Project Gutenberg facts for kids

Project Gutenberg (often called PG) is a special project run by volunteers. Their goal is to turn old books and other cultural works into digital files. They also want to help create and share free eBooks. It was started in 1971 by an American writer named Michael S. Hart. This makes it the oldest digital library in the world!

Most of the things you find in Project Gutenberg are full books or stories. These are usually works that are in the public domain. This means their copyright has ended, so anyone can use them for free. All the files are free to access. They come in easy-to-use formats that work on almost any computer. As of early 2024, Project Gutenberg had over 70,000 free eBooks!

You can find these books in simple text files. They are also available in other formats like HTML, PDF, and EPUB. Most books are in English, but there are many in other languages too. There are also other projects connected to Project Gutenberg. These projects offer more content, often focusing on specific regions or languages. Project Gutenberg works closely with Distributed Proofreaders. This is an online community where volunteers help check scanned texts for mistakes.

Project Gutenberg is named after Johannes Gutenberg. He was an inventor who helped create printing technology. His work made books much more widely available to people.

History of Project Gutenberg

Michael S. Hart (left) and Gregory Newby (right) from Project Gutenberg, at a conference in 2006

Michael S. Hart started Project Gutenberg in 1971. He began by typing the United States Declaration of Independence into a computer. Hart was a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He got access to a large computer called a Xerox Sigma V mainframe. Friendly computer operators gave him a special account. This account had almost unlimited computer time. At that time, this was worth a lot of money! Hart wanted to "give back" this gift. He decided to do something valuable for everyone. His first goal was to make 10,000 important books available for free by the year 2000.

Michael Hart was inspired by a free paper copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He decided to type it into a computer. Then, he shared it with other computer users. This happened on July 4, 1971.

The computer he used was one of only 15 connected to ARPANET. This was an early computer network that later became the Internet. Hart believed that one day, everyone would have computers. He wanted to make books available electronically for free. He used the Declaration of Independence from his backpack. This became the very first Project Gutenberg electronic text. He named the project after Johannes Gutenberg. Gutenberg was a German printer from the 1400s. He started a revolution with his movable type printing press.

By the mid-1990s, more volunteers joined Project Gutenberg. Hart was running it from Illinois Benedictine College. He typed all the texts himself until 1989. After that, image scanners and special software called optical character recognition (OCR) got better. This made it easier to scan books. Hart later made a deal with Carnegie Mellon University. They agreed to manage Project Gutenberg's money. As more e-texts were added, volunteers started helping with the daily tasks. Hart used to do all of these tasks himself.

An Italian volunteer named Pietro Di Miceli created the first Project Gutenberg website. He also started building the project's online catalog. He worked on this for ten years, from 1994 to 2004. During this time, the project's web pages won many awards. They were often listed as "best of the Web." This helped make the project very popular.

Starting in 2004, a better online catalog was created. This made it easier to find, access, and link to Project Gutenberg content. Today, Project Gutenberg is hosted by ibiblio. This is a digital library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Michael Hart passed away on September 6, 2011. He was 64 years old.

Books on CDs and DVDs

In August 2003, Project Gutenberg made a CD. It had about 600 of the "best" eBooks from their collection. You could download this CD as a special file called an ISO image. If people could not download the CD, they could ask for a free copy to be mailed to them.

In December 2003, a DVD was created. It held almost 10,000 books! At that time, this was nearly the entire collection. In early 2004, the DVD also became available by mail.

A new DVD came out in July 2007 with over 17,000 books. In April 2010, a special dual-layer DVD was released. This one had almost 30,000 items!

Most of the DVDs and all of the CDs were burned by volunteers. However, the new dual-layer DVDs were made in a factory. This was cheaper than having volunteers burn so many discs. By October 2010, the project had mailed about 40,000 discs. As of 2017, they stopped mailing free CDs. But you can still download the ISO image files.

What's in the Collection?

Growth of Project Gutenberg publications from 1994 to 2015

As of August 2015, Project Gutenberg had over 70,000 items. On average, more than 50 new e-books are added every week. Most of these are literature from Western culture. This includes novels, poems, short stories, and plays. But Project Gutenberg also has cookbooks, reference works, and old magazines. The collection also has a few non-text items. These include audio files and music notes.

Most of the releases are in English. But there are also many books in other languages. As of April 2016, the most common non-English languages were French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese.

Whenever possible, Gutenberg books are available in plain text. This usually uses a simple US-ASCII character encoding. Sometimes it uses ISO-8859-1 for special characters. Michael Hart always wanted a simple text version. He believed it would be readable far into the future. For books in East Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese, a different encoding called UTF-8 is used.

Other formats might also be released if volunteers create them. The most common format besides plain text is HTML. This allows for special formatting and pictures. Some people have asked for more advanced formats. They think these are easier to read. But Project Gutenberg generally avoids formats that are hard to edit, like PDF. This is because they don't fit with the project's goals.

Since 2009, Project Gutenberg has also offered automatically created file formats. These include HTML (if not already provided), EPUB, and plucker.

Project Goals

Michael Hart said in 2004 that Project Gutenberg's goal is simple: "To encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks." He wanted to offer "as many e-books in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible." A project slogan is to "break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy." Volunteers want to keep spreading reading and appreciation for old stories. This is just like how public libraries started doing in the late 1800s.

