Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

JSeiko

Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/

taubek

Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.

seizethecheese

A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.

throw0101c

While PG has probably gotten a lot of use and growth with the growth/maintreaming of the Internet since the 1990s, (TIL) it started back in 1971: > Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. Hart believed one day the general public would be able to access computers and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. […] * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg

mowmiatlas

Made an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/

Someone1234

I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).

brcmthrowaway

I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI

aronhegedus

Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use

JKCalhoun

Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.) I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.) I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference. My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose… I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done. (If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)

RattlesnakeJake

As a Kindle user, I still miss the old version of the site. The new one looks great on normal desktop, but the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser.

carlosjobim

Their feeds of new books is a goldmine: 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.

ndr42

The project was geo-blocked in Germany for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039

AndrewStephens

PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

oidar

I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?

gluejar

Nice to see so much appreciation for what we do. (I'm the new-ish executive director.) Any wikipedians reading this, the article about PG is... aging. Last I looked, it said we offered Plucker files. @Jseiko has done some nice work.

kreyenborgi

Gutenberg is awesome. There is also https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden

bryankaplan

I find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.

smilespray

I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work. Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right. Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now. Thanks for sticking with the project!

kgwxd

How did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?