Project Gutenberg is the name of a website that contains tens of thousands of free eBooks. Legal and well, because these are books that belong to the public domain. For example because the copyright has expired. We explain what you can do with this treasure trove of information.
Before the 15th century, making a book was such a labor-intensive affair that each title was actually considered an exclusive work of art. Only after the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg could mass production begin.
Hence the name of the distribution archive, Project Gutenberg, which now has more than 59,000 books in the public domain downloaded. When exactly is that the case? Copyright applies throughout the author’s life and for a specified period after his or her death. In Europe and North America, a book only becomes public domain 70 years after the author’s death. In this archive you will not find recent works, but an incredible collection of historical works.
The project depends on an army of volunteers scanning these books and converting them into text via ocr. The design of this archive is quite old-fashioned, but everything on the site is functional – and most importantly.
File formats
The front page of Project Gutenberg contains a link to the most downloaded books on this platform and to works in various languages. Of course you have to enter the title or author in the search engine. With each result you see how many people have already downloaded this work. Gutenberg also hosts audio versions of the books. A logo next to the title shows whether it is a reading book or an audiobook.
You can download different versions of each book. You can read the HTML version via the browser, but you can also download ePub and Kindle files. There is even a qr code to quickly download the book to your smartphone. Meanwhile, Gutenberg has added a useful integration with Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive. This allows you to send the work to your favorite cloud storage service.
Other tricks
A few more tricks that come in handy in Project Gutenberg. The project makes it possible to download the complete works of an author in one go. If you want, you can bring in all the books by William Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Winston Churchill, for example. When such a collection is updated later, you can receive an update via RSS, provided you have subscribed to the RSS feed.
Project Gutenberg also offers email subscriptions after which you will be notified of new submissions. We do not recommend this, unless you are happy with 20 emails a day.
After all, a fascinating phenomenon are the vintage illustrations that you will find here. You can find it in Project Gutenberg via a detour in Google. In the Google search box, type site: gutenberg.org followed by a space and a keyword and click Pictures. For example site: gutenberg.org whale. The result is the images of whales included in the original books as illustrations or photos. Happy reading!