07 What is Project Gutenberg?
Description
This article is from the Books FAQ, by Evelyn C. Leeper eleeper@jaguar.stc.lucent.com with numerous contributions by others.
07 What is Project Gutenberg?
Project Gutenberg is planned as a storage- and clearing-house
for making books available very cheaply, by freely providing them
in standard electronic formats (usually ASCII). This can only be done
for books where the copyrights have expired, or when authors have permitted
free redistribution, so that effectively much of the work has focused
on classic literature.
A sample of famous works or authors would include:
Lewis Carroll: ALICE IN WONDERLAND; THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Dante: THE DIVINE COMEDY (in several translations and the original Italian)
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, & John Jay: FEDERALIST PAPERS
Charles & Mary Lamb: TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE
Dr. David Livingstone: MISSIONARY TRAVELS AND RESEARCHES IN SOUTH AFRICA
Plutarch: LIVES
Shakespeare: Works
Robert Louis Stevenson: A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES
Mark Twain: TOM SAWYER; HUCKLEBERRY FINN; and others
But just as important is the ability of an electronic medium
to cheaply convey information that is less known, or regional,
but still worthwhile, such as:
Lady Gordon: LETTERS FROM THE CAPE
Henry Lawson: JOE WILSON AND HIS MATES (Australian Lit)
Joseph Munk: ARIZONA SKETCHES
"Banjo" Paterson: THE MAN FROM SNOWY RIVER; and others (Australian Lit)
W. D. James / W. G. Simms / M. C. Weems: 3 biographies of FRANCIS MARION
Project Gutenberg has produced over 2,000 etexts, and is releasing 32 new
etexts per month, hoping to double production each year until 10,000 etexts
are finished in 2001. These vary from classic fiction to nonfiction to
large numerical calculations like the square root of 2 to 10**n decimal
places). Releases are announced on bit.listserv.gutnberg. Project
Gutenberg is available by anonymous FTP from uiarchive.uiuc.edu in
directory pub/etext/gutenberg, and mirror sites.
One of the best places to find electronic texts (etexts) is:
The Online Book Page: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/index.html
where over 10,000 online texts are catalogued by author and title,
in a searchable database, with some subject listings as well.
It is by far the best and most comprehensive site for etexts
presently on the net.
[Provided by Alan Light (alight@vnet.net).]
Another similar directory is held at info.umd.edu, in directories under
inforM/EdRes/ReadingRoom/Fiction. Found there are books by 14 authors
including Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, and F. Scott Fitzgerald . They also
have the Bible, Book of Mormon and Koran in ASCII format. Also available
from info.umd.edu is a collection of economics time series data from the
Federal government, as well as daily and long-term weather forecasts.
(I am told info.umd.edu allows you to telnet in and use an intelligent
front end to browse the files on line, and transfer them back using
ftp, tftp, or kermit? Simply telnet info.umd.edu, and login as "info",
then follow the instructions on the screen.)
cwdynm.cwru.edu has the Bible, the Book of Mormon (and other Mormon
texts), and the Koran available via anonymous FTP.
obi.std.com also has a lot of texts; check ~ftp/obi/ls-lR for a list.
The Eden Etext Archive is at http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/etext/ or via FTP
at ftp://ftp.cs.rmit.edu.au/pub/etext/.
And someone else says, "Probably the best available Bible depository and
concordance type program that I've seen on the net is the Online Bible,
available in the doc/bible subdirectory on wuarchive.wustl.edu. This is
freeware and includes several different English translations of the Bible
as well as Greek and Hebrew texts, concordances, etc. I spoke to one of
the developers yesterday, and a major upgrade is coming (in August, I
believe). There are also plans for foreign language Bible editions in
the works."
There is also a huge archive available from Oxford, but most of the
texts here require a physical letter of request be sent to England --
still cheap, but anyway -- if you want the address/catalog, send a
'help' message to archive@vax.ox.ac.uk.
And if you're looking for general electronic information, try telneting
to consultant.micro.umn.edu and logging in as 'gopher'. It is
menu-driven and you can access the library catalogs of many
universities, as well as lots of other neat stuff.
Other sources for etexts include the Online Book Initiative at
obi.std.com (available through Gopher or FTP), and the Internet Wiretap
Gopher server at wiretap.spies.com.
Users of the World Wide Web can find pointers to these and other
collections at http://sunsite.unc.edu/ibic/IBIC-homepage.html and there is
also a page of pointers at http://www.cs.cmu.edu:8001/Web/books.html
which partly overlaps the page above. It's less "official," but does have
some pointers the other page doesn't have.
There is also the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts on the World-Wide Web,
at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/alex-index.html, indexes over 1800 books
and shorter texts by author and title, incorporating texts from Project
Gutenberg, Wiretap, the On-line Book Initiative, the Eris system at Virginia
Tech, the English Server at Carnegie Mellon University, Project Bartlesby,
CCAT, the on-line portion of the Oxford Text Archive, and many others.
[Thanks to John Ockerbloom (ockerbloom@cs.cmu.edu) for updating this info.]
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