19 ms·

Project Gutenberg – Library of over 60k free eBooks

200 points by yosefjaved1 4y ago

ghaff 4y ago
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.
8b16380d 4y ago
One of my favorite places to get new books to read.
- azaras 4y ago
  Any recomendation? Please.
  - InCityDreams 4y ago
    The Devils Dictionary - always a good start.
  - mrweasel 4y ago
    Discoverability really is the main “problem” with Project Gutenberg.
  - endemic 4y ago
    https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ sources notable literature from Gutenberg and packages it up into modern ebook formats.
    - FabHK 4y ago
      Standard Ebooks are great, typeset to a much higher standard than Project Gutenberg, though with a much smaller selection, which on the other side facilitates discoverability. They have an RSS feed with new releases: https://standardebooks.org/rss/new-releases https://standardebooks.org/rss/new-releases And discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035
    - mrob 4y ago
      "Standard" Ebooks also make their own non-standard editorial changes to modernize the language of the books. These edits are labeled as such in their git repository, but they're mixed with the technical edits so in practice it would take a lot of work to revert them. I prefer the Project Gutenberg versions.
      - anjbe 4y ago
        > "Standard" Ebooks also make their own non-standard editorial changes I take the name to mean that their books all follow a “standard” (i.e., single, consistent) style guide. > to modernize the language of the books. SE will update archaic spellings, if they’re homonyms (e.g., ‘akehorn’ → ‘acorn,’ ‘centrys’ → ‘sentries’). I used to make similar substitutions in my own ebooks in the past, so clearly I’m in SE’s target market. SE won’t update language in other ways as far as I know (they won’t censor or replace “problematic” words), or modernize punctuation in any way that changes meaning. But if that’s not your cup of tea, Standard Ebooks does provide links both to scans of the original printed book and to the Project Gutenberg transcription, and marks editorial changes in the commit message so anyone who wants to can revert just the spelling changes. > in practice it would take a lot of work to revert them. I’m not sure what more you’d suggest them to do, other than stop using a style guide at all—which is the whole raison d’être of the project.
  - anjbe 4y ago
    Popularity does not always correlate with quality, but Gutenberg’s “Top 100 Downloads” page is worth checking out: https://gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top https://gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top
  - 8b16380d 4y ago
    Any of the classics
kristofferR 4y ago
I like Project Gutenberg, but I like Library Genesis or other shadow libraries even more.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  There's probably a lot of public domain reprinted material in those "shadow libraries", that could be legally posted on PG. Unfortunately, the complexity involved means that few people bother to do this.
NelsonMinar 4y ago
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 https://manybooks.net/ https://manybooks.net/ 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. 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.
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  Wanted to highlight https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/, another alternative for copyedited Gutenberg texts that is mentioned in other HN comments.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  Also library genesis, which searches z-library and I guess some other sources. It looks like it’s maybe built on IPFS which seems cool.
marcodiego 4y ago
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. Imagine a machine where you could choose a book from project Gutenberg, pay it and have it instantly printed for you.
- derstander 4y ago
  The Harvard Book Store (the independent one, not the Coop) has just such a machine! Though I haven’t used it. https://www.harvard.com/clubs_services/books_on_demand/ https://www.harvard.com/clubs_services/books_on_demand/
  - cxr 4y ago
    That service was shut down within just 24 hours of your leaving this comment: > Termination of Print-on-Demand Services > Print-on-Demand services are no longer available through Harvard Book Store, effective Monday, April 25, 2022.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  That a bit how I see my ebook reader. I’m just not enamored of the physical books.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  I have the same dream, but I'd like it to plug into the Internet Archive. Then again, the cost to the world's trees would be substantial because I'd remember about the Serials in Microfilm project[1]. Seriously, check out these images of the collection[2]. Then again, again, think of all the carbon you could sequestrate by printing that many books (and keeping them). I've even considered DIY book binding so I can print fun things, but it's (obviously) quite a mission. Occasionally I see a novelty reprint of an old volume of a periodical in a museum shop and I start searching for book presses and glue and then sanity prevails. [1]: https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm [2]: https://archive.org/details/SerialsOnMicrofilmCollection/IMG_0586.JPG https://archive.org/details/SerialsOnMicrofilmCollection/IMG...
