8 ms·
Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
- JSeiko 5mo agoHi! 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/ https://www.gutenberg.org/
- Falimonda 5mo agoThe book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement. Keep up the good work!
- JSeiko 5mo agogood feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!
- Falimonda 5mo agoAny interest in offering PG as a multi-lingual web e-reader in any language? I've since discontinued hosting it, but happy to add you all and merge into an official PG offering: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/VtYKxjrMme https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/VtYKxjrMme
- Falimonda 5mo agoMore content visible on various videos I took and posted to X https://x.com/abal_ai https://x.com/abal_ai
- samcollins 5mo agoVery cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links? (I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)
- e0d075b569cd 5mo ago[flagged]
- kay_o 5mo agoCheck out https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.
- JSeiko 5mo agonot yet, but that's not a bad idea imo. Dealing with Ai crawler traffic is definitely a challenge if that's what you were referring to.
- ancientcatz 5mo agoOPDS?
- gluejar 5mo agoOPDS 2.0 coming RSN. email us if you want to test. OPDS 0.x is currently available (not recommended) by adding .opds to the end of a url
- jzs 5mo agoNow i'm not associated with gutenberg in any form, but they do have a page for offline consumption: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there. However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
- xrd 5mo agoThank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.
- ExtremisAndy 5mo agoOh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!
- JSeiko 5mo agoThanks! We're currently working on a design update of the page of any specific book. Should be online soon (next 1-2 weeks or so)
- excitednumber 5mo agoThank you for being one of the best places on the internet
- shuvrojit 5mo agoGreat Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.
- JSeiko 5mo agohttps://github.com/gutenbergtools https://github.com/gutenbergtools autocat3 and gutenbergsite are repos responsible for generating gutenberg.org
- smallnix 5mo agoThere's a minor bug with chrome in android where the menu will not close when you tap outside the menu or on the menu link/button
- BiraIgnacio 5mo agoThanks so much for the work you and your team do!
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoWanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!
- JSeiko 5mo agoit's not my day job. PG is open-source. I'm "just" a contributor
- TimorousBestie 5mo agoOh, right. That makes sense.
- nomoreusernames 5mo ago[dead]
- jefurii 5mo agoWhen 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!
- JSeiko 5mo agosadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D
- Wistar 5mo ago♡
- ok_dad 5mo ago<3 Less than three is a classic!
- agys 5mo agoEss two is less than less than three, but also a classic. s2 < <3
- ricardonunez 5mo agoI like the design but liked the previous design as well, it was unique and Craigslistish, you knew what website you were visiting just by looking at it.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 5mo ago>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).
- freedomben 5mo agoI can't say for project Gutenberg specifically, but in general a huge issue I see is OCR errors. What do you all do to address OCR?
- lapetitejort 5mo agoI uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar
- gluejar 5mo agoCheck out Distributed Proofreaders: https://pgdp.net https://pgdp.net
- jfengel 5mo agoI didn't realized DP was still around. I used to do it quite a bit, 15 years ago, but OCR has improved considerably since then.
- tangledhelix 5mo agoOCR has improved a lot since then, but OCR is just step 1 of reading in text. They make a lot of errors (even now, especially on old worn out paper pages) and even if they didn't, one has to format the book, deal with footnotes, sidenotes, illustrations, etc. DP is very active, we will welcome you back with open arms :)
- zamadatix 5mo agoThanks 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 https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?
- JSeiko 5mo agoyou can open an Issue at https://github.com/gutenbergtools/gutenbergsite https://github.com/gutenbergtools/gutenbergsite
- lucb1e 5mo agoHuh 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!
- codys 5mo agoI think their site is just slow, potentially because more people than they are used to are trying to view it. I was unable to load it initially (got an error from firefox) and had to re-attempt. Still slow if one forces a reload (shift-r, etc, to not use local cache).
- JSeiko 5mo agowe are having occasional lows in page speed performance due to LARGE amounts of bot traffic. full disclosure - we've not really been able to resolve this fully/well. Let us know if you have a good idea for how to deal with it
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoCF cache?
- lucb1e 5mo agoI'm only a small-scale sysadmin but the way that I understand the internet is that you send abuse notifications to the IP address block owner and, if it doesn't get resolved, you block. The whois/rdap database reveals which IPs all belong to the same hosting provider or ISP, so you can summarize that all to one list of IP addrs + timestamps per some time period The ISP actually knows which subscriber is on that line, can send them notices, block them, terminate them... loads of things that you simply cannot do because you have no relation to this person. And frankly I wouldn't want to need to have a personal relation with every website that I visit; my ISP can reach me if there is anything relevant to continued use of the internet. From personal experience, when I was a teenager, the ISP cutting our household off after an abuse report was an effective way of stopping what I was doing
- svat 5mo agoHave 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 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.
