Rendered at 00:35:51 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Cloudflare Workers.
JSeiko 8 hours ago [-]
Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg.
We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!).
If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/
svat 4 hours ago [-]
Have you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans.
I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.
gluejar 3 hours ago [-]
We're using git repos internally to keep history for each book. They existed on github for a while, but our implementation was awkward, and too big of project for the volunteer dev team. But it's likely that we'll evolve towards that.
marcprux 20 minutes ago [-]
> I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks[…]
Why?
JSeiko 4 hours ago [-]
I believe our new-ish CEO Eric Hellman actually did some work on something very similar
JSeiko 4 hours ago [-]
That's an interesting idea. not a small feat to accomplish though ...
jefurii 7 hours ago [-]
When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
sadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D
ricardonunez 54 minutes ago [-]
I like the design but liked the previous design as well, it was unique and Craigslistish, you knew what website you were visiting just by looking at it.
Wistar 6 hours ago [-]
♡
ok_dad 3 hours ago [-]
<3
Less than three is a classic!
lucb1e 5 hours ago [-]
Huh that's interesting: 4.5 seconds for the TCP handshake and an additional 9.2 seconds for the TLS handshake. Is this some kind of captcha, since most bots would disconnect before that, so if you complete it once then it knows you're good? (Until the bots catch on of course, but so long as it works it's relatively unintrusive and not discriminatory against uncommon client software (that is, non-Chrome/ium).) The rest of the requests were lightning fast
Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!
codys 4 hours ago [-]
I think their site is just slow, potentially because more people than they are used to are trying to view it.
I was unable to load it initially (got an error from firefox) and had to re-attempt. Still slow if one forces a reload (shift-r, etc, to not use local cache).
JSeiko 4 hours ago [-]
we are having occasional lows in page speed performance due to LARGE amounts of bot traffic. full disclosure - we've not really been able to resolve this fully/well. Let us know if you have a good idea for how to deal with it
dimava 16 minutes ago [-]
If it's purely bot traffic, then Anubis could help
I have about 50k of the books, I would have used a torrent of just the txt files if it was prominent.
lucb1e 4 hours ago [-]
I'm only a small-scale sysadmin but the way that I understand the internet is that you send abuse notifications to the IP address block owner and, if it doesn't get resolved, you block. The whois/rdap database reveals which IPs all belong to the same hosting provider or ISP, so you can summarize that all to one list of IP addrs + timestamps per some time period
The ISP actually knows which subscriber is on that line, can send them notices, block them, terminate them... loads of things that you simply cannot do because you have no relation to this person. And frankly I wouldn't want to need to have a personal relation with every website that I visit; my ISP can reach me if there is anything relevant to continued use of the internet. From personal experience, when I was a teenager, the ISP cutting our household off after an abuse report was an effective way of stopping what I was doing
Jolter 2 hours ago [-]
It’s effective against teenagers maybe. Not so much against Amazon, Meta or wherever botnet/crawler is coming out of China these days from up-and-coming AI companies.
tonetegeatinst 57 minutes ago [-]
I mean you could block entire AS numbers that relate to amazon or big tech datacenters
tangledhelix 29 minutes ago [-]
wouldn't help, much of the traffic we've observed look closer to ddos patterns - IPs from all over the world, many different networks, each IP makes one request only, doesn't come back. highly distributed, no form of blocking would be effective except maybe captcha or proof of work.
TurdF3rguson 4 hours ago [-]
CF cache?
Falimonda 8 hours ago [-]
The book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement.
Keep up the good work!
JSeiko 8 hours ago [-]
good feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!
Falimonda 2 hours ago [-]
Any interest in offering PG as a multi-lingual web e-reader in any language?
As long as you're taking suggestions, since many of the books are quite old, adding a publication date or date range to the search functionality might be nice. I personally would find it very useful since I have a tendency to look for things that are older than year _x_ when researching various things.
