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

FWIW 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!

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

The biggest lever: make the reading experience great. 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

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!

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!

Hi 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.

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!

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.

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!

A silly legal tribunal confused PG with pirate sites. We sent the tribunal a letter pointing out their error but it was ignored. The block was served on local dns providers so many Italian users evade the block by using DNS from Google or Cloudflare.

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.

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.]

On any device you can install KOReader, PG is one of the default options in the builtin OPDS browser.

https://koreader.rocks/

No money for them.

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...

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

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

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.

I am actually working on this right now. If you would like to test it, you may download Thorium reader and add the catalog http://pgnew.pglaf.org:8000/opds/

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.

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

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

That's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable

Since 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"

not that I know of ...

I 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.

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

The ebook editions are very good for this. Most of the e-reader software provides all the amenities (bookmarks, highlighting, notes, control of margins, etc).

Lines aren't too long. They look great on all my devices.

Use ⌘ + + until you get the line length you like.

Project 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.

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

>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).

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).

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

traffic yesterday ~20% more than recent average. 4971601 sessions 177 robots 863462 robot files 3390115 user files 20.30% robot files (robots id'd based on requests/ip address) 5 apache servers for static content, 1 CherryPy server for dynamic content hosted at iBiblio.

Haha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up

bot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D

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

later this year

in which way? (genuine question)

Firefox's reader mode works amazingly for these situations.

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

only 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.

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

only 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

> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…]

Why?

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

Is 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.

For 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.

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

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.

> I asked Claude

Please don't do this.

Quote an authoritative source, not some AI bot known for ~~hallucinating~~ bullshitting.

We also have an older OPDS 1.0 (the one I sent is the newer, 2.0 standard) catalog but it isn’t the best to use. It’s still a WIP, but very close to being finished.

Yep! This is how I get all my books on Kindle! For me, I choose the 'older Kindles' option and it downloads directly to my homepage.

FYI, 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.

Don't forget Wikisource! https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page

Like the Project Gutenberg collection on archive.org, the ZIMs are only current up to 2018.

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

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

"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 used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html

One author remains blocked in Germany (but only for a couple more years)...

very glad this has been resolved (I'm from Germany myself)

Project Gesperrtberg

hopefully!

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

This is covered in the FAQ - https://www.gutenberg.org/help/faq.html#why-is-project-guten...

And as another person noted, the vast majority of books have HTML, EPUB, Mobi formats. We are also looking at both KEPUB (Kobo) and PDF which will probably come in the future.

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.

check it again. most books have epub avalible

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

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 ...

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.

I'm working on audiobook app that integrates the Libivox catalog. Only on Windows right now - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n1z76ffb3fc?hl=en-US I'll release Android, IOS, Mac & Linux versions soon.

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

And 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!

wikipedians, please help update this article.

that'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 ...

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 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

Amazing!!! 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.

Well, 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.

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

♡

I 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.

I 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.

A 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

Yes I am willing to help. Plz include me in your efforts. Thank you for this

exciting :)

CF cache?

I ... now want to read this book.

I'd call it one of those middle-ground things:

• On the one hand, E Ink devices have a fairly known set of limitations, and it would be ridiculous for me to expect them to render the whole web well.

• On the other hand, it's good for website designs to consider the kind of devices employed by their users. Using a Kindle to access Gutenberg is likely less of an edge case than it would be for other sites, so it's worth the extra design work.

(Keep in mind that -- given my sibling comment -- this is all theoretical. The latest iteration of Gutenberg's site is much better than the previous version)

How do you currently host everything? Your main web server should not be responsible for hosting content. All books should be hosted on mirrors, and clicking download should automatically select a mirror to download it from.

Furthermore:

* Make sure that all books are downloadable in bulk as torrents.

* Every day, generate a CSV file of all available books and their metadata. Distribute this so that bots and user clients can run queries locally, instead of using your search engine.

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

It 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.