- JSeiko 5mo agoThat's an interesting idea. not a small feat to accomplish though ...
- JSeiko 5mo agoI believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar
- gluejar 5mo agoWe're using git repos internally to keep history for each book. They existed on github for a while, but our implementation was awkward, and too big of project for the volunteer dev team. But it's likely that we'll evolve towards that.
- marcprux 5mo ago> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…] Why?
- a2800276 5mo agoIt splits the community and number of possible volunteer hours for one. It also splits the canon into different versions. More projects fight for the attention attention (and possibly donations) of the audience. There are lots of reasons it could be preferable to centralize. OTOH their mission is limited and some competition is healthy, if only to explore alternative ways to do things.
- 0x0203 5mo agoAs 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. Thanks for all the effort put into the site!
- gluejar 5mo agoonly 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.
- sgc 5mo agoI have the same problem on catholiclibrary.org, but insist on having something as the book date for every work. My solution is to temporarily default to the author dates until the book date can be refined. If there is no known author date I at least have a date range, hopefully to century or better. Author dates are a much smaller data set, can be generally supplemented from public marc records (viaf, loc, etc - I don't do that, but it's an option) and at least provide basic filtering / sorting.
- openclawclub 5mo ago[dead]
- Guestmodinfo 5mo agoHi 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.
- gluejar 5mo agoonly 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. reply
- Guestmodinfo 5mo agoYes I am willing to help. Plz include me in your efforts. Thank you for this
- 8bitsrule 5mo agoGreat 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.)
- OfflineSergio 5mo agoFor the Audio part, I suggest https://desktop.with.audio https://desktop.with.audio
- 8bitsrule 5mo agoIMO, most audio read by humans (esp. voice actors) are far preferable to machine readings. Also, I found no demos on that page.
- tangledhelix 5mo agoThere are many books available as audio, some are human-read, some were automated. You can see lists here: human-read: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/1 computer-generated: https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/categories/2 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.
- samwho 5mo agoLooking really good! Great work.
- shevy-java 5mo agoThere should be more books at Gutenberg. 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.
- robin_reala 5mo agoGutenberg 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.
- tangledhelix 5mo agoAs 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 https://self.gutenberg.org
- eulerpoolapi 5mo agoThe biggest lever: make the reading experience great. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/245/pg245-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/245/pg245-images.html is still hard to read: lines are tooo long (macbook), no great way for pagination/remembering where I was, notes
- SwampertX 5mo agoFirefox's reader mode works amazingly for these situations.
- drzaiusx11 5mo agoA while back I attempted to extract the FF reader code to make it a front end to various non-web clients (email with pine key bindings etc) I got it to a prototype level but then shelved it after having difficulty getting good results with various test datasets. Probably would make a fantastic ereader though
- tangledhelix 5mo agoThe ebook editions are very good for this. Most of the e-reader software provides all the amenities (bookmarks, highlighting, notes, control of margins, etc).
- elch 5mo agoLines aren't too long. They look great on all my devices. Use ⌘ + + until you get the line length you like.
- windowliker 5mo agoFWIW 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!
- Jiro 5mo agoI 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.
- taubek 5mo agoThank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.
- seizethecheese 5mo agoA big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.
- JSeiko 5mo agogood to hear - that was a lot of work!
- throw0101c 5mo agoWhile 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. […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- gluejar 5mo agowikipedians, please help update this article.
- svat 5mo agoIn what way? And from what sources? (Wikipedia as a tertiary source is supposed to be a summary of information present in reliable secondary sources — see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Based_upon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Based_upon. So if the information on the Wikipedia article is incomplete or out of date, where is the correct information available?)
- solarity_studio 5mo agoAwesome
- mowmiatlas 5mo agoMade an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/ https://loudreader.io/
- JSeiko 5mo agothat's cool!
- OfflineSergio 5mo agoif the doesn't leave my phone why is it a subscription?
- Someone1234 5mo agoI'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).
- JSeiko 5mo agoI've heard that the newest Kobo e-readers have a browser that you could use to go to gutenberg.org and directly download files. but yes, generally I agree with your point. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.