Thanks for all the effort put into the site!
xrd 8 hours ago [-]
Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.
excitednumber 8 hours ago [-]
Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet
zamadatix 5 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the free work! Project Gutenberg is nice to have :).
On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?
I didn't realized DP was still around. I used to do it quite a bit, 15 years ago, but OCR has improved considerably since then.
lapetitejort 6 hours ago [-]
I uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar
shuvrojit 8 hours ago [-]
Great Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.
Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there.
However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
> All Project Gutenberg metadata are available digitally in the XML/RDF format. This is updated daily (other than the legacy format mentioned below). Please use one of these files as input to a database or other tools you may be developing, instead of crawling or roboting the website.
not yet, but that's not a bad idea imo.
Dealing with Ai crawler traffic is definitely a challenge if that's what you were referring to.
ancientcatz 8 hours ago [-]
OPDS?
gluejar 7 hours ago [-]
OPDS 2.0 coming RSN. email us if you want to test.
OPDS 0.x is currently available (not recommended) by adding .opds to the end of a url
e0d075b569cd 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
TimorousBestie 7 hours ago [-]
Wanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
it's not my day job. PG is open-source. I'm "just" a contributor
TimorousBestie 6 hours ago [-]
Oh, right. That makes sense.
nomoreusernames 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
BiraIgnacio 7 hours ago [-]
Thanks so much for the work you and your team do!
throw0101c 8 hours ago [-]
While PG has probably gotten a lot of use and growth with the growth/maintreaming of the Internet since the 1990s, (TIL) it started back in 1971:
> Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. 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. […]
"Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois."
In what way? And from what sources? (Wikipedia as a tertiary source is supposed to be a summary of information present in reliable secondary sources — see for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Based_upon. So if the information on the Wikipedia article is incomplete or out of date, where is the correct information available?)
JSeiko 3 hours ago [-]
good question. Eric - any pointers?
drummojg 3 hours ago [-]
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
JSeiko 3 hours ago [-]
this is so great to hear! Distributed proofreaders (the org that actually does transcriptions) is still looking for volunteer should you feel the urge/inclination :)
https://www.pgdp.net
oxag3n 4 minutes ago [-]
Is there a plan to extend search to book content?
Someone1234 8 hours ago [-]
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).
horsawlarway 8 hours ago [-]
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.
robin_reala 6 hours ago [-]
To be precise, the vast majority of SE is from Gutenberg, but we also source from Faded Page, Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource and occasionally do our own transcriptions.
everybodyknows 7 hours ago [-]
HTML editions from the two sites contrast interestingly:
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”
[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.]
GaryBluto 8 hours ago [-]
Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.
JSeiko 8 hours ago [-]
probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.
dgellow 2 hours ago [-]
They do exist, since a pretty long time. I bought a pocketbook beginning 2010s. https://pocketbook.ch.
If you mean epub reader software Calibre and a bunch of others exist since pretty much the beginning of epub
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:
Rather a shame that PG didn't monetize by putting their books up there pre-emptively.
dessimus 6 hours ago [-]
>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
Why is it 'plundering' for B&N to print physical books, transport them to their brick-and-mortar stores to sell? There are real costs associated to doing so. It would not have zero cost for me to print and bind a copy myself at home.
the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.
WillAdams 6 hours ago [-]
It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it.
If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
that would be great! Sadly I'm not very confident that that will actually happen ...
WillAdams 5 hours ago [-]
Needs new legislation where the commons/public domain have public benefit corporations appointed as the manager of said resource.
JSeiko 8 hours ago [-]
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.
daveoc64 7 hours ago [-]
You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers - even the Kindle supports it.
cstever 7 hours ago [-]
No money for them.
cosmos0072 4 hours ago [-]
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...
cosmos0072 4 hours ago [-]
Found: it's a sentence from 2020, and PG decided not to appeal (!?)
Seems like a case for HTTP 451 (Unavailable for Legal Reasons) rather than 404.
johndough 4 hours ago [-]
It looks like the issue was that, in Italy, copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author or the first translator of a work.