snvzz 4y ago
There'd be many more, if copyright terms didn't keep getting extended forever. It is a shame.
yewenjie 4y ago
While it is a great project, posting a link to it is almost like posting a link to Wikipedia.
- yosefjaved1 4y ago
  Funny enough, I never heard of it until yesterday when I was looking to buy a book called "Calculus Made Easy" from Amazon and read a review that mentioned not to buy the book because it was a printed version of the it on Project Gutenberg. I was debating if I should post up the link or not because I did find other posts that mentioned Project Gutenberg on HN when I did a quick search; however, I didn't see any post that mentioned Project Gutenberg exclusively in my search. I figured if HN didn't think it was useful then they'll just bury my post down or leave it alone. Also, I'm sure there were other people on HN out there like me who were completely oblivious that this project existed. I'm glad I did mention because some of the comments on this post are really good.
  - mgdlbp 4y ago
    And today's lucky 10 000 are thankful for your doing so. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
  - gramie 4y ago
    I am partway through the calculus text, and it really is good. 25 years after finishing my engineering degree, I finally understand why the derivative of 5x^2 -6x +2 is 10x -6. Amazing!
  - ghaff 4y ago
    I think you'll find that even on HN, there are a lot of people who don't read a lot of books that aren't reference books--and even fewer who have much interest in mostly 100+ year-old novels.
robonerd 4y ago
LibriVox (https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/) 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 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court read by John Greenman (https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court-by-mark-twain-2/ https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-co...) Goofy book, but very entertaining.
- anjbe 4y ago
  LibriVox is great. As you mentioned, the quality varies, but some are real gems. My personal favorites are the Jeeves stories narrated by Mark Nelson: https://librivox.org/my-man-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ https://librivox.org/my-man-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ Also, the whole LibriVox collection is uploaded to the Internet Archive (easy to find: it’s one of the top links under the audio tab). IA’s interface is nicer in certain ways than librivox.org due to its options for searching, sorting (e.g., by views), and listening in the browser. https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  I can recommend The Count of Monte Cristo, read by David Clarke.[1] This is a fantastic book, read by an extraordinary reader. [1] - https://librivox.us/book/6697 https://librivox.us/book/6697
  - ineedasername 4y ago
    That is such an amazing revenge story, intricately plotted with excellent characters.
blisterpeanuts 4y ago
I’ve read several books from Gutenberg over the years, a very good project. 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]. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Theres a lot of weird old stuff floating around, which might not be what you think of when you think "book" but were actually published as books. For example, governments often publish tranacripts of votes. It's great that these exist, and are being digitised for scholars and historians, but its not what you'd go to your local library for. https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL258109A/United_States._Army https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL258109A/United_States._Arm....
westcort 4y ago
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. https://www.locserendipity.com/ https://www.locserendipity.com/
- westcort 4y ago
  Also this Project Gutenberg randomizer: https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html
- NelsonMinar 4y ago
  Neat trick! I took a look and the page is about 4MB or maybe 8MB, less than 1MB compressed. Smaller than the typical animated ad. Is there an actual index data structure? What I see on the page is just a bunch of simple <a> links that are linearly scanned. Nothing wrong with that mind you, it seems to work well.
  - westcort 4y ago
    It’s just simple keyword matching in the order of appearance on the list. I did something similar with the DMOZ directory: https://www.locserendipity.com/DMOZ.html https://www.locserendipity.com/DMOZ.html Also, as an experiment, I developed an auto-summarizer, scraped and summarized all of the edu domains on DMOZ, pared the non-active ones, and the ordered them by the amount of content (more content ranks higher). The result is this search engine: https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html