- GaryBluto 5mo agoMost of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.
- JSeiko 5mo agoprobably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.
- WillAdams 5mo agoArguably https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bookdesign.gutebooks https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bookdesign... should ~~be~~ EDIT have been ENDEDIT opensource --- it does at least work to support Project Librivox (or at least that's my understanding) Seems to no longer be available (see below)
- JSeiko 5mo agoI'm getting "We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server." if I go to the link
- 5mo ago
- brcmthrowaway 5mo agoI can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI
- JSeiko 5mo agomaybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438 could be a trick to ease that fear :D
- zozbot234 5mo agoI've found that the larger open-weight AI models do a great job of explaining the old non-fiction content on PG, particularly magazine articles which are a good size for the AI to handle. It breaks down the long wall-of-text paragraphs for you and explains all the historically relevant background that would've been assumed to be known back in the day. If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present day it will also do that very nicely, highlighting the places where the text shows old-fashioned viewpoints that would be sharply criticized today.
- JSeiko 5mo agoso maybe Karpathy has a point that LLM-assisted reading should be a thing. Would be cool if that worked on E-Reader screens as well. Maybe when the browsers on E-Readers become good enough ...
- kgwxd 5mo agoHow did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?
- JSeiko 5mo agogood question. first though - maybe some bot has downloaded it often for whatever reasons and our systems didn't detect it as bot traffic. just a guess.
- aronhegedus 5mo agoRecently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use
- JSeiko 5mo agoMoby Dick is consistently one of the Top Downloads
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoProject 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.)
- graemep 5mo agoI have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.
- RattlesnakeJake 5mo agoCheck out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.
- JLO64 5mo agoAs others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
- dempedempe 5mo agoSource can be anything with the original text, but, more often than not, ends up being PG.
- everybodyknows 5mo agoYou can contribute to Standard Ebooks by finding OCR errors, then pushing your fixes to https://github.com/standardebooks https://github.com/standardebooks
- RattlesnakeJake 5mo agoAs 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.
- JSeiko 5mo agoThat's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable
- RattlesnakeJake 5mo agoAnd now it's time to put my foot in my mouth. I haven't used it in a while because it was frustrating, but you guys seem to have already fixed it :) The previous version of the site had two major flaws: 1. The search bar had been removed from the top of the page, and hidden behind a "Click here to search" (or similar) link partway down the page 2. Once you opened that page, the coloring of the site was so washed out on e-ink that the text input was hard to find. Thanks for fixing it!
- JSeiko 5mo ago"you guys seem to have already fixed it" - that's what we like to hear :)
- bitigchi 5mo agoMaybe include a "Lite" version that only displays text/links? No to minimal styling would be great!
- graemep 5mo agoIs that a Kindle issue? You can download books in most browsers. I know Amazon have done things to make life difficult for other stores in the past.
- RattlesnakeJake 5mo ago
- carlosjobim 5mo agoTheir feeds of new books is a goldmine: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/feeds.html 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.
- WillAdams 5mo agoI used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly: https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html
- ndr42 5mo agoThe project was geo-blocked in Germany for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039
- JSeiko 5mo agovery glad this has been resolved (I'm from Germany myself)
- debo_ 5mo agoProject Gesperrtberg
- tangledhelix 5mo agoOne author remains blocked in Germany (but only for a couple more years)...
- AndrewStephens 5mo agoPG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.
- JSeiko 5mo agothe amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else is possibly the coolest aspect of PG imo
- oidar 5mo agoI'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?
- gluejar 5mo agoNowadays we depend on scans from Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and other sources. Some scans are better than others. Bear in mind that our illustrations need to be in the public domain and usually from the same edition as the text. https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html
- gluejar 5mo agoNice 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.
- britta 5mo agoFYI, 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.
- kreyenborgi 5mo agoGutenberg is awesome. There is also https://www.fadedpage.com/ https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think https://runeberg.org/ https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden
- Arcorann 5mo agoDon't forget Wikisource! https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page
- bryankaplan 5mo agoI find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.
- smilespray 5mo agoI 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. Thanks for sticking with the project!
- JSeiko 5mo agothat's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...
- smilespray 5mo agoThat is doable. Most of my work was regexp and repetitive stuff. And the typograhpy stuff is achievable with the current state of the art models. Not that I remember what I did, it was 30 years ago.
- JSeiko 5mo agoInteresting!
