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About Project Gutenberg

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 7 months ago

Project Gutenberg

 

by David Welch

 

Site URL: www.gutenberg.org

 

In 1447, Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press, allowing books to be copied and distributed at significantly reduced efforts and thus ushering in an era where books were widely available to the public. In 1971, Micheal Hart started Project Gutenberg, an endeavor to collect, save, and distribute cultural works as electronic texts, when he realized that anything that could be digitized on a computer could be replicated effortlessly and distributed freely to anyone who has access. Since then, the Project Gutenberg database has grown to contain over 18,000 etexts with an average of fifty new books added every week, making it the largest collection of etexts available. Eventually, Project Gutenberg will contain every book in the public domain and be ready to add new works into their collection as they enter public domain status, granting everyone in the world access to free and easy access to these books which make up our cultural heritage.

 

The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple; to save cultural works electronically so they can be copied easily and saved forever, long after their original hard copies decay beyond legibility, so that everyone can have easy access to them. To ensure the continued survival of these works, the Project Gutenberg database is backed up daily and mirrored on many different locations on all seven continents. To make the etexts most readable not only by computer software but to human eyes as well, etexts are primarily encoded in the US-ASCII format and extended to ISO-8859-1 for special characters. Project Gutenberg's easy to download and view text has been an invaluable asset to literary sites, such as those linked to by becklit.org. Texts are also saved in other formats like html, pdf, and even some audio versions are available. The optional zip format permits the lowest file size possible for increased convenience when downloading.

 

Project Gutenberg mostly contains cultural works from Western perspective but one can also find things like travel guides, magazine issues, and reference works. While the bulk of the collection is books, there are also some works of music, film, and pictures available. Etexts have been translated into dozens of languages by volunteers. Of course, Project Gutenberg can only legally save and distribute books that are in the public domain, so most of the books were originally published before 1923. However, some books still under copyright have been given unlimited distribution rights to Project Gutenberg, although readers will have certain limitations to what they can do with them. One won't be able to find Stephen King, Tom Clancy, or J.K. Rowling here yet but one can find classics that SearchLIT.org features such as William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

With the sheer volume of content readily available, anyone will find Project Gutenberg a valuable resource. Teachers can find free etexts to use in classrooms. Students can find books to read or topics to explore. Researchers can search through government documents or historical diaries. One could even find some great recipes by downloading an electronic cookbook. A refined search engine allows searches by author, title, language, and subject; and because these are etexts, it is possible to search with passages or keywords, making Project Gutenberg a handy tool for researchers. For those still undecided on where to begin, there are several top 100 lists, displaying the most popular books and authors.

 

Project Gutenberg relies on a system of volunteerism to flourish. There is no list of books previously chosen to add to the database. The books added can be anything procured by anyone as long as the text is in the public domain. Transferring a book to an etext can either be done by typing or scanning the pages and using optical character recognition software to find the text on the page. One can also volunteer by proofreading, procuring eligible paper books, burning CDs for people without internet access, donating money, or by promoting Project Gutenberg on your site.

 

Now that U.S. public domain laws have changed to permit copyrights to last 90 years after the death of the author, the growth of the public domain has been limited. Still, it is up to us to maintain this information and add to it so our cultural and intellectual heritage will continue to survive, evolve and influence future generations.

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