hiq 4y ago
How does it compare with Wikisource? It looks like Project Gutenberg is older, but given https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html is looks like the UX (as a contributor) is better on Wikisource.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Gutenberg was a pioneer and sits at the centre of an ecosystem. Distributed Proofreaders and others like Standard ebooks build on Gutenberg texts and upstream fixes and corrections to them. https://www.pgdp.net/c/ https://www.pgdp.net/c/
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    DP proofread from book scans and upload the proofed and processed text to Gutenberg. Standard ebooks takes the Gutenberg texts and further enhances them. So they're operating on opposite stages of the pipeline.
    - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
      Yeah, but DP feed the text (including corrections) downstream and standardebooks (while adding their own extras) may spot things that slipped through and get them reported and fixed upstream. They don't need to, but they do.
- adhesive_wombat 4y ago
  Wikisource (at least the English one) has a slightly different take on it in that they (now) generally expect proofreading to proceed according to a PDF or DjVu scan of a specific original edition (and you can have multiple editions). There's a page-by-page proofreading interface. Project Gutenberg world are usually non-specific editions and might be a mish-mash or contain editorial fix-ups. Projects like Distributed Proofreaders also operate on a top-down basis where there's a project manager for each book. On Wikisource, you can just get stuck in where you like. No one technically "owns" anything. The Monthly Challenge [1] is quite a fun new innovation where there's a bit more community activity, as a lot of people like to plug away on their own projects, which some people think is a bit boring. [1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Community_collaboration/Monthly_Challenge https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Community_collabor...
ineedasername 4y ago
I met the founder Michael Hart at the 2006 HOPE conference, and with a couple of people we all caught lunch together. 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: 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. Turns out, I was an idiot.
- ghaff 4y ago
  So were a lot of people. The smartphones of the time were pretty clunky, didn't have good ecosystems, and required expensive/limited data plans. Whereas OLPC was familiar and supposedly cheap and there were other cheap laptops coming in too. Also, people raised on PCs with keyboards just couldn't imagine doing real work on a phone. I think many of us are still shocked at how a lot of kids are perfectly fine with and even prefer doing everything on their phone.
Barrin92 4y ago
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.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
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. 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. 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!
- Wistar 4y ago
  > "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." Me, too. A couple years ago, right here on HN, I learned that there is a word for that: Tsundoku. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku
sicp-enjoyer 4y ago
For greek and roman classics I also recommend: http://classics.mit.edu/ http://classics.mit.edu/
r3trohack3r 4y ago
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. Gutenberg and LibGen have been absolutely indispensable. Gutenbergs copy of The Skeptical Chymist is fantastic. Bonus points that both platforms make it extremely easy to push a pdf directly to my remarkable tablet.
dang 4y ago
There have been lots of submissions of specific books, of course, but this is a nice general thread: Obituary for Michael Stern Hart, Project Gutenberg Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971 - Sept 2011 (32 comments)
TradingPlaces 4y ago
This was the first thing on the web that really excited me.
jsisto 4y ago
I like to use sed to replace names in books. For example I used the following command to create Josh's Adventures In Wonderland curl https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt | sed 's/Alice/Josh/g' > Joshs-adventures-in-wonderland.txt There are endless possibilities of fun. I'm thinking about doing 1984 next.
jet_32951 4y ago
There is an Australian version of this link: http://gutenberg.net.au http://gutenberg.net.au . 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.
ranic 4y ago
I love PG and I remember buying a Kindle 15 years ago just so I could read books from PG. To this I would add https://www.fadedpage.com/ https://www.fadedpage.com/ which is like Project Gutenberg, but for works in the Canadian public domain!
jsciarra 4y ago
I'm surprised no-one on this thread has mentioned the Magic Catalog: http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html Download it onto your eReader and click on a book in the project to get it onto the device. Genius.