- ssgodderidge 5mo agoLooks 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? [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855
- JSeiko 5mo agobot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D
- sovietswag 5mo agoHaha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up
- why_at 5mo agoIt's got better reviews on Goodreads than Moby Dick too. I know what I'm reading next
- tmoertel 5mo agoFor context, here is the first paragraph of the book's preface: How best to perform construction work and what it will cost for materials, labor, plant and general expenses are matters of vital interest to engineers and contractors. This book is a treatise on the methods and cost of concrete construction. No attempt has been made to present the subject of cement testing which is already covered by Mr. W. Purves Taylor's excellent book, nor to discuss the physical properties of cements and concrete, as they are discussed by Falk and by Sabin, nor to consider reinforced concrete design as do Turneaure and Maurer or Buel and Hill, nor to present a general treatise on cements, mortars and concrete construction like that of Reid or of Taylor and Thompson. On the contrary, the authors have handled the subject of concrete construction solely from the viewpoint of the builder of concrete structures. By doing this they have been able to crowd a great amount of detailed information on methods and costs of concrete construction into a volume of moderate size.
- autoexec 5mo agoI love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!
- monegator 5mo agoI keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR
- jwpapi 5mo agoPlease give me some book recommendations :)
- klondike_klive 5mo agoNot a recommendation per se but I used to use Amphetype on Gutenberg texts to practise touch-typing. There's something about writing out a book that hits differently to reading it. You skip less, odd parts stick with you. I think the last one I tried was The Island of Dr Moreau.
- jwpapi 5mo agoUlnar Nerve Entrapement :/
- JSeiko 5mo agoFlatland: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=flatland https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=flatland I've heard good things. Also - Sherlock Holmes :)
- BaseBaal 5mo agoFrom the newest releases page I stumbled into "Some Nigerian fertility cults" by Percy Amaury Talbot & am enjoying it so far. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78684 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78684
- fmajid 5mo agoWorth mentioning the Project Gutenberg ZIMs. You can download the entire ENglish Gutenberg corpus for about 60GB (English Wikipedia ZIM complete with images is ~120GB): https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html
- cxr 5mo agoLike the Project Gutenberg collection on archive.org, the ZIMs are only current up to 2018.
- Timixx 5mo ago[flagged]
- cold_tom 5mo agoProject Gutenberg feels like the opposite of modern internet design philosophy. Quiet, useful, accessible, and built to last.
- tomjen3 5mo agoProject Gutenberg is awesome and amazing. I was visting the ruins of a monestary the other day, and one of the texts listed that it had a library of 320ish books. I chucked because I have almost 200 books in my personal Kindle library, but I was wrong. I actually have 75000+ books, thanks to Project Gutenberg. I just haven't downloaded them all yet.
- thangalin 5mo agoProject Gutenberg is a treasure trove, though many technical details defy automatic typesetting of its books. Standard Ebooks takes consistency to an unbelievable level. My post compares various sources of public domain books with an eye on typesetting: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-projects/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...
- elias1233 5mo agoI thought this was for the Wordpress Gutenberg Editor for a second
- gluejar 5mo agoI should hit Matt up for a donation.
- Myzel394 5mo agoI wonder if the people behind project Gutenberg use Anna's Archive or mam for books that can't be put on Gutenberg.
- cosmos0072 5mo agoFrom Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome" Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...
- cosmos0072 5mo agoFound: it's a sentence from 2020, and PG decided not to appeal (!?) Full story (in Italian) at https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenberg-sequestro/ https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenb...
- charonn0 5mo agoSeems like a case for HTTP 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) rather than 404.
- amelius 5mo agoHTTP 666 (We're evil) seems more fitting here.
- johndough 5mo agoIt looks like the issue was that, in Italy, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author or the first translator of a work.
- JSeiko 5mo agoPG works based on US copyright law. And as I understand it that's also 70 years after author/translator death. My gut feeling is that if anyone tried hard enough this ban could probably get lifted
- robin_reala 5mo ago
- drummojg 5mo agoThe best thing I ever did for my father was to buy him a kindle and an access point and show him how to use Project Gutenberg to get books. He loved the old writings (he being a GED holder who was in the Navy during Korea yet had read the entire Harvard Classics). He had a special rolled up towel he used to prop it on his lap in his favorite chair and he read and read and read. When he passed he was reading "Legends of the Jews" from 1931. I had some small e-correspondence with Michael S. Hart back in the 90's as well, and made a few modest contributions to the project, which made my English major undergraduate heart swell with pride and joy. I guess this is only to say that PG is special to me for these reasons, and I am glad to see it still thriving. <3
- mentalgear 5mo agoKeep up the awesome work !
