Slashdot Mirror
Project Gutenberg Publishes 10,000th Free eBook
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."
it is time to read up eh?
I still kind of have issues with ebooks.. I mean, reading is pretty much a tactile thing for me.. I.e. I like the smell of books, I like turning pages..
In other words, it is nice to get away from the computer sometimes and just read..
Though, I congratulate their efforts, it is cool
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Are there any decent e-readers for this? I have looked around and all of them want to use some crazy proprietary format or just plain suck. I think those things could take off if there was a good one, I'm game.
Hammer of Truth
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?
That's almost half the Hardy Boys series!
That's odd. What with all the extensions on copyright expirations, I didn't realize that the Bible was in the public domain.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
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.
s/profile/brain/g
Anyone here regularly read from Project G?
I wouldn't say "regularly", but I would say "once in a while". Is that good enough?
What did you read?
Shakespeare, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Lewis Caroll, early P. G. Wodehouse, early Edgar Rice Burroughs.
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
You mean, the U.S. Constitution has been freely available on the Internet all this time, and still Ashcroft hasn't bothered to read it?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
For being a fairly large database of reading material, is it only capable of archiving things so old that they have expired copyrights [...] you can hardly expect it to become a cultural phenomenon,
At least some of us read some of that older material. Shakespeare and Poe and Twain didn't suddenly become pointless after you left school.
Personally I've found myself reading a number of pulp mysterys - The Orange-Yellow Diamond by J.S. Fletcher (some sterotypes, but not racist), Joe Muller: Detective by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner, and of course the early Agatha Christies. Despite being "a million years" old, they're still quite good novels.
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
Yeah, it's copyrighted. So if I erase the files from my harddrive after I read them, wouldn't this be equal to borrowing them from library?
No. The copyright holder didn't recieve any compensation from you downloading the electronic transcription of their work. A library book is paid for once at the very least when it is obtained by the library.
Break out the eye patch buddy.. YARR!
"Anyone here regularly read from Project G? What did you read?"
...
Jules Verne, Mark Twain, HG Wells, Herotodus, Lincoln, Gibbon, Napolean, Stoker, Wilde, Poe, Lovecraft, London, Dickens, Plutach,