Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.

Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet

Have 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) 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.

When 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!

Huh 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!

The 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!

Thanks 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 is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?

Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!

There'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

just heard back that the server provider has been doing a security update. Maybe you were one of the users that got unlucky as a result... maybe try later if still interested

I've reported it.

good 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.

I believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar

That's an interesting idea. not a small feat to accomplish though ...

I 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).

you can open an Issue at https://github.com/gutenbergtools/gutenbergsite

Thanks! 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)

"Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois."

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

Prescient

I asked Claude to research the background story: "In May 2020, the Court of Rome ordered Italian ISPs to seize/block a list of domains as part of a criminal case (the 52127/20 R.N.R. you're seeing) targeting sites and Telegram channels distributing pirated newspapers and magazines. 28 domains were on the list, and Project Gutenberg got thrown in alongside the actual pirate sites."

apparently this situation hasn't been resolved yet

If you don’t strip the Project Gutenberg license from the book text (leaving only the book text, which no-one disputes is public domain and freely distributable), you are required to give “pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes”

https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

[Way back in the early days of the iPhone, I sold a book reading app which was backed directly by Project Gutenberg texts, called “Eucalyptus”. I sent 20% of the gross profits to PG - which was never less than very supportive of the app - and felt good about doing so.]

I'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.

You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers - even the Kindle supports it.

No money for them.

Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.

I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.

The common issue with PDFs is that e-readers generally have terrible support for them.

PDF coming this year.

I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.

maybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438

could be a trick to ease that fear :D

sadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D

we 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

good feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!

wikipedians, please help update this article.

Found: 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-gutenb...

I've used https://standardebooks.org/ to pull nicely formatted Project Gutenberg books on any e-reader that supports a browser (in my case, Boox).

Technically, I can also just directly pull the epub from Project Gutenberg, but sometimes the formatting leaves a lot to be desired.

Once you get an e-reader that runs a semi-capable OS (ex - stock android, even an older version), it's hard to go back to something like a kindle.

Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.

Used to be one could sort of get that with the Project Librivox:

https://librivox.org/

e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox).

FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores --- Amazon apparently has a similar setup for the Kindle Store:

https://www.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Books-Kindle-Store/s?k=...

Rather a shame that PG didn't monetize by putting their books up there pre-emptively.

We're supporting EPUB3 for the vast majority of books! At the same time we also have a "Plain Text" version for each as in a sense it's the most robust. PdFs are in the works!

As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.

I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.

personally I'm a fan of the other "PG" as well.

Ulnar Nerve Entrapement :/

As 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!

Seems like a case for HTTP 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) rather than 404.

To be precise, the vast majority of SE is from Gutenberg, but we also source from Faded Page, Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource and occasionally do our own transcriptions.

standardebooks.org is great!

>Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores

Why is it 'plundering' for B&N to print physical books, transport them to their brick-and-mortar stores to sell? There are real costs associated to doing so. It would not have zero cost for me to print and bind a copy myself at home.

That's cool. I'll have to read up on EPUB3—I'm not familiar with it.

(I worked on iBooks for the Mac like 15 years ago—it's where I got to dive into the ePub format. A lot has changed in the standard since I am sure.)

EDIT: looks like EPUB3 has a "paginated" mode as well as more sophisticated layout tags.

Also appears to have support for ruby and vertical writing modes. This was not yet supported in WebKit when I worked on iBooks. Somehow, this white guy from Kansas (who knows no language other than English) got tapped to implement the vertical TOC for Asian languages. Also tasked with annotating the ePUB pages to display (also vertical) ruby text…

You can contribute to Standard Ebooks by finding OCR errors, then pushing your fixes to https://github.com/standardebooks

Source can be anything with the original text, but, more often than not, ends up being PG.

it's also very "accessible" - good for assistive technologies and people with "ou-of-the-ordinary" requirements

"you guys seem to have already fixed it" - that's what we like to hear :)

Interesting!

It's got better reviews on Goodreads than Moby Dick too. I know what I'm reading next

This was very touching, thanks for sharing. Sorry for your loss.

this is so great to hear! Distributed proofreaders (the org that actually does transcriptions) is still looking for volunteer should you feel the urge/inclination :) https://www.pgdp.net

In 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. So if the information on the Wikipedia article is incomplete or out of date, where is the correct information available?)

It 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.

HTML editions from the two sites contrast interestingly:

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1513/pg1513-images.html

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...

Each has its particular advantages relative to the other ...

probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.

the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.

We'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.

I love, love, looove the fact that I can have a book's html version on project gutenberg bookmarked and continue to read across devices without ever having to login. I use the browser's inbuilt capability extensively to enhance my reading experience (fonts, backgrounds, text to speech, print formatting, share snippets). None of this is a good experience with pdf, epub or any other format.

I've read more (meaningful) text on PG than any other digital platform. Huge fan. Thanks for all the work and for keeping it clean and free

Maybe include a "Lite" version that only displays text/links? No to minimal styling would be great!

♡

CF cache?

Curious, what are the advantages you see in each relative to the other?

Also one should probably compare the former to the single-page version on standardebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...

<3

Less than three is a classic!

Do you host a torrent?

I have about 50k of the books, I would have used a torrent of just the txt files if it was prominent.

It was also blocked in Germany for a while due to a court order https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html

I'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.

I'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

Arguably

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)

It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it.

If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).

Any 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

good question. Eric - any pointers?

so 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 ...

PG 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

I'm getting "We're sorry, the requested URL was not found on this server." if I go to the link

that would be great! Sadly I'm not very confident that that will actually happen ...

The Alfred Döblin books are still blocked in Germany (for a couple more years).

I believe the app is discontinued and the reason I can see the page is that I am on record as having downloaded it.

It’s effective against teenagers maybe. Not so much against Amazon, Meta or wherever botnet/crawler is coming out of China these days from up-and-coming AI companies.

Needs new legislation where the commons/public domain have public benefit corporations appointed as the manager of said resource.

More content visible on various videos I took and posted to X

https://x.com/abal_ai

I mean you could block entire AS numbers that relate to amazon or big tech datacenters

wouldn't help, much of the traffic we've observed look closer to ddos patterns - IPs from all over the world, many different networks, each IP makes one request only, doesn't come back. highly distributed, no form of blocking would be effective except maybe captcha or proof of work.