The Reader’s Library: Project Gutenberg

Posted on July 24, 2021Comments Off on The Reader’s Library: Project Gutenberg

I feel so behind the times barely getting around to sharing this addition to the Reader’s Library. Throughout my education career, I had heard references to it, but it only ever stayed on the periphery of my awareness until recently.

Project Gutenberg celebrates 50 years of offering free literature!

Some quick facts: Since its founding by Michael Hart in 1971, everything offered by Project Gutenberg are works with expired copyrights in the U.S. Volunteers digitize and proofread the books before they are added to the library. Books can be either read online or downloaded. There is no fee or registration and no special apps needed to access the library. Project Gutenberg has over 60,000 eBooks available to the public.

Personally, I enjoyed reading recently added short stories published in the Imagination: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy from 1955. It was a treat to read about the interesting and unique ideas that influenced the genre so many love today.

Project Gutenberg is a fantastic place to look for classics and timeless titles to read, in addition to being a wonderful organization. Rather than explain how awesome Project Gutenberg is, I’ll let you read their mission statement and decide if they’re worth checking out.

Thanks for stopping by and happy reading!

The Project Gutenberg Mission Statement, by Michael Hart

The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple: To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.

This mission is, as much as possible, to encourage all those who are interested in making eBooks and helping to give them away.

In fact, Project Gutenberg approves about 99% of all requests from those who would like to make our eBooks and give them away, within their various local copyright limitations.

Project Gutenberg is powered by ideas, ideals, and by idealism.

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Because we are totally powered by volunteers we are hesitant to be very bossy about what our volunteers should do, or how to do it.

We offer as many freedoms to our volunteers as possible, in choices of what books to do, what formats to do them in, or any other ideas they may have concerning “the creation and distribution of eBooks.”

Project Gutenberg is not in the business of establishing standards. If we were, we would have gladly accepted the request to convert an exemplary portion of our eBooks into HTML when World Wide Web was a brand new idea in 1993; we are happy to bring eBooks to our readers in as many formats as our volunteers wish to make.

In addition, we do not provide standards of accuracy above those as recommended by institutions such as the U.S. Library of Congress at the level of 99.95%. While most of our eBooks exceed these standards and are presented in the most common formats, this is not a requirement; people are still encouraged to send us eBooks in any format and at any accuracy level and we will ask for volunteers to convert them to other formats, and to incrementally correct errors as times goes on.

Many of our most popular eBooks started out with huge error levels–only later did they come to the more polished levels seen today. In fact, many of our eBooks were done totally without any supervision–by people who had never heard of Project Gutenberg–and only sent to us after the fact.

We want to continue to encourage everyone to send us eBooks, even if they have already created some without any knowledge of who we were, what we were doing, or how we were doing it.

Everyone is welcome to contribute to Project Gutenberg.

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We want to provide as many eBooks in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible.

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Written by Michael S. Hart June 20, 2004. Updated October 23, 2004; December 25, 2007.

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