Giveaway shows demand for e-books is strong

More than 30 million books were downloaded in the past month as part of the World eBook Fair, a giveaway of books in electronic form. Originally intended to run July 4 to Aug. 4, the project was extended for a week because unexpected demand at the start temporarily overwhelmed computer servers.

Coordinated by Project Gutenberg, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making e-books available for free, the fair (www.worldebookfair.com) brought together Gutenberg's own holdings of 20,000 books with those of 125 private e-book libraries and collections that agreed to lend their holdings. The largest is World eBook Library, which normally charges a fee for downloading. More than 300,000 books in total were available.

According to Gutenberg founder Michael Hart, about 95 percent of the books available for download were in the public domain -- not under copyright protection -- and permission was given for the remainder by the libraries that hold the rights.

``It was a revelation, way beyond our expectations," Hart said yesterday. ``On some peak days we had 150,000 different people downloading books. A lot more people want e-books than the world ever dreamed of." He had hoped 10 million books would be downloaded. So great was demand, he said, that the project will be repeated starting Oct. 1 to coincide with World Book Fair Month.

Though books were available in 100 languages, the majority were in English, and Hart said there were huge spikes of downloading from Europe and Asia.

``The biggest request we got was for newer books," he said. ``In October we're going to have a bunch of new books."