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Project Gutenberg Publishes 10,000th Free eBook

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the worthwhile-endeavours dept.

AndrewRUK writes "Earlier today, Project Gutenberg's founder, Micheal Hart, announced that the project has passed the milestone of 10,000 free eBooks available, with the publication of the Magna Carta.Project Gutenberg was founded in 1971, with the aim of "[making] information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search." In the 32 years since the project started, over 10,000 books, ranging from the Bible to school textbooks, and from the complete works of Shakespeare to the USA's declaration of independence, have been made freely available to the public by Project Gutenberg."

5 of 281 comments (clear)

  1. Proofreading by Empiric · · Score: 4, Informative

    Based on someone's post earlier, I gave Distributed Proofreaders a try. It's very straightforward to get started on a couple of pages done at your leisure (especially easy for those knowing basic HTML--like Slashdot posters--think standard bold and italic tags; the only mild ramp up is footnotes), and I found their scanned book choices interesting to be reading through in the process of proofing (well-done proofing interface as well).

    If you're in the mood for browsing books, give it a try... you can find something interesting to read and do a little service for humanity at the same time.

    --
    ~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
  2. Re:errata by jonathan_ingram · · Score: 2, Informative

    The scans for all of the books proofed through Distributed Proofreaders are online. Also, if you find errors in a PG book, you're very welcome to submit corrections to it.

    --
    -- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
  3. Re:$1 Trillion? by clonebarkins · · Score: 2, Informative
    Have they made any progress on their other goal? They wanted to collect a $1 donation for each book from each of the 100 million people they expected to read it, so when they reached the 10,000 book milestone, they'd have raised $1 trillion.

    Not quite. They estimated that if they charged $1 per book, they would have given away $1 Trillion worth of ebooks, not raised that amount. There's a big difference.

    --

    "The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand

  4. uBook by _LORAX_ · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's the only eBook reader I use. Slightly confusing itterface to get used to, but very clean and simple. Reads many unencrypted text formats including ( pdb, prc, txt, rtf, html ) and can read into .zip archives and display covers/inline images.

    Runs on windows and the pocketPC platform and is FREEWARE.

    uBook download

  5. How to format Gutenberg to Palm: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    In your favorite text editor:
    1. Find a character not in the text (# generally works)

    2. Append # to the end of every line.

    3. Replace all [newline]#[newline] with [newline][newline]

    4. Replace all #[newline][newline] with [newline][newline]

    4.5 (check if -# is a split word--if it is, replace -#[newline] with nothing.)

    5. Replace all # with [space]

    All paragraphs are now single lines. They fold nicely on a PDA.