JSeiko 3 hours ago [-]
PG works based on US copyright law. And as I understand it that's also 70 years after author/translator death.
My gut feeling is that if anyone tried hard enough this ban could probably get lifted
The Alfred Döblin books are still blocked in Germany (for a couple more years).
JSeiko 4 hours ago [-]
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
gluejar 7 hours ago [-]
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.
thangalin 5 hours ago [-]
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:
Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.)
I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)
I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.
My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…
I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.
(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
We're supporting EPUB3 for the vast majority of books! At the same time we also have a "Plain Text" version for each as in a sense it's the most robust. PdFs are in the works!
JKCalhoun 4 hours ago [-]
That's cool. I'll have to read up on EPUB3—I'm not familiar with it.
(I worked on iBooks for the Mac like 15 years ago—it's where I got to dive into the ePub format. A lot has changed in the standard since I am sure.)
EDIT: looks like EPUB3 has a "paginated" mode as well as more sophisticated layout tags.
Also appears to have support for ruby and vertical writing modes. This was not yet supported in WebKit when I worked on iBooks. Somehow, this white guy from Kansas (who knows no language other than English) got tapped to implement the vertical TOC for Asian languages. Also tasked with annotating the ePUB pages to display (also vertical) ruby text…
JLO64 7 hours ago [-]
As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
Source can be anything with the original text, but, more often than not, ends up being PG.
gofreddygo 4 hours ago [-]
I love, love, looove the fact that I can have a book's html version on project gutenberg bookmarked and continue to read across devices without ever having to login. I use the browser's inbuilt capability extensively to enhance my reading experience (fonts, backgrounds, text to speech, print formatting, share snippets). None of this is a good experience with pdf, epub or any other format.
I've read more (meaningful) text on PG than any other digital platform. Huge fan. Thanks for all the work and for keeping it clean and free
RattlesnakeJake 8 hours ago [-]
Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.
jiffygist 7 hours ago [-]
I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.
iberator 19 minutes ago [-]
check it again. most books have epub avalible
skrtskrt 7 hours ago [-]
The common issue with PDFs is that e-readers generally have terrible support for them.
gluejar 7 hours ago [-]
PDF coming this year.
graemep 8 hours ago [-]
I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.
the_af 7 hours ago [-]
I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
it's also very "accessible" - good for assistive technologies and people with "ou-of-the-ordinary" requirements
lxgr 2 hours ago [-]
Not really, given that it can’t represent even basic formatting such as bold or italic text, chapter markers etc.
As an output format it’s ok, but as an input format, it’s almost as bad as PDF.
fmajid 6 hours ago [-]
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):
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?
As a Kindle user, I still miss the old version of the site. The new one looks great on normal desktop, but the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser.
JSeiko 8 hours ago [-]
That's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable
bitigchi 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe include a "Lite" version that only displays text/links? No to minimal styling would be great!
RattlesnakeJake 7 hours ago [-]
And now it's time to put my foot in my mouth. I haven't used it in a while because it was frustrating, but you guys seem to have already fixed it :)
The previous version of the site had two major flaws:
1. The search bar had been removed from the top of the page, and hidden behind a "Click here to search" (or similar) link partway down the page
2. Once you opened that page, the coloring of the site was so washed out on e-ink that the text input was hard to find.
Thanks for fixing it!
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
"you guys seem to have already fixed it" - that's what we like to hear :)
graemep 7 hours ago [-]
Is that a Kindle issue?
You can download books in most browsers. I know Amazon have done things to make life difficult for other stores in the past.
RattlesnakeJake 5 hours ago [-]
I'd call it one of those middle-ground things:
• On the one hand, E Ink devices have a fairly known set of limitations, and it would be ridiculous for me to expect them to render the whole web well.