200 points by yosefjaved1 4y ago

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.

8b16380d 4y ago

One of my favorite places to get new books to read.

azaras 4y ago
Any recomendation? Please.
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  The Devils Dictionary - always a good start.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  Discoverability really is the main “problem” with Project Gutenberg.
- endemic 4y ago
  https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ sources notable literature from Gutenberg and packages it up into modern ebook formats.
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Standard Ebooks are great, typeset to a much higher standard than Project Gutenberg, though with a much smaller selection, which on the other side facilitates discoverability. They have an RSS feed with new releases: https://standardebooks.org/rss/new-releases https://standardebooks.org/rss/new-releases And discussed here before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20594802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14570035
  - mrob 4y ago
    "Standard" Ebooks also make their own non-standard editorial changes to modernize the language of the books. These edits are labeled as such in their git repository, but they're mixed with the technical edits so in practice it would take a lot of work to revert them. I prefer the Project Gutenberg versions.
    - anjbe 4y ago
      > "Standard" Ebooks also make their own non-standard editorial changes I take the name to mean that their books all follow a “standard” (i.e., single, consistent) style guide. > to modernize the language of the books. SE will update archaic spellings, if they’re homonyms (e.g., ‘akehorn’ → ‘acorn,’ ‘centrys’ → ‘sentries’). I used to make similar substitutions in my own ebooks in the past, so clearly I’m in SE’s target market. SE won’t update language in other ways as far as I know (they won’t censor or replace “problematic” words), or modernize punctuation in any way that changes meaning. But if that’s not your cup of tea, Standard Ebooks does provide links both to scans of the original printed book and to the Project Gutenberg transcription, and marks editorial changes in the commit message so anyone who wants to can revert just the spelling changes. > in practice it would take a lot of work to revert them. I’m not sure what more you’d suggest them to do, other than stop using a style guide at all—which is the whole raison d’être of the project.
- anjbe 4y ago
  Popularity does not always correlate with quality, but Gutenberg’s “Top 100 Downloads” page is worth checking out: https://gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top https://gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top
- 8b16380d 4y ago
  Any of the classics

kristofferR 4y ago

I like Project Gutenberg, but I like Library Genesis or other shadow libraries even more.

zozbot234 4y ago
There's probably a lot of public domain reprinted material in those "shadow libraries", that could be legally posted on PG. Unfortunately, the complexity involved means that few people bother to do this.

NelsonMinar 4y ago

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 https://manybooks.net/ https://manybooks.net/ 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. 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.

NelsonMinar 4y ago
Wanted to highlight https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/, another alternative for copyedited Gutenberg texts that is mentioned in other HN comments.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Also library genesis, which searches z-library and I guess some other sources. It looks like it’s maybe built on IPFS which seems cool.

marcodiego 4y ago

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. Imagine a machine where you could choose a book from project Gutenberg, pay it and have it instantly printed for you.

derstander 4y ago
The Harvard Book Store (the independent one, not the Coop) has just such a machine! Though I haven’t used it. https://www.harvard.com/clubs_services/books_on_demand/ https://www.harvard.com/clubs_services/books_on_demand/
- cxr 4y ago
  That service was shut down within just 24 hours of your leaving this comment: > Termination of Print-on-Demand Services > Print-on-Demand services are no longer available through Harvard Book Store, effective Monday, April 25, 2022.
Tagbert 4y ago
That a bit how I see my ebook reader. I’m just not enamored of the physical books.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
I have the same dream, but I'd like it to plug into the Internet Archive. Then again, the cost to the world's trees would be substantial because I'd remember about the Serials in Microfilm project[1]. Seriously, check out these images of the collection[2]. Then again, again, think of all the carbon you could sequestrate by printing that many books (and keeping them). I've even considered DIY book binding so I can print fun things, but it's (obviously) quite a mission. Occasionally I see a novelty reprint of an old volume of a periodical in a museum shop and I start searching for book presses and glue and then sanity prevails. [1]: https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm https://archive.org/details/sim_microfilm [2]: https://archive.org/details/SerialsOnMicrofilmCollection/IMG_0586.JPG https://archive.org/details/SerialsOnMicrofilmCollection/IMG...

