Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/

While PG has probably gotten a lot of use and growth with the growth/maintreaming of the Internet since the 1990s, (TIL) it started back in 1971:

> Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed one day the general public would be able to access computers and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. […]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg

The best thing I ever did for my father was to buy him a kindle and an access point and show him how to use Project Gutenberg to get books. He loved the old writings (he being a GED holder who was in the Navy during Korea yet had read the entire Harvard Classics). He had a special rolled up towel he used to prop it on his lap in his favorite chair and he read and read and read. When he passed he was reading "Legends of the Jews" from 1931.

I had some small e-correspondence with Michael S. Hart back in the 90's as well, and made a few modest contributions to the project, which made my English major undergraduate heart swell with pride and joy.

I guess this is only to say that PG is special to me for these reasons, and I am glad to see it still thriving. <3

I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).

From Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome"

Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...

Nice to see so much appreciation for what we do. (I'm the new-ish executive director.) Any wikipedians reading this, the article about PG is... aging. Last I looked, it said we offered Plucker files. @Jseiko has done some nice work.

Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove, though many technical details defy automatic typesetting of its books. Standard Ebooks takes consistency to an unbelievable level. My post compares various sources of public domain books with an eye on typesetting:

https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.)

I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)

I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.

My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…

I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.

(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)

Worth mentioning the Project Gutenberg ZIMs. You can download the entire ENglish Gutenberg corpus for about 60GB (English Wikipedia ZIM complete with images is ~120GB):

https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html

Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others.

> 23644 downloads in the last 30 days.

I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot?

[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855

Gutenberg is awesome. There is also

https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think

https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden

As a Kindle user, I still miss the old version of the site. The new one looks great on normal desktop, but the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser.

The project was geo-blocked in Germany for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039

Made an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/

I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work.

Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right.

Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now.

Thanks for sticking with the project!

A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.

my first ever coding project was making a chrome extension that made the typography better on the html formats: https://github.com/smcalilly/gutenberg-typography

Project Gutenberg feels like the opposite of modern internet design philosophy. Quiet, useful, accessible, and built to last.

Is there a plan to extend search to book content?

Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use

I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?

I wonder if the people behind project Gutenberg use Anna's Archive or mam for books that can't be put on Gutenberg.

I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!

I find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.

PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

I thought this was for the Wordpress Gutenberg Editor for a second

I love Project Gutenberg, don't get me wrong... but frankly, Anna's is better.

Keep up the awesome work !

Their feeds of new books is a goldmine:

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/feeds.html

Every day you'll get much more than you're bargaining for, right into your feed or inbox. Easy download books you're interested in and put them on your Kindle.

Please give me some book recommendations :)

I keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR

Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.

How did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?

Awesome

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I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI