Project Gutenberg (PG) is a

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effort to

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and archive

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works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of

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." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest

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. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of

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s or individual stories in the

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. All files can be accessed for free under an

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layout, available on almost any computer. , Project Gutenberg had reached 50,000 items in its collection of free eBooks. The releases are available in

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as well as other formats, such as

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, and

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wherever possible. Most releases are in the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the is ...

, but many non-English works are also available. There are multiple affiliated projects that provide additional content, including region- and language-specific works. Project Gutenberg is closely affiliated with

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, an Internet-based community for proofreading scanned texts. Project Gutenberg is named after

Johannes Gutenberg Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and Artisan, craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable type, movable-type printing press. Though not the first of its ki ...

, who introduced book printing with movable type in Europe.

History

Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the

United States Declaration of Independence The United States Declaration of Independence, formally The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen States of America, is the pronouncement and founding document adopted by the Second Continental Congress meeting at Pennsylvania State House ...

. Hart, a student at the

University of Illinois The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the University ...

, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V

mainframe computer A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...

in the university's Materials Research Lab. Through friendly operators, he received an account with a virtually unlimited amount of computer time; its value at that time has since been variously estimated at $100,000 or $100,000,000. Hart explained he wanted to "give back" this gift by doing something one could consider to be of great value. His initial goal was to make the 10,000 most consulted books available to the public at little or no charge by the end of the 20th century.

On July 4, 1971, after being inspired by a free printed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, he decided to type the text into a computer, and to transmit it to other users on the computer network. :— Gregory B. Newby

This particular computer was one of the 15

nodes In general, a node is a localized swelling (a "knot") or a point of intersection (a Vertex (graph theory), vertex). Node may refer to: In mathematics *Vertex (graph theory), a vertex in a mathematical graph *Vertex (geometry), a point where two ...

ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical fou ...

, the computer network that would become the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. Hart believed one day the general public would be able to access computers and decided to make works of literature available in electronic form for free. He used a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence in his backpack, and this became the first Project Gutenberg

e-text e-text (from "''electronics, electronic text''"; sometimes written as etext) is a general term for any Electronic document, document that is read in digital data, digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a compute ...

. He named the project for

, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the

movable type Movable type (US English; moveable type in British English) is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual alphanumeric characters or punctuatio ...

printing press A printing press is a mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting upon a printing, print medium (such as paper or cloth), thereby transferring the ink. It marked a dramatic improvement on earlier printing methods in wh ...

revolution. By the mid-1990s, Hart was running Project Gutenberg from Illinois Benedictine College. More volunteers had joined the effort. He manually entered all of the text until 1989 when

image scanner An image scanner—often abbreviated to just scanner—is a device that optically scans images, printed text, handwriting or an object and converts it to a digital image. Commonly used in offices are variations of the desktop ''flatbed scanner'' ...

s and

optical character recognition Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronic or mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo of a document, a scen ...

software improved and became more available, making

book scanning Book scanning or book digitization (also: magazine scanning or magazine digitization) is the process of converting physical books and magazines into digital media such as images, electronic text, or electronic books (e-books) by using an imag ...

more feasible. Hart later came to an arrangement with

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

, which agreed to administer Project Gutenberg's finances. As the volume of e-texts increased, volunteers began to take over the project's day-to-day operations that Hart had run. Italian volunteer Pietro Di Miceli developed and administered the first Project Gutenberg website and started the development of the Project online Catalog. In his ten years in this role (1994–2004), the Project web pages won a number of awards, often being featured in "best of the Web" listings, contributing to the project's popularity. Starting in 2004, an improved online catalog made Project Gutenberg content easier to browse, access and

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text wit ...

. Project Gutenberg is now hosted by

ibiblio ibiblio (formerly SunSITE.unc.edu and MetaLab.unc.edu) is a "collection of collections", and hosts a diverse range of publicly available information and open source content, including software, music, literature, art, history, science, politic ...

at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill A university () is an institution of higher (or tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. Universities typically offer both undergraduate and postgraduate programs. In the United States ...

