Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • Their feeds of new books is a goldmine:

    https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/feeds.html

    Every day you'll get much more than you're bargaining for, right into your feed or inbox. Easy download books you're interested in and put them on your Kindle.

    by carlosjobim
  • I used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly:

    https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html

    by WillAdams
  • Gutenberg is awesome. There is also

    https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think

    https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden

    by kreyenborgi
  • Don't forget Wikisource! https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page
    by Arcorann
  • If you like Project Gutenberg, the closest analog for music is IMSLP, the Petrucci Music Library (imslp.org) — over 855,000 public-domain scores maintained by volunteers, with the same labor-of-love energy and the same perpetual scan-quality and copyright-jurisdiction headaches. Same ethos of "the works belong to humanity, not a storefront." Worth a bookmark for the musicians on HN.
    by derekhdawson
  • Worth mentioning the Project Gutenberg ZIMs. You can download the entire ENglish Gutenberg corpus for about 60GB (English Wikipedia ZIM complete with images is ~120GB):

    https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html

    by fmajid
  • Like the Project Gutenberg collection on archive.org, the ZIMs are only current up to 2018.
    by cxr
  • Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove, though many technical details defy automatic typesetting of its books. Standard Ebooks takes consistency to an unbelievable level. My post compares various sources of public domain books with an eye on typesetting:

    https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...

    by thangalin
  • Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others.

    > 23644 downloads in the last 30 days.

    I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot?

    [0] https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855

    by ssgodderidge
  • It's got better reviews on Goodreads than Moby Dick too. I know what I'm reading next
    by why_at
  • bot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D
    by JSeiko
  • For context, here is the first paragraph of the book's preface:

    How best to perform construction work and what it will cost for materials, labor, plant and general expenses are matters of vital interest to engineers and contractors. This book is a treatise on the methods and cost of concrete construction. No attempt has been made to present the subject of cement testing which is already covered by Mr. W. Purves Taylor's excellent book, nor to discuss the physical properties of cements and concrete, as they are discussed by Falk and by Sabin, nor to consider reinforced concrete design as do Turneaure and Maurer or Buel and Hill, nor to present a general treatise on cements, mortars and concrete construction like that of Reid or of Taylor and Thompson. On the contrary, the authors have handled the subject of concrete construction solely from the viewpoint of the builder of concrete structures. By doing this they have been able to crowd a great amount of detailed information on methods and costs of concrete construction into a volume of moderate size.

    by tmoertel
  • Haha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up
    by sovietswag
  • Nice to see so much appreciation for what we do. (I'm the new-ish executive director.) Any wikipedians reading this, the article about PG is... aging. Last I looked, it said we offered Plucker files. @Jseiko has done some nice work.
    by gluejar
  • FYI, I took Plucker out of the lead in November, after a PG volunteer recommended that update on the article talk page. Plucker is currently only mentioned in a sentence about formats offered in 2009.

    Happy to make other updates! Writing specific notes on the talk page is helpful.

    by britta
  • From Italy, https://www.gutenberg.org/ gives a 404 error and https://gutenberg.org/ opens a very official-looking page stating "police notice. This site is under judicial seizure" and references a sentence number: "criminal proceedings 52127/20 R.N.R.I. tribunal of Rome"

    Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...

    by cosmos0072
  • I asked Claude to research the background story: "In May 2020, the Court of Rome ordered Italian ISPs to seize/block a list of domains as part of a criminal case (the 52127/20 R.N.R. you're seeing) targeting sites and Telegram channels distributing pirated newspapers and magazines. 28 domains were on the list, and Project Gutenberg got thrown in alongside the actual pirate sites."

    apparently this situation hasn't been resolved yet

    by JSeiko
  • It was also blocked in Germany for a while due to a court order https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
    by dgellow
  • A silly legal tribunal confused PG with pirate sites. We sent the tribunal a letter pointing out their error but it was ignored. The block was served on local dns providers so many Italian users evade the block by using DNS from Google or Cloudflare.
    by gluejar
  • Found: it's a sentence from 2020, and PG decided not to appeal (!?)

    Full story (in Italian) at https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenb...

    by cosmos0072
  • I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).
    by Someone1234
  • You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers - even the Kindle supports it.
    by daveoc64
  • On any device you can install KOReader, PG is one of the default options in the builtin OPDS browser.

    https://koreader.rocks/

    by BHSPitMonkey
  • I've heard that the newest Kobo e-readers have a browser that you could use to go to gutenberg.org and directly download files.

    but yes, generally I agree with your point. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.

    by JSeiko
  • Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.
    by GaryBluto
  • Used to be one could sort of get that with the Project Librivox:

    https://librivox.org/

    e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox).

    FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores --- Amazon apparently has a similar setup for the Kindle Store:

    https://www.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Books-Kindle-Store/s?k=...

    Rather a shame that PG didn't monetize by putting their books up there pre-emptively.

    by WillAdams
  • If you don’t strip the Project Gutenberg license from the book text (leaving only the book text, which no-one disputes is public domain and freely distributable), you are required to give “pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes”

    https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html

    [Way back in the early days of the iPhone, I sold a book reading app which was backed directly by Project Gutenberg texts, called “Eucalyptus”. I sent 20% of the gross profits to PG - which was never less than very supportive of the app - and felt good about doing so.]

    by jrmg
  • I've used https://standardebooks.org/ to pull nicely formatted Project Gutenberg books on any e-reader that supports a browser (in my case, Boox).

    Technically, I can also just directly pull the epub from Project Gutenberg, but sometimes the formatting leaves a lot to be desired.

    Once you get an e-reader that runs a semi-capable OS (ex - stock android, even an older version), it's hard to go back to something like a kindle.

    by horsawlarway
  • I am actually working on this right now. If you would like to test it, you may download Thorium reader and add the catalog http://pgnew.pglaf.org:8000/opds/
    by zachjesus
  • The best thing I ever did for my father was to buy him a kindle and an access point and show him how to use Project Gutenberg to get books. He loved the old writings (he being a GED holder who was in the Navy during Korea yet had read the entire Harvard Classics). He had a special rolled up towel he used to prop it on his lap in his favorite chair and he read and read and read. When he passed he was reading "Legends of the Jews" from 1931.

    I had some small e-correspondence with Michael S. Hart back in the 90's as well, and made a few modest contributions to the project, which made my English major undergraduate heart swell with pride and joy.

    I guess this is only to say that PG is special to me for these reasons, and I am glad to see it still thriving. <3

    by drummojg