Project Gutenberg Made Accessible

scishop writes "Mazarin is an open-source interface to Project Gutenberg's library. Mazarin increases the accessibility of Gutenberg's 10,000+ books as it formats the books for HTML display -- providing paginations in addition to generating table of contents and other advanced markup features -- along with enabling users to carry out full-text searches on the entire library."

Comments

PG

[ArbiterOne]

Most of PG's more well-knownalready are formatted into HTML.

Re:PG

[Charles Franks]

The promo.net address is an old one and no longer maintained, please reference gutenberg.net

Charles Franks
Founder, Distributed Proofreaders

Re:PG

[Charles Franks]

For PDA-friendly formats of PG e-texts try Blackmask and/or Pluckerbooks

Charles Franks
Founder, Distributed Proofreaders

Re:PG

[flimnap]

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.

Re:PG

[bbc]

PG does accept other formats, gladly.

However, it insists on at least a plain vanilla version of a text, as that format has proven to be the most durable and accessible.

So next time you post a text version to PG, make sure you post HTML and PDF versions alongside.

(Do read the rules for HTML in the PG FAQ first, though.)

Text version

[Whitecloud]

since some seem to have trouble on the index page... here it is:

Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael Hart, who in 1971 decided that it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world. Since then, he has been joined by hundreds of volunteers who share his vision.
Now, more than thirty years later, Project Gutenberg has the following figures (as of November 8th 2002): 203 New eBooks released during October 2002, 1975 New eBooks produced in 2002 (they were 1240 in 2001) for a total of 6267 Total Project Gutenberg eBooks. 119 eBooks have been posted so far by Project Gutenberg of Australia.

Click here for the full PG story and here for the latest News , and learn about the Stockholm Challenge Award recently won by Project Gutenberg in the category Culture.

The key link is search page.

Re:Text version

[jonathan_ingram]

well, to those with computers & internet connection...

One of the projects run by the Internet Archive is the Bookmobile, which creates, prints, and gives away (for a nominal production fee) books created from public domain sources. One of their most popular products is an illustrated edition of Alice in Wonderland.

who can read English...

Yes, PG's content is primarily English at the moment, but this is only because most of the volunteers up until now have been English. If you are confident in a language other than English, you can help us get more books in this language -- either by scanning them, or by proofing the books which other people have scanned by joining the Distributed Proofreading Project (or the new EU sister-project DP Europe). At the moment the main site has projects available for proofing in German, Latin, French, Spanish, Swedish, Finnish, Dutch, Hebrew, Danish, Italian, ancient Greek, and Gaelic. The EU site has, in addition, books available in Serbian, Slovenian, Romanian, Welsh, Hawaiian, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Ukranian, modern Greek, and Bulgarian.

if the copyright has expired...

Yes, the vast majority of books in PG are copyright expired. This isn't a big problem, though, as we've only scratched the surface of the number of copyright expired books. Even at the current rate of growth, there's enough to keep us going until the US copyright regime starts letting new books into the public domain in 15 years or so.

Re:Slashdotted - but nice error messages

[Zocalo]

Judging by the snippet of Perl at the bottom of the error message I'd say it's part of the Mason CMS.

Re:Best way to read online texts?

[gunne]

If you have a palm pilot, i can recommend Weasel Reader.
I've been using it for a couple of years on my Palm V, and despite its small screen size it works perfectly for reading ebooks.