I was hoping to reply to this in detail but as I never got around to it, I'll keep it short: mostly it's about the editorial changes they make to the text, modernizing spelling etc. Many of the changes are unjustified IMO, and often detract from the charm of the original, and I'm uncomfortable reading a text I know has been tampered with in this way. Of course it's their project and they can do whatever they want, and they clearly love books, so with strong opinions there will be some that I may disagree with. I'd much rather read books from Project Gutenberg or Wikisource, both of which don't even correct obvious typos without marking up in some way that they've done so.

I also have many positive things to say about Standard Ebooks, but I don't think you were asking about those. :)

----

Edit: Without going into what I think are the most egregious sort of changes they introduce (which I think will require a longer post) and limiting myself to ones easy to find immediately:

See the earlier discussion (linked in a sibling comment here) where the editor-in-chief says it's ok to change punctuation because "The sounds out of his mouth do not include an apostrophe whether it's there in the spelling or not." (a very American view IMO): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16956931

And looking at a recent commit on one of their books, here's a recent (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...) revert of one of their aggressive "modernizations" from 2024 (https://github.com/standardebooks/agatha-christie_the-secret...), that had, in line with their usual practice, changed "every one" to "everyone" (in one place even when referring to "a good many risks"), and the same commit made other changes (including one still present) like "they ought to have it lithographed. It must be a frightful nuisance doing every one separately." having the last four words turned into "doing everyone separately."!

<3

Less than three is a classic!

Not the GP, but I also have mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks. They modernise texts for American readers. This means changing the punctuation, merging some words, altering the syntax, etc.

When I read an old novel, written two centuries ago in England, the little differences to modern English are part of the charm, and I certainly don't want any Americanism mixed in. For one of my favorite novels, The Forsyte saga, the author deliberately used some rare forms of words, which SE replaced with the mainstream forms.

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

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.

I would love it if you could detect AI scraper bots, and feed them AI generated bs instead of the real books...

If it's purely bot traffic, then Anubis could help

You could have seen it on some websites already

https://anubis.techaro.lol/

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

HTTP 666 (We're evil) seems more fitting here.

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

They do exist, since a pretty long time. I bought a pocketbook beginning 2010s. https://pocketbook.ch.

If you mean epub reader software Calibre and a bunch of others exist since pretty much the beginning of epub

In a similar vein to cobbzilla, I have a couple of family members (and to a lesser extent myself too) who would be keen on such an app for their iOS devices if you ever need some testers for that :)

(iPhones 15 Pro, 11 Pro, SE-2nd; and an iPad of some kind)

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

I've reported it.

that's cool!

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

Moby Dick is consistently one of the Top Downloads

Paul Graham? ;-)

the amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else is possibly the coolest aspect of PG imo

if the doesn't leave my phone why is it a subscription?

I should hit Matt up for a donation.

nice!

good to hear - that was a lot of work!

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.

Nowadays 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

From 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

Flatland: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=flatland

I've heard good things. Also - Sherlock Holmes :)

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)

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

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).

I love librivox! please add me to your ios release list. my HN username at g mail

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?)

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-...

That 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.

Interesting. Do you "just" use the browser's built-in capabilities or also some browser extensions?

Not 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.

:D

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

https://x.com/abal_ai

It’s a different mission.

PG focuses on an accurate digital translation of the source material, sometimes hosting multiple different versions of the same text, and doing things like putting work into recreating the adverts at the back of some novels.

SE focuses less of preservation and more on making readers’ versions of the texts, like other publishing imprints. So there’s typography standardisation, a light-touch moderinisation of hyphenation and soundalike spelling, and things like author-wide collections of short fiction and poetry even if it didn’t previously exist.

Both are valuable, but they serve different segments.

Ess two is less than less than three, but also a classic.

s2 < <3

On the “every one” example, that’s a definite mistake that shouldn’t have made its way in to the book in the first place. The production process has a specific step for “every one” (https://standardebooks.org/contribute/producing-an-ebook-ste...) that guides producers through making the correct choices when modern usage has two different possible choices. It shouldn’t have happened, but it’s a mistake that was fixed at least.

SE editor in chief here. What you describe is incorrect. The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight". We do not do things like change from en-GB to en-US, replace old words with different modern words, or change text for "American readers", whatever that means. I have no idea where you got that impression.

I personally worked on the Forsyte saga. If you think something was done in error, please let us know and we'll be happy to fix it.

You may already be aware, but SE marks all commits making those kinds of changes as '[Editorial]', so it is generally trivial to use their tooling to build your own high-quality ebook without any of the editorial changes.

SE sounds truly, truly awful. Thanks for making me aware of its existence so I can avoid it.

anubis only works against lazy scrapers, and at a cost to your users. I'd prefer people not use it.

Bot traffic comes from machines that usually have a lot of idle cpu (since they're largely blocked on network IO as they scrape a bunch of sites in parallel), so they can trivially solve the anubis "proof of work" challenge, save the cookie, and then not solve it again for that site.

The only reason scrapers don't solve it is if the developers were too lazy to implement it... and modern scrapers also do, codeberg stopped using anubis because modern scrapers were updated to solve it.

The "proof of work" has to be easy or else people on old cell phones couldn't access your site (since an old android phone would start to overheat and throttle trying to solve a challenge that would take a modern server even several seconds), and it also consumes your cell-phone user's batteries, which is a really precious resource for them compared to the idle cpu on a server.

we have a tarball of all text files - link posted somewhere here

Cloudflare sells that as a product, they call it Labyrinth IIRC.

This is very, very, very dangerous.

Occasionally, you misclassify a real user as a bot, and then your reputation is ruined forever.

The official Polish train schedules website did this recently, feeding incorrect departure and arrival times to IP addresses known for aggressive scraping, without taking CGNAT into account. People... have noticed[1].

[1] (Polish) https://zaufanatrzeciastrona.pl/post/kto-i-dlaczego-losuje-w...

Just to add to the two negative replies, I find Anubis to be the only system that doesn't ever get in the way. My browsers have Javascript enabled and, so far, it never took more than a fraction of a second to complete the checks

Every other system I've run into has constant false positives, e.g. Google captchas will sometimes say I've failed and make me do the hardest level (if it wasn't giving me that already), Cloudflare regularly thinks I'm a bot, Codeberg blocked me before, Github signup captchas used to take ~15 minutes to complete and then still said "well you failed, try again", Github's general rate limiting has false positives (some days I browse a lot, other days little, and on the little days it'll sometimes go "slow down" with no recourse whatsoever, you're just blocked for an indeterminate amount of time), OpenStreetMap blocks my browser at work because I'm using Firefox ESR instead of latest stable and it finds that user agent string to be implausible, whatever the german railway operator uses since a few days is triggering on me constantly, etc.,

etc.,

etc. Constant blocks everywhere.

With Anubis, my understanding is that you do the proof of work (with whatever implementation you like, it doesn't have to be the Javascript one that they provide) and you can move on without ever doing any task yourself. The power consumption is a shame, but so long as attackers aren't even doing this much, the couple Joules it takes doesn't seem to be an issue

Of course, the attackers will evolve, but for now...

Please no. I'm a non-bot who gets stopped and turned away all the time by that menace. Anubis doesn't work without JS.

One of the things I give duckduckgo a lot of credit for is that while they're quick to interrupt me for a bot check (sometimes multiple times in a span of minutes) they'll let me identify ducks even on the most locked down browsers I use.

That’s only the case for works published after the mid-70s. For works published before (which is all current PD books in the US), it’s 95 years after the date of publication, with a few exceptions where people failed to file renewal notices.

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.

The problem with this approach is that modern scrapers use hordes of residential proxies and quickly rotate through IP addresses which belong to ASes you get a lot of real traffic from. There's nothing you can do if the ISP won't take any action against the customer.

