Such a remarkable and useful project. I had to look this up in Wikipedia; it was started in 1971 (!) by Michael S. Hart. They've never done much for aesthetics or curation. I like <a href="https://manybooks.net/" rel="nofollow">https://manybooks.net/</a> as an alternative. It's mostly Gutenberg sources (with credit) but the site and epub downloads are nicely designed. Although they've gotten pretty spammy.<p>If Sci-Hub is more your speed then Z-Library has 10 million books available for download. However most of them are not licensed copies. The neat thing about Gutenberg is it turns public domain books into something easily accessible.
I met the founder Michael Hart at the 2006 HOPE conference, and with a couple of people we all caught lunch together.<p>I was very sad when I heard of his passing. I'm sure I made no impression on him, but he made a big one on me:<p>He was very enthusiastic about technology making information available (and of course books) to the developing world. I wasn't sure how that would happen, but he told me cellphones would do it. In my head, I wasn't convinced-- remember in 2006 computers were still prohibitively expensive for much of the world and so were just about any cellphones with > 1.5" screen, not to mention very slow data speeds. OLPC had been launched a year earlier and it seemed to me that cheap devices of that sort were a more likely inroad to less well-off countries.<p>Turns out, I was an idiot.
I don’t read much. I bought an e-reader in 2014 and it has sat in a bin basically the whole time. But recently I discovered library genesis, which is full of pirated books in the vein of sci-hub. I dug up the old e-reader and I’m starting to read again. It’s amazing being able to just download and read a high quality epub of whatever book I have wanted to read. A lot of the books I actually own physical copies because I bought them thinking I would read them, and then never got around to them and I now have many boxes of books in the garage. Normal libraries aren’t quite right for me because I don’t read promptly and feel bad holding something I am not reading when others might want to check it out. But finally with library genesis I can download whatever and it doesn’t cost me money or take up any space. It works really well for me. And at night, after work, I’m making a little time for reading again.<p>Of course, in our current society we can’t offer this to everyone or artists would starve. But I think the solution is not to stop offering giant free libraries to everyone. I actually think the solution is to build a society where food and shelter and clothing and internet are free. So the daily costs of life go away. And artists can create their art and offer it for free to everyone. And every person on earth can grow up with access to a library of every book ever digitized.<p>EDIT: I should add, that if we did not patent and copyright everything, then costs would go down because generics would rule the market. This would also allow MUCH FASTER growth in poorer nations, since they would not have to import expensive goods from wealthy nations but could make their own clones. Google the TRIPS agreement for more. But if we also make society free to live (which is now cheaper without patents and copyright keeping prices high), then creators and engineers do not have to fear for their livelihood. So it is a self reinforcing change to society, and one where I believe the rate of innovation would be much higher. For every business person who only innovates because of the monopoly profits our current society offers, there are 100 engineers and business owners who just want to offer the next greatest thing, and who see the potential profit in being first to market. The hardcore libertarians who give talks at the Mises Institute know that intellectual property is a state enforced distortion of the free market, and all the communists and anarchists know that if you can offer knowledge to help others, you should not lock it down. One of the rare places both these groups agree!
I like to use sed to replace names in books. For example I used the following command to create Josh's Adventures In Wonderland<p>curl <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt" rel="nofollow">https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt</a> | sed 's/Alice/Josh/g' > Joshs-adventures-in-wonderland.txt<p>There are endless possibilities of fun. I'm thinking about doing 1984 next.
Project Gutenberg, which long predates the web, is probably less well-known than it deserves to be. While there are various reasons you might want digital or physical copies of out of copyright texts--such as commentary and annotations--Gutenberg means that you can get the original text of most books of any note before about the 1920s for free. And with tablets/ebook readers, they're easy to read.
I parsed through the Library of Congress digital records to find an out-of-copyright subset, and developed a search engine that is unique in that it is technologically impossible for me to track searches, as the index loads in the page. It has about a million entries.<p><a href="https://www.locserendipity.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.locserendipity.com/</a>
There have been lots of submissions of specific books, of course, but this is a nice general thread:<p><i>Obituary for Michael Stern Hart, Project Gutenberg Founder</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971</a> - Sept 2011 (32 comments)
How does it compare with Wikisource?<p>It looks like Project Gutenberg is older, but given <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html</a> is looks like the UX (as a contributor) is better on Wikisource.
It also finally seems to be available in Germany again after years of legal disputes. It always seemed a little bit ironic given the name of the project that here of all places you ran into a big red "Your IP is blocked" page.
There is an Australian version of this link: <a href="http://gutenberg.net.au" rel="nofollow">http://gutenberg.net.au</a> . There are quite a few books there that are not in gutenberg.org because the Aus. version observes Australian copyright law. You won't find much R.A. Freeman, for example, in the parent but almost his entire œuvre can be found on the Aussie site.
I’ve read several books from Gutenberg over the years, a very good project.<p>However, I’m surprised that it’s only 60K titles. The Google digitization project had over 1 million public domain titles as of 2008[1].<p>1. <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books</a>
I’ve been getting into old (1600s-1900s) science books lately. Many are out of print and either difficult or extremely expensive to get a physical copy of.<p>Gutenberg and LibGen have been absolutely indispensable.<p>Gutenbergs copy of The Skeptical Chymist is fantastic.<p>Bonus points that both platforms make it extremely easy to push a pdf directly to my remarkable tablet.
I'm surprised no-one on this thread has mentioned the Magic Catalog:<p><a href="http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html" rel="nofollow">http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html</a><p>Download it onto your eReader and click on a book in the project to get it onto the device.<p>Genius.
I love PG and I remember buying a Kindle 15 years ago just so I could read books from PG.<p>To this I would add <a href="https://www.fadedpage.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fadedpage.com/</a> which is like Project Gutenberg, but for works in the Canadian public domain!
I imagine a machine. Something similar to that automated coca-cola machines which you choose the flavor of your soda, pay it and it spits it.<p>Imagine a machine where you could choose a book from project Gutenberg, pay it and have it instantly printed for you.
For greek and roman classics I also recommend: <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://classics.mit.edu/</a>
LibriVox (<a href="https://librivox.org/" rel="nofollow">https://librivox.org/</a>) has free audiobooks for many of these public domain books. They're recorded by volunteers, so the quality is a grab bag. Some of them are quite good though. Most recently I listened to <i>A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court</i> read by John Greenman (<a href="https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court-by-mark-twain-2/" rel="nofollow">https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-co...</a>) Goofy book, but very entertaining.