. Hart died on 6 September 2011 at his home in Urbana, Illinois, at the age of 64.

CD and DVD project

In August 2003, Project Gutenberg created a CD containing approximately 600 of the "best" e-books from the collection. The CD is available for download as an

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. When users are unable to download the CD, they can request to have a copy sent to them, free of charge. In December 2003, a

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kind ...

was created containing nearly 10,000 items. At the time, this represented almost the entire collection. In early 2004, the DVD also became available by mail. In July 2007, a new edition of the DVD was released containing over 17,000 books, and in April 2010, a dual-layer DVD was released, containing nearly 30,000 items. The majority of the DVDs, and all of the CDs mailed by the project, were recorded on recordable media by volunteers. However, the new dual layer DVDs were manufactured, as it proved more economical than having volunteers burn them. , the project has mailed approximately 40,000 discs. As of 2017, the delivery of free CDs has been discontinued, though the ISO image is still available for download.

Scope of collection

, Project Gutenberg claimed over items in its collection, with an average of over 50 new

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s being added each week. These are primarily works of

literature Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

from the Western cultural tradition. In addition to literature such as novels, poetry, short stories and drama, Project Gutenberg also has

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s and issues of periodicals. The Project Gutenberg collection also has a few non-text items such as audio files and music-notation files. Most releases are in English, but there are also significant numbers in many other languages. , the non-English languages most represented are: French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese. Whenever possible, Gutenberg releases are available in

, mainly using

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but frequently extended to

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(needed to represent accented characters in French and Scharfes s in German, for example). Besides being copyright-free, the requirement for a

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

(

character set Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...

) text version of the release has been a criterion of Michael Hart's since the founding of Project Gutenberg, as he believes this is the format most likely to be readable in the extended future. Out of necessity, this criterion has had to be extended further for the sizable collection of texts in East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese now in the collection, where

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...

is used instead. Other formats may be released as well when submitted by volunteers. The most common non-ASCII format is

, which allows markup and illustrations to be included. Some project members and users have requested more advanced formats, believing them to be easier to read. But some formats that are not easily editable, such as

, are generally not considered to fit with the goals of Project Gutenberg. Also Project Gutenberg has two options for master formats that can be submitted (from which all other files are generated): customized versions of the

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standard (since 2005) and

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(since 2011). Beginning in 2009, the Project Gutenberg catalog began offering auto-generated alternate file formats, including HTML (when not already provided),

and

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Ideals

Michael Hart said in 2004, "The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple: 'To encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks'". His goal was "to provide as many e-books in as many formats as possible for the entire world to read in as many languages as possible". Likewise, a project slogan is to "break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy", because its volunteers aim to continue spreading public

literacy Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, huma ...

and appreciation for the literary heritage just as

public libraries A public library is a library that is accessible by the general public and is usually funded from public sources, such as taxes. It is operated by librarians and library paraprofessionals, who are also civil servants. There are five fundamenta ...

began to do in the late 19th century. Project Gutenberg is intentionally decentralized; there is no selection policy dictating what texts to add. Instead, individual volunteers work on what they are interested in, or have available. The Project Gutenberg collection is intended to preserve items for the long term, so they cannot be lost by any one localized accident. In an effort to ensure this, the entire collection is backed-up regularly and

mirrored ''Mirrored'' is the debut studio album by American experimental rock band Battles. It was released on May 14, 2007 in the United Kingdom, and on May 22, 2007 in the United States. ''Mirrored'' marked the first album in which the band incorporated ...

on servers in many different locations.

Copyright

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. Material is added to the Project Gutenberg archive only after it has received a copyright clearance, and records of these clearances are saved for future reference. Project Gutenberg does not claim new copyright on titles it publishes. Instead, it encourages their free reproduction and distribution. Most books in the Project Gutenberg collection are distributed as

under United States copyright law. There are also a few copyrighted texts, such as those of

science fiction Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...

author

Cory Doctorow Cory Efram Doctorow (; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who served as co-editor of the blog ''Boing Boing''. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of ...