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

Personally I find the formatting used by the Gutenberg one to be a lot nicer/easier to read, despite (or perhaps because of) being simpler, more plain.

At least for the first few pages of content that I looked at on both versions.

I just use the built-in capabilities these days as everything that I would need is in there. This was not true many years ago when I did use some browser extensions.

Interesting!

good question. Eric - any pointers?

There's quite a lot of information here: https://www.gutenberg.org/about/ All our text is now utf-8. No Plucker! Almost every book is HTML(5).

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

One could argue that this falls into the previous poster's thought about "the little differences to modern English are part of the charm" ...

Ulnar Nerve Entrapement :/

SE is an amazing and wonderful resource

When I tried this in the past, it was non-trivial because the editorial changes are mixed with the technical changes. Reverting the editorial changes broke the technical changes.

Your comment makes it sound as though the mistake was introduced by an inexperienced contributor who did not read the guide, when in fact it was introduced by the founder/editor-in-chief of the project. :) And in case it wasn't clear, only one of the mistakes was reverted, and the other one I quoted is still present in the book even as of this moment.

More broadly, the position of Standard Ebooks is that a modern reader would be distracted by spellings like "some one" and "every thing", and by time written like "2.30" instead of "2:30", and that books in British quotation style must be converted to American quotation style. I think most readers can in fact tolerate such small differences, and this position is frankly insulting — the punctuation and spelling of works are part of their character, and if anything, I'm more distracted by such anachronisms in style introduced as part of the Standard Ebooks process.

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

I commented on this kind of editing several years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16957359

The edit is still in place, and I still maintain that changing 'phone to phone in dialogue changes the meaning.

They're providing beautifully made ebooks for free...

The only thing they are is truly, truly wonderful.

> The only thing we do is very light sound-alike spelling modernization, like "to-night" -> "tonight".

Curious. Why even bother?

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

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

Then block all of Amazon, Meta, or wherever botnet/crawling traffic is coming from that doesn't honor robots.txt, sends DDoS reflection traffic, submits SMTP messages (in large volumes, not just probing) for domains they're not authorized for with SPF, or whatever else applies to the protocol you're using

If they can't keep their ranges clean to a reasonable degree, their customers will need to move if they want to access your part of the internet. New sign-ups will always be hard, so some amount of abuse is expected, but if it's the same abuse traffic for weeks after you've notified them, well, it stops being your problem at some point

Worse than that - even if they would take action, you can't possibly orchestrate filing all of the complaints. It's a drown-in-quicksand problem, you can't fight quicksand one grain at a time.

Guess: screen readers and such.

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

Yeah, that edit clearly changes the meaning of the text.

I know. All the more reason to do it, right? If an ISP can't keep its network clean, then allowing them to send traffic onto the web is just asking for the problem to continue

Show people a useful error, such as "You are using [ISP name] which sends large volumes of abusive traffic (think of spam and DDoS). They allow the attackers to hop around points across their entire network so we cannot block the abusers more selectively. Despite our attempts to contact them, the abuse continues in volumes which we do not see from other ISPs. To access our corner of the internet, use a different ISP. You could try mobile data instead of Wi-Fi or vice versa.", and they can make their own choices about staying with this ISP if more and more websites show this sort of error

If everyone tries to identify people piecemeal, we all need to implement ~200 different identification systems (assuming each country has a central system that everyone is signed up to in the first place), or rely on algorithms to tell who is a bot (I'm currently being misidentified on a daily basis and I'm, eh, not a bot. Trying to buy public transport tickets is currently difficult, for example, because the monopolist in my country blocks me after a few route queries when using a Google browser, and 0 queries from Firefox)

And to be honest, that position is totally reasonable, and the good thing is that you have the option of Gutenberg, Faded Page, and a bunch of other archival sites, also for free, if you don’t want that.

But nearly all print publishers also do what SE does. Why do you think they do, when it costs additional money and time to do that? A reasonable answer is that some, or a majority of, people prefer it.

