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Indeed, there are many, many sites that do all sorts of wonderful things with Project Gutenberg eBooks. That's the wonderful thing about PG, you can do anything you like with the books.

While personally I prefer the original and the best... hey, whatever floats your boat!

It is very much worth noting that Project Gutenberg would have nowhere near as many eBooks as it does without the help of Distributed Proofreaders. Sign up there, and proof just a page a day to make your contribution to preserving literary history. You can proofread as little or as much as you like, and do something worthwhile! Distributed Proofreaders is a great way to spend some of your time.

Charles Franks
Founder, Distributed Proofreaders

Yeah, that was a shame, I had hoped the HWG project would take off too. But then again, it always seemed to me there were very few civic-minded amongst the HWG when I was a member; probably due to the fact that you really didn't have to do anything to "join" and a lot of people saw it as a quick way to load up their resume when web jobs were hot.

But, there is still vindication. Pluckerbooks, in addition to making ready-made pdb files for Plucker, also provides you with the full HTML for their books, which are often Gutenberg conversions. I always read them in Plucker, but the HTML is also useful for non-Palmers.

You should use Plucker books on your Palm. Only 2000 books so far, but no random line breaks (apart from those enforced by 160 pixel screen). And a new version (1.6) of Plucker is just out.

Project Gutenberg etexts come with a header and footer. This header and footer are property of Project Gutenberg. Also, Project Gutenberg is a trademarked name.

If you want to sell Project Gutenberg etexts without paying the Project a licensing fee, you need to strip out the header, footer and references to Project Gutenberg. The public domain part of these etexts is, er, public domain.

Sites that take PG texts and convert them to easy to read format are Black Mask, Gnutenberg, Pluckerbooks, and Raptorbook. This is off the top of my head, there are probably much more.

The Gnutenberg search function is broken AFAIK. Just leave the fields empty and click Search. They've got some beautiful PDFs.

--Branko

My source for public domain-sourced ebooks. Now, they are missing some stuff I'd like to see, but they really do have a ton of goods there. And, even if your reader of choice isn't plucker, all of the books are available in very simple HTML markup for conversion to your format of choice.

And there's always the venerable Project Gutenberg; most of their stuff is in plain, portable, ASCII. They also have a CD of some of the best stuff available.

I agree that the eBook prices are too high. I've settled for reading the classics on my Handspring Visor.

Check out Plucker Books. These are Gutenberg books formatted for the Plucker reader.

I still prefer a real book, but these come in handy when I'm feeding my infant son...bottle in one hand and Visor in the other.

I recently got a cheap Handspring Visor and found this site for reading books with the cool Plucker browser.

It's old stuff, but it's free.

This is already happening. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) recently added support for Plucker; the LDP now automatically generates Plucker format for all HOWTO, mini-HOWTO, and FAQ documents. The LDP also automatically regenerates the files when the documents are updated. Pluckerbooks has over a thousand pregenerated books and they have links to other sources of Plucker documents.

In fact, I've recently added support for Plucker to my own website. My paper Why Open Source Software / Free Software? Look at the Numbers! also has a Plucker version available. I also generate a Plucker version of my book on writing secure programs. So I'm speaking from experience here.. Plucker works well for at least some content providers!

Downloading the tools and then generating the Plucker format is easy if you can use a command line interface. Plucker's format is essentially compressed HTML, so for most websites it's easy to support. Plucker is GPL'ed, so its components (the generator and reader) can't be "taken away"... and they are free for any use. This combination of free reader, free creator, and no risk (because it can't be taken away) makes Plucker much more appropriate for many content providers. The Plucker viewer itself is quite capable, for example, it supports larger fonts for headings, bold text, italics, hypertext links, images, horizontal rules, and tables (formatted as one cell per line). If you click on a hypertext link to a page not included in the file, Plucker will show you the URL so you can look it up later.

Installing just the viewer is actually quite easy for end-users; you can download just the viewer from the Plucker website, and Plucker users can beam the program to other users of Palm-compatible PDAs. Generating Plucker files is pretty easy from the command line, but I do agree that currently grandma may have trouble generating documents on her own. It's also true that getting "new" versions of Plucker documents isn't automatic; you have to do something to get an update. The Plucker folks are actively working on solving these problems, e.g., creating GUI interfaces. Since Plucker is already a really nice viewer, and other work is already ongoing, I think that the Plucker developers will quickly succeed in making it easier for naive users to generate their own documents.

This is already happening. For example, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) recently added support for Plucker; the LDP now automatically generates Plucker format for all HOWTO, mini-HOWTO, and FAQ documents. The LDP also automatically regenerates the files when the documents are updated. Pluckerbooks has over a thousand pregenerated books and they have links to other sources of Plucker documents.

In fact, I've recently added support for Plucker to my own website. My paper Why Open Source Software / Free Software? Look at the Numbers! also has a Plucker version available. I also generate a Plucker version of my book on writing secure programs. So I'm speaking from experience here.. Plucker works well for at least some content providers!

Downloading the tools and then generating the Plucker format is easy if you can use a command line interface. Plucker's format is essentially compressed HTML, so for most websites it's easy to support. Plucker is GPL'ed, so its components (the generator and reader) can't be "taken away"... and they are free for any use. This combination of free reader, free creator, and no risk (because it can't be taken away) makes Plucker much more appropriate for many content providers. The Plucker viewer itself is quite capable, for example, it supports larger fonts for headings, bold text, italics, hypertext links, images, horizontal rules, and tables (formatted as one cell per line). If you click on a hypertext link to a page not included in the file, Plucker will show you the URL so you can look it up later.

Installing just the viewer is actually quite easy for end-users; you can download just the viewer from the Plucker website, and Plucker users can beam the program to other users of Palm-compatible PDAs. Generating Plucker files is pretty easy from the command line, but I do agree that currently grandma may have trouble generating documents on her own. It's also true that getting "new" versions of Plucker documents isn't automatic; you have to do something to get an update. The Plucker folks are actively working on solving these problems, e.g., creating GUI interfaces. Since Plucker is already a really nice viewer, and other work is already ongoing, I think that the Plucker developers will quickly succeed in making it easier for naive users to generate their own documents.