20k banner

From the Distributed Proofreaders website (blockquotes omitted).  Congratulations!!!

Just half a year after our 10th anniversary, we have reason to celebrate another big milestone. As of today, Distributed Proofreaders has contributed 20,000 unique titles to the bookshelves of Project Gutenberg, free to enjoy for everybody.

Out of curiosity, I had a look at the numbers. It took us more than six years to post the first 10,000 books, reaching that milestone in March 2007.  We have doubled that number in just a bit over four years. That’s on average about 2500 projects posted per year!

In addition to being the biggest single producer of ebooks for Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders is a truly international community. People from all over the world contribute, bringing with them their unique skills and preferences. One area where this becomes obvious is the variety of different languages we’re working in. While most projects only contain a single language, there are those where two or even more languages are used. These books are often especially challenging, needing people with skills in different languages to complete. At Distributed Proofreaders, help with a language you’re not familiar with is never far away. Native speakers of lots of different languages as well as specialists in a few that aren’t even spoken anymore are always happy to answer questions about tricky issues, making it therefore possible to complete those challenging projects and post the resulting books to Project Gutenberg for everybody to enjoy.

To celebrate that diversity, we have chosen to showcase books containing at least two languages. Here’s a list of our projects for the 20,000 celebration for you to enjoy:

There will be more to come, and I’ll add them here as soon as I know about them, so there’ll be a full list at the end. And there will be individual posts about some of the books in that list, too.

A big Thank You goes to everybody who has contributed to these and all the other books that make up this huge number, in whatever capacity.

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