is passed on to Michael Hart for distribution to the world as an e-text.

Anyone can volunteer -- but you don't necessarily need to have a scanner or the time to scan a whole book. You can do part of a book, or you can just act as an editor, looking over previously scanned works for errors. Project Gutenberg now boasts of over 600 volunteers.

Project Gutenberg can be accessed by anyone throughout the world with an Internet connection. It is an excellent educational resource for those that cannot afford to buy book after book. In college, I was able to use Project Gutenberg for books required by many of my classes, and it saved me a pretty penny. It is a very worthwhile effort, if you have the time. If you don't have the time (and not many of us do), you should visit anyway, and peruse the thousands of works now available to you for free!