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/
When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!
>When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design.
I suppose a printed book, black ink on paper, is "brutalist" and unpleasant to look at?
The text of a book shouldn't be encrusted with format, your reader or browser should contain the presentation that you want to see, find appealing, or need (accessibility).
Thanks for the free work! Project Gutenberg is nice to have :).
On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?
Huh that's interesting: 4.5 seconds for the TCP handshake and an additional 9.2 seconds for the TLS handshake. Is this some kind of captcha, since most bots would disconnect before that, so if you complete it once then it knows you're good? (Until the bots catch on of course, but so long as it works it's relatively unintrusive and not discriminatory against uncommon client software (that is, non-Chrome/ium).) The rest of the requests were lightning fast
Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!
traffic yesterday ~20% more than recent average.
4971601 sessions
177 robots
863462 robot files
3390115 user files
20.30% robot files
(robots id'd based on requests/ip address)
5 apache servers for static content, 1 CherryPy server for dynamic content
hosted at iBiblio.
Have you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans.
I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.
As long as you're taking suggestions, since many of the books are quite old, adding a publication date or date range to the search functionality might be nice. I personally would find it very useful since I have a tendency to look for things that are older than year _x_ when researching various things.
only 20% of our books have original publication data in the db. We have a project to add another 40% or so from another database, let us know if you want to help.
Hi for the past 20 years I have known about Project Gutenberg and I used to read a lot from it. One of the obstacle that I face is that there is no way to arrange the books in the order of their original publication.
Do you know of any such way.
Surely we can arrange the books by their release date on Gutenberg but it has long baffled me as it feels to me the most useless way of sorting the books.
Thank you for Project Gutenberg.
only 20% of our books have original publication data in the db. We have a project to add another 40% or so from another database, let us know if you want to help.
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Great project. Are many of the books in a format that can easily be converted into audio? Is there a way to search for them, and information on what software your readers find useful for this purpose?
(Note: A lot of print media these days has switched to far-to-small font-sizes. Less of a problem for (zoomable) digital media, but for many that's still a barrier.)
Gutenberg is nearly all books that have lapsed into the US public domain by dint of being published 95+ years in the past. Which broadly explains why you hit nothing for 3d printing.
As another commenter said PG is almost all books from 95+ years in the past due to copyright law in the US. We partner with a sister organization, the World Library Foundation, who have a self-publishing portal for modern works by authors who wish to put their own work in the public domain. You might want to look there for more modern material. https://self.gutenberg.org
The ebook editions are very good for this. Most of the e-reader software provides all the amenities (bookmarks, highlighting, notes, control of margins, etc).
FWIW I absolutely love how 'no-frills' PG is compared to so much of the bloated, over-engineered, script-riddled web these days. Please don't ever change that!
I don't know what the status of this is today, but a number of years ago my biggest complaint about Gutenberg is that a lot of books had images added back when low resolution images were the standard, so you have a ton of books with image resolutions from the year 2000.
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. […]
"Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois."
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 am actually working on this right now. If you would like to test it, you may download Thorium reader and add the catalog http://pgnew.pglaf.org:8000/opds/
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.)
And as another person noted, the vast majority of books have HTML, EPUB, Mobi formats. We are also looking at both KEPUB (Kobo) and PDF which will probably come in the future.
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.
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.
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?
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.
FYI, I took Plucker out of the lead in November, after a PG volunteer recommended that update on the article talk page. Plucker is currently only mentioned in a sentence about formats offered in 2009.
Happy to make other updates! Writing specific notes on the talk page is helpful.
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.
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?
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):
99 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 75.9 ms ] threadI suppose a printed book, black ink on paper, is "brutalist" and unpleasant to look at?
The text of a book shouldn't be encrusted with format, your reader or browser should contain the presentation that you want to see, find appealing, or need (accessibility).
On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?
Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!
I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.
Thanks for all the effort put into the site!
(Note: A lot of print media these days has switched to far-to-small font-sizes. Less of a problem for (zoomable) digital media, but for many that's still a barrier.)
human-read: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1
computer-generated: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/2
IIRC many of the human-generated ones come from LibriVox, many of the computer-generated ones came from a collaboration with Microsoft.
Also by the way I just searched for 3d printing and found nothing. Either there are no books, or the search query makes things too complicated, IMO.
Use ⌘ + + until you get the line length you like.
> 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
https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...
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.)
And as another person noted, the vast majority of books have HTML, EPUB, Mobi formats. We are also looking at both KEPUB (Kobo) and PDF which will probably come in the future.
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.
Happy to make other updates! Writing specific notes on the talk page is helpful.
https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think
https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden
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!
> 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
https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html