• On the other hand, it's good for website designs to consider the kind of devices employed by their users. Using a Kindle to access Gutenberg is likely less of an edge case than it would be for other sites, so it's worth the extra design work.
(Keep in mind that -- given my sibling comment -- this is all theoretical. The latest iteration of Gutenberg's site is much better than the previous version)
I love Project Gutenberg, don't get me wrong... but frankly, Anna's is better.
smilespray 7 hours ago [-]
I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work.
Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right.
Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now.
Thanks for sticking with the project!
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
that's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...
smilespray 6 hours ago [-]
That is doable. Most of my work was regexp and repetitive stuff. And the typograhpy stuff is achievable with the current state of the art models. Not that I remember what I did, it was 30 years ago.
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
Interesting!
seizethecheese 8 hours ago [-]
A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.
JSeiko 8 hours ago [-]
good to hear - that was a lot of work!
cold_tom 5 hours ago [-]
Project Gutenberg feels like the opposite of modern internet design philosophy.
Quiet, useful, accessible, and built to last.
aronhegedus 8 hours ago [-]
Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
Moby Dick is consistently one of the Top Downloads
oidar 7 hours ago [-]
I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?
gluejar 7 hours ago [-]
Nowadays we depend on scans from Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and other sources. Some scans are better than others. Bear in mind that our illustrations need to be in the public domain and usually from the same edition as the text. https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html
Myzel394 5 hours ago [-]
I wonder if the people behind project Gutenberg use Anna's Archive or mam for books that can't be put on Gutenberg.
autoexec 6 hours ago [-]
I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!
bryankaplan 7 hours ago [-]
I find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
:D
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
personally I'm a fan of the other "PG" as well.
mentalgear 2 hours ago [-]
Keep up the awesome work !
AndrewStephens 7 hours ago [-]
PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
the amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else is possibly the coolest aspect of PG imo
elias1233 5 hours ago [-]
I thought this was for the Wordpress Gutenberg Editor for a second
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.
WillAdams 7 hours ago [-]
I used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly:
Not a recommendation per se but I used to use Amphetype on Gutenberg texts to practise touch-typing. There's something about writing out a book that hits differently to reading it. You skip less, odd parts stick with you.
I think the last one I tried was The Island of Dr Moreau.
jwpapi 6 hours ago [-]
Ulnar Nerve Entrapement :/
BaseBaal 5 hours ago [-]
From the newest releases page I stumbled into "Some Nigerian fertility cults" by Percy Amaury Talbot & am enjoying it so far.
just heard back that the server provider has been doing a security update. Maybe you were one of the users that got unlucky as a result... maybe try later if still interested
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
I've reported it.
taubek 8 hours ago [-]
Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.
kgwxd 7 hours ago [-]
How did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?
JSeiko 7 hours ago [-]
good question. first though - maybe some bot has downloaded it often for whatever reasons and our systems didn't detect it as bot traffic. just a guess.
solarity_studio 8 hours ago [-]
Awesome
Timixx 5 hours ago [-]
1
derekhdawson 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
brcmthrowaway 8 hours ago [-]
I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI
I've found that the larger open-weight AI models do a great job of explaining the old non-fiction content on PG, particularly magazine articles which are a good size for the AI to handle. It breaks down the long wall-of-text paragraphs for you and explains all the historically relevant background that would've been assumed to be known back in the day.
If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present day it will also do that very nicely, highlighting the places where the text shows old-fashioned viewpoints that would be sharply criticized today.
JSeiko 6 hours ago [-]
so maybe Karpathy has a point that LLM-assisted reading should be a thing. Would be cool if that worked on E-Reader screens as well. Maybe when the browsers on E-Readers become good enough ...
I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.
Why?
Less than three is a classic!
Edit: welcome to your first comment after 9 years on HN btw, nice to have you here!
I was unable to load it initially (got an error from firefox) and had to re-attempt. Still slow if one forces a reload (shift-r, etc, to not use local cache).
