Project Gutenberg Request for Support

By Michael Hart

May 18 2001

Right now we are in a sort of "Catch-22" situation with fundraising right now. . .we are registered in about 1/3 of the states right now, with paperwork in to get to 2/3, but we don't have enough money to register in the last 1/3, and the first 1/3 will start needing to be renewed by the time we get to the last 1/3. . .and the stack of paperwork for these is literally as large as the person handling them.

The trustees of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation have told me we need to raise $25,000 just to complete all this paperwork, as there are lots of fees associated with theses, and we have to hire a CPA to sign the last bunch. . .obviously we did the easiest and least expensive states first.

Neither of our trustees have the time to do all this by themselves, so we also have to pay for a 1/4 time assistant, even though our trustees do serve pro bono.

We can't get on shows such as Oprah, Regis, Letterman and Leno to do any demonstrations and fundraising until we are registered in all 50 states, and probably also the District of Columbia, so it's even more of a Catch-22 than it first appears. . . .

We are expecting to have approximately 4,000 Etexts online by the end of the year, with nearly 2,000 volunteers whom we would like to provide more support for in the areas of copyright research, book finding, scanning, proofreading, etc. Currently every one of the Project Gutenberg sites around the world is operated by a volunteer who provides all the disk space, bandwidth, etc., and we would love to buy our own drives for at least the two major US sites on which we initially post our Etexts.

As of 05/16/01 contributions are only being solicited from people in: Connecticut, Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, Oklahoma, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Wyoming, South Carolina. = 18 states

We have completed filing in the following states, awaiting response: Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

We are partially filed in Maryland, they wanted more information.

The last 5 states have such incredible paperwork that we haven't quite been able to do it all yet. . .sorry. . . . Alaska, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, West Virginia.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally request donations in all 50 states. If your state is not listed and you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have, just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to donate.

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