But why not be true to the original author's text? What's the need to modify it?

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.

> you can't possibly orchestrate filing all of the complaints

To the ISPs? Each IP range has an abuse email address registered and this is specifically exempt from rate limiting at RIPE's WHOIS server. Not sure how it is in other RIRs but I just happen to know of this policy

You can automate the whole thing, provided that you have a reliable way of identifying the undesired traffic which you need anyway for being able to block it by any means. The trouble is in user identification (they'll just use a new IP address from that ISP or hosting provider if you don't tell the provider about the problematic user)

See the other comments in this thread. The perpetrators are unknown and are jumping between residential IPs. Possibly botnets?

> But nearly all print publishers also do what SE does.

Do they? To check, I tried to find a recent publication of Agatha Christie, and found the collection “Country Christie: Twelve Devonshire Mysteries” which says “First published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2025”. It still has British-style punctuation (throughout the book), and times like “1.30”, “9.30”, “11.30”, “7.30 a.m.”, “12.30 p.m.”, and “8.30”. I checked a couple of other recent publications and admittedly they do modernize (though not in phrases like “every one of you”), but again I found the collection “The Last Seance: Haunting Tales from the Queen of Mystery” (2019) which does not. So it seems mixed.

In any case, I think it's fine to do what Standard Ebooks does, and if it were instead called something like “Modernized Ebooks with American punctuation”—if readers would know before picking one up—it would be totally unobjectionable. The name “Standard” gives the wrong impression. It's a bit like colorizing old black-and-white movies (or dubbing foreign-language movies instead of subtitling them): yes possibly even a majority of people may prefer it, but IMO it would be good to be more explicit what has been done.

Not parent, but while I can appreciate your viewpoint, I would like to point out that many many many books have abridged, reworded, simplified, or disambiguated versions for different audiences.

The Bible is I daresay the most famous of these. Translations aside, even the English versions have had significant alterations done to wording, spelling, and meaning depending on the version.

There's also the Great Illustrated Classics imprint for certain classic novels like H.G. Wells's The Invisible Man. (I read that one like 10 times as a kid and it's what got me into sci-fi as a whole I'd argue. Haha.)

Whether these alternate versions are good or bad is obviously up for debate and depends on the person, but I'm just saying that what SE does is hardly new in the publishing world.

Then see my other replies in the thread where I've specifically addressed residential IPs, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163060

See what I wrote above (and let me say I am talking about Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders here, I am one of the admins on both). A large amount of the hassle traffic we've seen is as I wrote above, the IPs come from everywhere and in many cases, each IP makes a single request and doesn't come back. They change user-agent dynamically, etc, to masquerade as regular traffic. They come from residential, cloud/hyperscale, corporate, educational, government, all the networks, on every continent. This is many thousands of "open a ticket with someone" events per hour territory. It's as difficult to fight as DDoS itself for the same reasons (presumably the harvesting parties know that and that's exactly why this approach is used).

Others online have been writing about their own experience with the same stuff; it's not unique to PG at all, it's everywhere. Talk to anyone that runs a web server and they'll have these stories...

This is the post I’m talking about. Make sure you understand how it would not be productive to go after each ISP individually when the traffic is from all of them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155512

I'm aware, I also host various websites that see an IP do a single request to the most unlikely of deep pages. Usually not hard to correlate with similar surprising requests from the same ISP, though, and that's exactly why it would be useful to talk to them: they know who used that IP address at the given timestamp. If they get a hundred complaints from different websites, the ISP is in the unique position to correlate that and find the subscriber(s) that are problematic

You also don't have to send out 1k support requests per hour. Could trial it with some hosting provider that you expect is responsive and see how it works out

edit: like, I just don't see another solution short of banning being anonymous online. Each site would have to know who you are. Someone has to be able to track it back to a person that is doing the abuse or there can't be any rules that we can apply. Imo it's better if that's the ISP (or VPN provider, say) who already has this information anyway