- derekhdawson 5mo agoIf you like Project Gutenberg, the closest analog for music is IMSLP, the Petrucci Music Library (imslp.org) — over 855,000 public-domain scores maintained by volunteers, with the same labor-of-love energy and the same perpetual scan-quality and copyright-jurisdiction headaches. Same ethos of "the works belong to humanity, not a storefront." Worth a bookmark for the musicians on HN.
- greenie_beans 5mo agomy first ever coding project was making a chrome extension that made the typography better on the html formats: https://github.com/smcalilly/gutenberg-typography https://github.com/smcalilly/gutenberg-typography
- JSeiko 5mo agonice!
- gwerbret 5mo agoI love Project Gutenberg, don't get me wrong... but frankly, Anna's is better.
- JSeiko 5mo agoin which way? (genuine question)
- gwerbret 5mo agoWell, mainly in the fact that Anna's has several orders of magnitude more books, and includes research publications and more, ah, contemporary materials to boot.
- TFNA 5mo agoI came here to post something similar. PG is perhaps still important as an archive of proofread OCRed public-domain material, but for ordinary people, the shadow libraries have vastly more stuff. After all, readers don’t want their reading to be limited to what was published before a copyright cutoff date many decades ago.
- oxag3n 5mo agoIs there a plan to extend search to book content?
- JSeiko 5mo agonot that I know of ...
- tangledhelix 5mo agoSince the books are available on the site as text and HTML the search engines index them already for you. Try searching for the below; it should take you to the book you expect as the first result: site:gutenberg.org "it was the best of times"
- jdthedisciple 5mo agoI wonder how extensive the overlap is with sacred-texts.com
- mashijian 5mo ago[flagged]
- vwkd 5mo agoNot sure if this is the right place, but the new layout of the German Projekt Gutenberg is missing any download links. For example https://projekt-gutenberg.org/authors/johann-wolfgang-von-goethe/books/faust-eine-tragoedie/ https://projekt-gutenberg.org/authors/johann-wolfgang-von-go...
- timonoko 5mo agoNeeds "translate" buttons. Now little too cumbersome for most, https://www-gutenberg-org.translate.goog/cache/epub/64099/pg64099-images.html?_x_tr_sl=fi&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-gutenberg-org.translate.goog/cache/epub/64099/pg...
- zhenglei11 5mo ago[flagged]
- benj111 5mo agoProject Guttenburg was my first introduction to the foss ethos. Well I suppose there was Wikipedia, but project Guttenburg really spoke to me. This was probably around 2003? So I'm glad to see it still going strong. I just looked at the history (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60600/pg60600-images.html https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60600/pg60600-images.ht...) and it dates back to the 70s. There was me thinking it was some new fangled web thing.
- shevy-java 5mo agoAll the books should be there. I understand that current society has restrictions, what with near infinite copyright and other shenanigans - but I don't see any of these as reason to hide information from mankind. Eventually we'll free all the information. Remuneration will have to occur in other ways than the current status quo.
- JSeiko 5mo agohopefully!
- targetbridge 5mo ago[dead]
- simonTrace 5mo ago[dead]
- aymenfurter 5mo agoPG is proof that the best things on the internet are still built by people who just care about the mission.
- GeorgeTirebiter 5mo agoPaul Graham? ;-)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 5mo agoText files are still the best Good job
- zahirbmirza 5mo agoIs Project Guternberg ever going to add PDF download options?
- gluejar 5mo agolater this year
- zahirbmirza 5mo agoAmazing!!! As ereaders get faster and with colour, this could make books from the Project even more attractive. I love the work of your team. Thank you.
- NexiunDev 5mo ago[dead]
- litreads 5mo agoDeeply grateful for Project Gutenberg & LibriVox! I've been using the text to force-align LibriVox recordings to produce word-by-word synced audiobooks; first stage of this project is a YouTube channel but I could definitely turn this into a mobile reader app if there's interest: https://www.youtube.com/@LitReadsEditions https://www.youtube.com/@LitReadsEditions
- cpill 5mo agoI love PG... but the covers stink. Should have a public competition to have new ones made and voted on. I'm willing to vibe code a website to make it happen if you're willing...
- alexdesouza 5mo agoProject Gutenberg is the best. Kudos to the team and to the 1000s years of humans developed it!
- marcellocurto 5mo agoone of the last good websites on the web...