Why is Project Gutenberg so set on using Plain Vanilla ASCII?
Don’t misrepresent us–we support and publish many open formats, but, yes, we do want to have a plain text version of everything possible. We’re looking at our history, and we’re planning for the long term–the very long term. Today, Plain Vanilla ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world. This has been so for over thirty years, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. We’ve seen formats and extended character sets come and go; plain text stays with us. We can still read Shakespeare’s First Folios, the original Gutenberg Bible, the Domesday Book, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone (though we may have trouble with the language!), but we can’t read many files made in various formats on computer media just 20 years ago. We’re trying to build an archive that will last not only decades, but centuries. The point of putting works in the PG archive is that they are copied to many, many public