Project Gutenberg is set up to be decentralized. This means there's no strict rule about what texts to add. Instead, volunteers work on what they find interesting or what they have available. The collection is meant to last a very long time. This way, books won't be lost if something happens in one place. To make sure of this, the entire collection is regularly backed up. It is also copied onto servers in many different locations around the world.

Copyright Rules

Project Gutenberg is very careful about the copyright status of its eBooks. They only add material after checking that it's okay under United States copyright law. They keep records of these checks for future use. Project Gutenberg does not claim new copyright on the books it shares. Instead, it encourages people to freely copy and share them.

Most books in the Project Gutenberg collection are in the public domain under U.S. copyright law. This means they are free for everyone to use. There are also a few copyrighted texts, like some by science fiction writer Cory Doctorow. Project Gutenberg shares these with special permission. These books have extra rules set by the copyright owner. But they are usually licensed under Creative Commons, which means they can still be shared widely.

"Project Gutenberg" is a special name, like a trademark. You cannot use this name if you are selling or changing the public domain texts from the project. It is legal to resell public domain works. But you must remove all mentions of Project Gutenberg. Some people have taken books formatted by volunteers and sold them for profit. For example, the 1906 book Fox Trapping was sold on the Kindle Store without giving credit to Project Gutenberg.

The Project Gutenberg website was blocked in Germany for a while. This was because of a court order about books by authors like Heinrich Mann. Even though these books were in the public domain in the U.S., they were still copyrighted in Germany. The German court said the website was under German law because it had German content and could be accessed there. In October 2021, the problem was solved. Project Gutenberg agreed to block books by those three authors in Germany until their German copyright ends. The website was also blocked in Italy starting in May 2020.

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

In 2000, a non-profit group was formed. It's called the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, Inc. This group was created in Mississippi, United States. Its job is to handle the project's legal needs. Donations to this foundation can be tax-deductible.

Gregory B. Newby was a professor and a long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer. In 2001, he became the foundation's first CEO.

Project Partners

• Project Gutenberg Consortia Center: This group focuses on collections of other collections. These don't have the same strict editing or formatting as the main Project Gutenberg. They feature themed collections and many languages. This is supported by worldlibrary.net, which hosts self.gutenberg.org. This is a place where people can publish their own eBooks.
• ibiblio: This organization at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill now hosts Project Gutenberg.
• Distributed Proofreaders: In 2000, Charles Franks started Distributed Proofreaders (DP). This allowed many volunteers over the Internet to help check scanned texts. This effort greatly increased the number and types of texts added to Project Gutenberg. It also made it easier for new volunteers to join. DP officially joined Project Gutenberg in 2002. As of 2018, over 36,000 books from DP made up almost two-thirds of the books in Project Gutenberg.

Sister Projects

All sister projects are separate groups. They share the same goals as Project Gutenberg. They have also been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg name. These projects often focus on a specific country or language.

List of Sister Projects

• Project Gutenberg Australia: This project hosts many texts that are free to use under Australian copyright law. Some of these might still be copyrighted in the United States. It focuses on Australian writers and books about Australia.
• Project Gutenberg Canada: This is a digital library for Canadian public domain texts.
• Projekt Gutenberg-DE: This project claims copyright for its own product. It only allows people to browse its texts online.
• Project Gutenberg Europe: This project is run by Project Rastko in Serbia. It aims to be a Project Gutenberg for all of Europe. It started posting projects in 2005. It uses the Distributed Proofreaders software to create e-texts quickly.
• Project Gutenberg Luxembourg: This project mainly publishes books written in Luxembourgish.
• Projekti Lönnrot: This project was started by Finnish Project Gutenberg volunteers. Its name comes from the Finnish philologist Elias Lönnrot.
• Project Gutenberg of the Philippines: This project wants to make as many books available to as many people as possible. It has a special focus on the Philippines and Philippine languages.
• Project Gutenberg Russia (Rutenberg): This project aims to collect public domain books in Slavic languages, especially Russian. The name "Rutenberg" combines "Russia" and "Gutenberg."
• Project Gutenberg Self Publishing Portal: Also known as Project Gutenberg Self-Publishing Press. This project is run by the Project Gutenberg Consortia Center. Unlike the main Gutenberg Project, this one allows people to submit texts that have never been published before. This includes self-published eBooks. It launched in 2012 and also owns the "gutenberg.us" website.
• Project Gutenberg of Taiwan: This project wants to archive copyright-free books. It has a special focus on Taiwan in English, Mandarin, and Taiwan-based languages. It is a special project of Forumosa.com.
• Projekt Runeberg: This project focuses on Nordic literature.
• ReadingRoo.ms: This is the home of the Project Gutenberg PrePrints.
• Distributed Proofreaders Canada: This is a separate group. It was launched in December 2007 by David Jones and Michael Shepard.
• Faded Page: This is the public domain book archive for Distributed Proofreaders Canada.

Other Friends of Project Gutenberg

• Internet Archive: This was a long-time backup site and main host site for Project Gutenberg.
• Librivox.org: This is a main partner for new audioBooks.

See also

In Spanish: Proyecto Gutenberg para niños