You could have seen it on some websites already
https://anubis.techaro.lol/
I have about 50k of the books, I would have used a torrent of just the txt files if it was prominent.
The ISP actually knows which subscriber is on that line, can send them notices, block them, terminate them... loads of things that you simply cannot do because you have no relation to this person. And frankly I wouldn't want to need to have a personal relation with every website that I visit; my ISP can reach me if there is anything relevant to continued use of the internet. From personal experience, when I was a teenager, the ISP cutting our household off after an abuse report was an effective way of stopping what I was doing
Keep up the good work!
I've since discontinued hosting it, but happy to add you all and merge into an official PG offering: https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/s/VtYKxjrMme
https://x.com/abal_ai
Thanks for all the effort put into the site!
On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?
autocat3 and gutenbergsite are repos responsible for generating gutenberg.org
(I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html
Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there.
However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
> All Project Gutenberg metadata are available digitally in the XML/RDF format. This is updated daily (other than the legacy format mentioned below). Please use one of these files as input to a database or other tools you may be developing, instead of crawling or roboting the website.
And strongly consider a donation! (My addition)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html#the-p...
Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.
> Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. 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. […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg
https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...
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
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.
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1513/pg1513-images.html
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...
Each has its particular advantages relative to the other ...
Also one should probably compare the former to the single-page version on standardebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...
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.]
If you mean epub reader software Calibre and a bunch of others exist since pretty much the beginning of epub
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bookdesign...
should ~~be~~ EDIT have been ENDEDIT opensource --- it does at least work to support Project Librivox (or at least that's my understanding)
Seems to no longer be available (see below)
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.
Why is it 'plundering' for B&N to print physical books, transport them to their brick-and-mortar stores to sell? There are real costs associated to doing so. It would not have zero cost for me to print and bind a copy myself at home.
If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).
but yes, generally I agree with your point. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.
Any idea what's happening? I thought PG published public domain books...
Full story (in Italian) at https://www.wired.it/internet/web/2020/06/30/progetto-gutenb...
apparently this situation hasn't been resolved yet
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/11/project-gutenberg-p...
I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)
I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.
My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…
I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.
(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)
(I worked on iBooks for the Mac like 15 years ago—it's where I got to dive into the ePub format. A lot has changed in the standard since I am sure.)
EDIT: looks like EPUB3 has a "paginated" mode as well as more sophisticated layout tags.
Also appears to have support for ruby and vertical writing modes. This was not yet supported in WebKit when I worked on iBooks. Somehow, this white guy from Kansas (who knows no language other than English) got tapped to implement the vertical TOC for Asian languages. Also tasked with annotating the ePUB pages to display (also vertical) ruby text…
I've read more (meaningful) text on PG than any other digital platform. Huge fan. Thanks for all the work and for keeping it clean and free
As an output format it’s ok, but as an input format, it’s almost as bad as PDF.
https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html
> 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
https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think
https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden
The previous version of the site had two major flaws:
1. The search bar had been removed from the top of the page, and hidden behind a "Click here to search" (or similar) link partway down the page
2. Once you opened that page, the coloring of the site was so washed out on e-ink that the text input was hard to find.
Thanks for fixing it!
You can download books in most browsers. I know Amazon have done things to make life difficult for other stores in the past.
• On the one hand, E Ink devices have a fairly known set of limitations, and it would be ridiculous for me to expect them to render the whole web well.
• On the other hand, it's good for website designs to consider the kind of devices employed by their users. Using a Kindle to access Gutenberg is likely less of an edge case than it would be for other sites, so it's worth the extra design work.
(Keep in mind that -- given my sibling comment -- this is all theoretical. The latest iteration of Gutenberg's site is much better than the previous version)
Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right.
Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now.
Thanks for sticking with the project!
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.
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html
I've heard good things. Also - Sherlock Holmes :)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78684
could be a trick to ease that fear :D
If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present day it will also do that very nicely, highlighting the places where the text shows old-fashioned viewpoints that would be sharply criticized today.