Reprinting a Project Gutenberg Book

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Project Gutenberg is a unique project founded by Michael Hart. He invented the concept of eBooks in 1971 and continues to be intimately involved in the technology. Hart had a vision of making all of the world’s great literature available in electronic form. Further, this vision includes the mission to do this at little or no cost to as many people as possible.

Project Gutenberg aggressively encourages people to distribute their eBooks through a variety of means, including sending a URL for friends to download, burning a CD or DVD image of a book or a whole collection, encouraging libraries and bookstores to give away Project Gutenberg eBooks and sharing files on networks.

When Hart was a student at the University of Illinois, he typed the U.S. Declaration of Independence into a mainframe computer and offered it to others on a network that was the precursor to the current Internet. Hart named his project after Johannes Gutenberg, a German printer who invented the printing press in the fifteenth century. He said, “The idea of Project Gutenberg is to bring the source of all information, and civilization, to the masses in the same way the Gutenberg press did in the middle of the second millennium, only in a modern manner.”

Hart typed the first 100 books and until 1989 the books were manually entered by volunteers. At that point scanning and optical character recognition allowed the work to go faster. Currently, there are about 32,000 free books in the collection, and Project Gutenberg gives away about 3 million books a week from just one site, www.ibiblio.org. Project Gutenberg also has partners and affiliates making eBooks available for free or for small fees, and there are over 100,000 titles available through these sources. Users also have the option of downloading a free DVD containing 17,000 of the Project Gutenberg’s first 19,000 eBooks.

In addition to eBooks, the collection includes audio books, recorded music, sheet music, videos and photos. Project Gutenberg also includes books in a variety of languages, including French, German, Finnish, Spanish, Frisian, Catalan and Sanskrit. Hart says that he intends to carry 1 million books in 100 languages. He says that his goal is to provide eBooks for the whole world to read in as many formats as are available. He sees this project as a way to advance culture, literacy and democracy.

The project has evolved over the nearly four decades of its existence. In 2004, a Magnetlink download option was added to allow searching results pages. Magnetlink uses an open standard for peer to peer file sharing. It allows users to search for a friendly name of a book. For instance a user can type in “How Shakespeare Came to Write the Tempest” instead of a difficult file name, such as 32991-8.txt.

As part of the greening of the world, Project Gutenberg eBooks fit in well since they are an environmentally friendly alternative to traditional printed books. Electronic books are a growing trend, as the cost of books rises and the availability of technology is more widespread. While eBooks were designed to be read on a computer, devices such as Kindle, iPhone, Android, Sony Reader and other portable devices make reading eBooks more portable.

Project Gutenberg is a regular participant in the annual World eBook Fair, which is holding its fifth meeting in 2010. More than 3.5 million free books will be showcased, including historical documents, national literature, children’s literature, medicine and reference books, available for free downloading. The 2010 eBook fair focuses on eBook reading programs that can be used to read eBooks on cellphones, MP3 players, iPods and other portable media players. Michael Hart, who co-founded the World eBook Fair, says, “The cell phone is the wave of the future, not, I repeat, NOT the Kindle or Sony approach, for they are only targeting millions, and I should like very much to reach billions of people.”

Resource by k.Pearson

My name is Kim, I am a volunteer at a local Zoo in Chicago, IL. I have been a volunteer for about 5 years now and love it. My full time job is at a vet just outside of the city. I am intrigued by the nature of animals and how they interact with one another.

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