snvzz 4y ago

There'd be many more, if copyright terms didn't keep getting extended forever. It is a shame.

yewenjie 4y ago

While it is a great project, posting a link to it is almost like posting a link to Wikipedia.

yosefjaved1 4y ago
Funny enough, I never heard of it until yesterday when I was looking to buy a book called "Calculus Made Easy" from Amazon and read a review that mentioned not to buy the book because it was a printed version of the it on Project Gutenberg. I was debating if I should post up the link or not because I did find other posts that mentioned Project Gutenberg on HN when I did a quick search; however, I didn't see any post that mentioned Project Gutenberg exclusively in my search. I figured if HN didn't think it was useful then they'll just bury my post down or leave it alone. Also, I'm sure there were other people on HN out there like me who were completely oblivious that this project existed. I'm glad I did mention because some of the comments on this post are really good.
- mgdlbp 4y ago
  And today's lucky 10 000 are thankful for your doing so. https://xkcd.com/1053/ https://xkcd.com/1053/
- gramie 4y ago
  I am partway through the calculus text, and it really is good. 25 years after finishing my engineering degree, I finally understand why the derivative of 5x^2 -6x +2 is 10x -6. Amazing!
- ghaff 4y ago
  I think you'll find that even on HN, there are a lot of people who don't read a lot of books that aren't reference books--and even fewer who have much interest in mostly 100+ year-old novels.

robonerd 4y ago

LibriVox (https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/) 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 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court read by John Greenman (https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-court-by-mark-twain-2/ https://librivox.org/a-connecticut-yankee-in-king-arthurs-co...) Goofy book, but very entertaining.

anjbe 4y ago
LibriVox is great. As you mentioned, the quality varies, but some are real gems. My personal favorites are the Jeeves stories narrated by Mark Nelson: https://librivox.org/my-man-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ https://librivox.org/my-man-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ https://librivox.org/right-ho-jeeves-by-p-g-wodehouse/ Also, the whole LibriVox collection is uploaded to the Internet Archive (easy to find: it’s one of the top links under the audio tab). IA’s interface is nicer in certain ways than librivox.org due to its options for searching, sorting (e.g., by views), and listening in the browser. https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio https://archive.org/details/librivoxaudio
pmoriarty 4y ago
I can recommend The Count of Monte Cristo, read by David Clarke.[1] This is a fantastic book, read by an extraordinary reader. [1] - https://librivox.us/book/6697 https://librivox.us/book/6697
- ineedasername 4y ago
  That is such an amazing revenge story, intricately plotted with excellent characters.

blisterpeanuts 4y ago

I’ve read several books from Gutenberg over the years, a very good project. 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]. 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Theres a lot of weird old stuff floating around, which might not be what you think of when you think "book" but were actually published as books. For example, governments often publish tranacripts of votes. It's great that these exist, and are being digitised for scholars and historians, but its not what you'd go to your local library for. https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL258109A/United_States._Army https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL258109A/United_States._Arm....

westcort 4y ago

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. https://www.locserendipity.com/ https://www.locserendipity.com/

westcort 4y ago
Also this Project Gutenberg randomizer: https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html https://www.locserendipity.com/Gutenberg.html
NelsonMinar 4y ago
Neat trick! I took a look and the page is about 4MB or maybe 8MB, less than 1MB compressed. Smaller than the typical animated ad. Is there an actual index data structure? What I see on the page is just a bunch of simple <a> links that are linearly scanned. Nothing wrong with that mind you, it seems to work well.
- westcort 4y ago
  It’s just simple keyword matching in the order of appearance on the list. I did something similar with the DMOZ directory: https://www.locserendipity.com/DMOZ.html https://www.locserendipity.com/DMOZ.html Also, as an experiment, I developed an auto-summarizer, scraped and summarized all of the edu domains on DMOZ, pared the non-active ones, and the ordered them by the amount of content (more content ranks higher). The result is this search engine: https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html https://www.locserendipity.com/edu.html

