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. […]
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/
Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there.
However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
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).
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.)
As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
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.
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
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/
The book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement.
Keep up the good work!
good feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!
Very cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links?
(I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)
brother ... are we really THAT stupid now?
Check out https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html
Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.
not yet, but that's not a bad idea imo. Dealing with Ai crawler traffic is definitely a challenge if that's what you were referring to.
OPDS?
Now i'm not associated with gutenberg in any form, but they do have a page for offline consumption:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html
Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there.
However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
Donations are always appreciated ;)
Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.
Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!
Thanks! We're currently working on a design update of the page of any specific book. Should be online soon (next 1-2 weeks or so)
Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet
Great Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.
There's a minor bug with chrome in android where the menu will not close when you tap outside the menu or on the menu link/button
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).
I've heard that the newest Kobo e-readers have a browser that you could use to go to gutenberg.org and directly download files.
but yes, generally I agree with your point. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.
Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.
probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.
I've used https://standardebooks.org/ to pull nicely formatted Project Gutenberg books on any e-reader that supports a browser (in my case, Boox).
Technically, I can also just directly pull the epub from Project Gutenberg, but sometimes the formatting leaves a lot to be desired.
Once you get an e-reader that runs a semi-capable OS (ex - stock android, even an older version), it's hard to go back to something like a kindle.
standardebooks.org is great!
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.)
I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.
Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.
As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.
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.
That's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable
Is that a Kindle issue?
You can download books in most browsers. I know Amazon have done things to make life difficult for other stores in the past.
Made an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/
that's cool!
Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use
A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.
good to hear - that was a lot of work!
Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.
Awesome
I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI
maybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438
could be a trick to ease that fear :D