My location is Asia, rural, and I discovered these things. I have no real friends doing it right now? Is this just new?
Project Gutenberg is a collaborative project to make texts freely and widely available, to anyone in the world who cares to read them https://www.gutenberg.org/about/. The name comes from Johannes Gutenberg, noted for his invention of the moveable-type printing press, which dramatically reduced the cost of making books and made access to books a lot more feasible for the working class.
Project Gutenberg has a lot of old books because many countries have laws that restrict the free distribution of original work for a period of time after the work is initially published. These are called copyright laws because they govern who has the right to copy a work of art. In the US (and in other places, but I’m most familiar with US law so I’ll use it as an example), copyright protections eventually expire and the work enters the public domain, meaning that it no longer has copyright protections i.e. anyone may freely copy the work, including Project Gutenberg. That’s why they are able to make so many older books available for download.
EPUB is a file format that makes text files a little bit nicer to read than just plain text, especially if you’re using an ereader, so Project Gutenberg will often provide the text in an EPUB format as well as in plain text.
I can remember project Gutenberg as far back as 2013/12-ish when I had my first kindle, so it’s not just new. And that’s only when I became aware of it.
Project Gutenberg (a reference to the inventor of the printing press) specifically digitizes old books (this year published before 1931) because they are in the public domain and will not cause problems for the project to distribute. They are volunteer run and you can help by making sure the pages that were run through OCR are correct.
EPUB is a file format that is intended for digital readers. The main benefit (over PDF) is that it is reflowable, allowing the digital reader to change display format if you need something like larger text or a specific font while still “keeping your spot” in the document.
I’m interested to try it. Too bad, I can’t see an online community. Maybe this is just new, but I’ve heard of kindle long ago already.
deleted by creator
To add a little context, Standard Ebooks takes a subset of books from the Gutenberg Project and edits them into a more attractive, modernized standard. They add covers, fix typos and OCR mistakes. The same basic text, but with a slightly higher format quality.
No, it’s been around for awhile. In US law, any book over 95 years old is considered public property, and can be shared for free. So, there’s volunteers that take old books and scan them, then put the digital versions online for everybody.
If you’d like to make digital copies of things from your native language/culture and add them to the collection, I imagine that’d probably be fine. I’m not part of the project though, so I don’t know the details of how these are submitted/who you need to talk to/etc.
There are many downloads per month or per year though.
Yes, there probably are. Is that important?
You may also look into library networks. I have no idea whether it’s available where you are, but I started heavily using my local library’s ebooks online starting over the pandemic. I’ve read dozens of free ebooks without ever actually going there. That being said, every place is different and I believe library access is fairly local - you may want to see if there is such a thing where you are
Also, if you want to be a good citizen and not block others from checking out ebooks, I hear there are things you can do. Things like using Calibre+obok (or DeDRM, depending on device) to rip them from the reader device and remove the DRM. Then you can return the ebook to the library so others can use it, while being able to read it at your leisure.
I wouldn’t know, of course, but it seems like the polite thing to do.
I know there is a question mark at the end, but this is not an intelligible question.
I understand it perfectly, so maybe you’re just upholding your username.
Yeah maybe lol!
“What are old books” is not an intelligible question.
Project Gutenberg is old. I ran a Gutenberg mirror 35ish years ago.
not new, been around for a looooong time , I have a few dozen books from them on my Calibre library, some fascinating stuff.
I think project Gutenberg has been around for a while. Internet archive is good too