hiq 4y ago

How does it compare with Wikisource? It looks like Project Gutenberg is older, but given https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html is looks like the UX (as a contributor) is better on Wikisource.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Gutenberg was a pioneer and sits at the centre of an ecosystem. Distributed Proofreaders and others like Standard ebooks build on Gutenberg texts and upstream fixes and corrections to them. https://www.pgdp.net/c/ https://www.pgdp.net/c/
- zozbot234 4y ago
  DP proofread from book scans and upload the proofed and processed text to Gutenberg. Standard ebooks takes the Gutenberg texts and further enhances them. So they're operating on opposite stages of the pipeline.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Yeah, but DP feed the text (including corrections) downstream and standardebooks (while adding their own extras) may spot things that slipped through and get them reported and fixed upstream. They don't need to, but they do.
adhesive_wombat 4y ago
Wikisource (at least the English one) has a slightly different take on it in that they (now) generally expect proofreading to proceed according to a PDF or DjVu scan of a specific original edition (and you can have multiple editions). There's a page-by-page proofreading interface. Project Gutenberg world are usually non-specific editions and might be a mish-mash or contain editorial fix-ups. Projects like Distributed Proofreaders also operate on a top-down basis where there's a project manager for each book. On Wikisource, you can just get stuck in where you like. No one technically "owns" anything. The Monthly Challenge [1] is quite a fun new innovation where there's a bit more community activity, as a lot of people like to plug away on their own projects, which some people think is a bit boring. [1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Community_collaboration/Monthly_Challenge https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wikisource:Community_collabor...

ineedasername 4y ago

I met the founder Michael Hart at the 2006 HOPE conference, and with a couple of people we all caught lunch together. 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: 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. Turns out, I was an idiot.

ghaff 4y ago
So were a lot of people. The smartphones of the time were pretty clunky, didn't have good ecosystems, and required expensive/limited data plans. Whereas OLPC was familiar and supposedly cheap and there were other cheap laptops coming in too. Also, people raised on PCs with keyboards just couldn't imagine doing real work on a phone. I think many of us are still shocked at how a lot of kids are perfectly fine with and even prefer doing everything on their phone.

Barrin92 4y ago

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.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

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. 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. 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!

Wistar 4y ago
> "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." Me, too. A couple years ago, right here on HN, I learned that there is a word for that: Tsundoku. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

sicp-enjoyer 4y ago

For greek and roman classics I also recommend: http://classics.mit.edu/ http://classics.mit.edu/

r3trohack3r 4y ago

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. Gutenberg and LibGen have been absolutely indispensable. Gutenbergs copy of The Skeptical Chymist is fantastic. Bonus points that both platforms make it extremely easy to push a pdf directly to my remarkable tablet.

dang 4y ago

There have been lots of submissions of specific books, of course, but this is a nice general thread: Obituary for Michael Stern Hart, Project Gutenberg Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2971971 - Sept 2011 (32 comments)

TradingPlaces 4y ago

This was the first thing on the web that really excited me.

jsisto 4y ago

I like to use sed to replace names in books. For example I used the following command to create Josh's Adventures In Wonderland curl https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-0.txt | sed 's/Alice/Josh/g' > Joshs-adventures-in-wonderland.txt There are endless possibilities of fun. I'm thinking about doing 1984 next.

jet_32951 4y ago

There is an Australian version of this link: http://gutenberg.net.au http://gutenberg.net.au . 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.

ranic 4y ago

I love PG and I remember buying a Kindle 15 years ago just so I could read books from PG. To this I would add https://www.fadedpage.com/ https://www.fadedpage.com/ which is like Project Gutenberg, but for works in the Canadian public domain!

jsciarra 4y ago

I'm surprised no-one on this thread has mentioned the Magic Catalog: http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html http://freekindlebooks.org/MagicCatalog/magiccatalog.html Download it onto your eReader and click on a book in the project to get it onto the device. Genius.