Summary of first six months
Eric Hellman, Executive Director
While this summary primarily covers January-June of 2026, the second half of our fiscal year, it should be noted that the organization survived the first half despite the devastating loss of its longtime leader, Greg Newby. We had time to prepare for a transition, but there are some things you just can't prepare for. I am thankful for everyone who pitched in to make a successful transition possible.
My objectives for the 6 month period Jan-Jun 2026 combined short term objectives and longer term strategies. For the most part we successfully met most of our short-term objectives, though most of them were a lot more work than expected.
Stabilizing the finances
Closing our Salt Lake City office dramatically reduced one set of expenses, freeing up cash to augment much needed sysadmin capability in the absence of Greg Newby. The task of establishing financial reporting and clarity was much more difficult than anticipated, as it took over 5 months to get control of our bank account and start earning interest on our significant cash balance. Paypal continues to be a growing source of donations, but importing Paypal transactions into Quickbooks correctly has frequently resulted in time-consuming manual labor. We have applied for an investment account at Fidelity Investments, but that has taken much longer than anticipated.
Our expenses for the 6 months of 2026 have been lower than the budgeted amount, and income has been above budget, even when we omit the grant we received from the Manton Foundation and the bequest from the O'Brien family. I expect we'll end the full fiscal year a bit above break-even without the $500K bequest, which is an excellent result, considering that we started the calendar year with a fiscal-year deficit of over $36,000; no budget plan existed.
The $500,000 bequest we received is testament to the value we provide to our readers; we established an investment policy and expect it to provide continuing income towards our long-term sustainability.
Stabilizing the operations
Beginning the year, Project Gutenberg was loaded with "technical debt". Years and years of dependence on volunteer developers coupled with a finite amount of Greg led to accretion of messy, undocumented code. Our websites depended on 3 completely separate website frameworks and 6 different programming languages, and there was no list of what was actually running or where it was running. Thanks largely to the efforts of Casey, Dan and Robert, we now have documented most of our systems, put our code under version control, and cleaned up a number of messes. While we still depend on volunteer developers, those developers can now focus on new capabilities and features without having to be software archeologists.
We have new issues to deal with as well. Traffic to our website has increased almost 10-fold from a year ago, driven largely by aggressively stupid AI scraping bots. It is now common for our servers to serve 4 million files in a single day, to 2 million different IP addresses. This has increasingly impacted readers via connection timeouts. Casey has taken the lead in working with ibiblio staff to identify bottlenecks in our web infrastructure.
The experience of having to transition many accounts has caused us to be vigilant about security and contingency planning. I'm pleased to share that passwords and 2FA keys are now secured by a 1Password account that can be accessed by 3 different people in exceptional circumstances.
Innovation
While Accessibility improvements have been part of our development program more for than a year, we did not expect that we would be subject to ADA title II regulations. In early April we found out that UNC would be requiring us to work towards those accessibility requirements in order to continue in the ibiblio hosting environment. Our previous accessibility work put us in a good position to bring our website platform into full compliance by May and a grant from the Manton Foundation will help us to begin assessing our entire book collection for accessibility. This assessment will start with volunteer training by Laura Brady, a world expert on EPUB accessibility and huge fan of Project Gutenberg.
While the "Altpoet" editing facility for alt-text descriptions has not progressed much, it has attracted a lot of attention in the Accessibility community and it will be a key component of our ebook mitigation work.
Last year's addition of AI generated summaries has proven to be a popular addition to our website, although a small number of low-quality summaries provoked critical comment. These comments have been largely addressed by use of Wikipedia-driven summaries where appropriate, and integration of the summary generation into the ebook processing workflow continues.
One innovation we have facilitated was largely driven by our friends at Distributed Proofreaders. Books with mathematics content are now starting to take advantage of wider support and tooling for MathML, and the results have been excellent. Our older books used small images to show math content and these were both ugly and inaccessible.
Awareness
We have made a fair amount of progress towards making people more aware of Project Gutenberg. We're still here, we're still free, still no advertising, and we're not "That site that has just plain text" any more. Though a key demographic for us is older and often retired, when I speak about Project Gutenberg to 'civilians' I have found a higher awareness among teachers and younger people - the demographic that lived through remote schooling during COVID. A recent post about us on "Hacker News" went viral and it was clear that the commenters were both recent and longtime fans.
Our social media team has done an amazing job of growing their audiences and promoting engagement with Project Gutenberg books and authors. A believe that the team's work is responsible for a good part of the consistent growth in small donations via PayPal and Buy Me A Coffee. In parallel, the monthly newsletter has matured into a valuable communications channel with our readers.
Community
A sense of community is vital to any predominantly volunteer-based organization, and the past 9 months have seen a shift from a mostly email-based community to a Slack space supplemented by email. A Code of Conduct has been adopted. It's a start. Outreach has brought new people into the community and is reconnecting some folks who have drifted away. We need to do better and make people feel empowered and appreciated.
I'll next write about objectives for next year.
