I apologize; it seems I did not move the calendar event and forgot that we had moved the meeting to the 25th. Thanks Linda and Robert for the correction. I will join the zoom today at 1PM ET anyway in case anyone wants to chat. Eric Hellman Executive Director Project Gutenberg If you appreciate the work we do, donations are always appreciated! https://www.gutenberg.org/donate/
On Jul 17, 2026, at 8:09 AM, Eric Hellman <eric@hellman.net> wrote:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83964540489?pwd=9E7atMjspJYNv5fSkfRbBiKkbl7xP7.1
July Board update
- ended 25-26 fiscal year with a surplus of $506,273.88 (500K legacy donation + 6,273.88 ! - 300K Fidelity account created, 250K moved into a 3 month CD. - Director's insurance application filed, but the assigned advisor left the company, stranding our application. Resubmitted. - Very successful American Library Association Meeting - I received spontaneous applause for showing up. Strong interest in our new OPDS service that Zach has built. Meeting with Hathitrust and Lyrasis were very productive. - By installing monitoring of our database, webservers, and load balancers at iBiblio, Casey Peel has identified and addressed causes of the high-load websites and slowdowns and timeouts. - Altpoet and OPDS are now running on PGLAF servers. - Robert has made good progress on cleanup of our PHP based workflow tools.
Strategic Plan for 2026-2027
While there are still transition issues to be sorted, and technical debt to be dealt with, we now have the luxury of planning initiatives and budget to execute them.
Accessibility of our new and existing ebooks will be an important theme this year. We have some key components in place, but it will be people-power, both volunteer and paid staff, that will determine how well we succeed at making our ebooks accessible while remaining faithful to our source editions. There is wide interest in our accessibility work in the library and archive communities. In particular, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive sees our collection as a promising accelerant for their effort to improve the quality and accessibility of their ebook offerings; he would like to provide funding for our accessibility work.
Apps will be a new theme for Project Gutenberg. But not our own app. People who read our free ebooks also want to read books from their local library, or from a scholarly ebook source such as OApen. But no reader wants to have a different app for every source - readers want to learn to use a sungle app that works with all their ebooks. The technology that enables having multiple libraries in a single app is a protocol called OPDS, and the version that Zach has built is close to being ready for production use. A year from now, we want to see multiple apps aligned with Project Gutenberg's mission (and that of libraries of all kinds) to offer Project Gutenberg as an option. It won't be long before we can replace the claim "No Apps needed!") with the claim "Works in Apps, too!")
Another theme for the coming year will be new filetypes. I expect we will retire the "kf8.mobi" type, add azw3 for Kindle, add the "kepub" type for Kobo devices, and at long last generate hih quality PDF files. The core work for this is already done: the challenges will be coordination among multiple systems and teams.
The objective farthest from the finish line relates to audiobooks. PG has never had a coherent audiobook strategy. Our audiobooks are not presented well, some of them purport to be copyrighted, and there is almost no connection of audiobooks to their respective ebooks. This will require coordination with other organizations, including Librivox, Microsoft and MIT, and perhaps will include new technology for text-audio synchronization.
This will be an exciting year, but I continue to keep in mind the necessity to build the operational structures, finances, and teams to enable the hiring of Project Gutenberg's next executive director.
Eric Hellman Executive Director Project Gutenberg
If you appreciate the work we do, donations are always appreciated! https://www.gutenberg.org/donate/