, that Project Gutenberg distributes with permission. These are subject to further restrictions as specified by the copyright holder, although they generally tend to be licensed under

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of the organization, and the mark cannot be used in commercial or modified redistributions of public domain texts from the project. There is no legal impediment to the reselling of works in the public domain if all references to Project Gutenberg are removed, but Gutenberg contributors have questioned the appropriateness of directly and commercially reusing content that has been formatted by volunteers. There have been instances of books being stripped of attribution to the project and sold for profit in the

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and other booksellers, one being the 1906 book ''Fox Trapping''. The website was not accessible within

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, as a result of a court order from S. Fischer Verlag regarding the works of

Heinrich Mann Luiz Heinrich Mann (; 27 March 1871 – 11 March 1950), best known as simply Heinrich Mann, was a German author known for his Social criticism, socio-political novels. From 1930 until 1933, he was president of the fine poetry division of the ...

Thomas Mann Paul Thomas Mann ( , ; ; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novella ...

and

Alfred Döblin Bruno Alfred Döblin (; 10 August 1878 – 26 June 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel '' Berlin Alexanderplatz'' (1929). A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of ...

. Although they were in the public domain in the United States, the German court (Frankfurt am Main Regional Court) recognized the infringement of copyrights still active in Germany, and asserted that the Project Gutenberg website was under German jurisdiction because it hosts content in the German language and is accessible in Germany. This judgment was confirmed by the Frankfurt Court of Appeal on 30 April 2019 (11 U 27/18). The Frankfurt Court of Appeal has not given permission for a further appeal to the Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof), however, an application for permission to appeal has been filed with the Federal Court of Justice. As of 4 October 2020 that application was still pending (Federal Court of Justice I ZR 97/19). According to Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, "In October 2021, the parties reached a settlement agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires. Under the terms of the settlement, the all-Germany block is no longer in place. Other terms of the settlement are confidential." The website has been blocked in

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since May 2020.

Criticism

The text files use the format of

encoded in

and are typically wrapped at 65–70 characters, with paragraphs separated by a double line break. In recent decades, the resulting appearance and the lack of a markup possibility have often been perceived as bland and as a drawback of this format. Project Gutenberg attempts to address this by making many texts available in HTML, ePub, and PDF versions as well. HTML versions of older texts are autogenerated versions. Another not-for-profit project, Standard Ebooks, aims to address these issues with its collection of public domain titles that are formatted and styled. It corrects issues related to design and typography. In December 1994, Project Gutenberg was criticized by the

for failing to include documentation or discussion of the decisions unavoidable in preparing a text, or in some cases, not documenting which of several (conflicting) versions of a text has been the one digitized. The selection of works (and editions) available has been determined by popularity, ease of scanning, being out of copyright, and other factors; this would be difficult to avoid in any crowd-sourced project. In March 2004, an initiative was begun by Michael Hart and John S. Guagliardo to provide low-cost intellectual properties. The initial name for this project was ''Project Gutenberg 2'' (PG II), which created controversy among PG volunteers because of the re-use of the project's trademarked name for a commercial venture.

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation

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EIN: 64-6221541 was chartered in

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, to handle the project's legal needs. Donations to it are

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. Gregory B. Newby, while Assistant Professor at

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, and a long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer, in 2001, became the foundation's first

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, later

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Director, later Compute Canada’s Chief Technology Officer.

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, now hosts ''Project Gutenberg'' * Distributed Proofreaders: In 2000, Charles Franks founded

(DP), which allowed the proofreading of scanned texts to be distributed among many volunteers over the Internet. This effort increased the number and variety of texts being added to Project Gutenberg, as well as making it easier for new volunteers to start contributing. DP became officially affiliated with Project Gutenberg in 2002. , the 36,000+ DP-contributed books comprised almost two-thirds of the nearly books in Project Gutenberg.

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Elias Lönnrot Elias Lönnrot (; 9 April 1802 – 19 March 1884) was a Finnish physician, philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. He is best known for creating the Finnish national epic, ''Kalevala'', (1835, enlarged 1849), from short b ...

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