Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.
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.
He named the project for Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century German printer who propelled the movable type printing press revolution.
He manually entered all of the text until 1989 when image scanners and optical character recognition software improved and became more available, making book scanning more feasible.
[10] Starting in 2004, an improved online catalog made Project Gutenberg content easier to browse, access and hyperlink.
In addition to literature such as novels, poetry, short stories and drama, Project Gutenberg also has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals.
As of April 2016[update], the non-English languages most represented are: French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese.
Besides being copyright-free, the requirement for a Latin (character set) text version of the release had been a criterion of Michael Hart's since the founding of Project Gutenberg, as he believed it was the format most likely to be readable in the extended future.
Also Project Gutenberg has two options for master formats that can be submitted (from which all other files are generated): customized versions of the Text Encoding Initiative standard (since 2005)[17] and reStructuredText (since 2011).
[18] Beginning in 2009, the Project Gutenberg catalog began offering auto-generated alternate file formats, including HTML (when not already provided), EPUB and plucker.
The Project Gutenberg collection is intended to preserve items for the long term, so they cannot be lost by any one localized accident.
[3] Most books in the Project Gutenberg collection are distributed as public domain under United States copyright law.
There are also a few copyrighted texts, such as those of science fiction author Cory Doctorow, that Project Gutenberg distributes with permission.
Under the terms of the agreement, Project Gutenberg eBooks by the three authors will be blocked from Germany until their German copyright expires.
In recent decades, the resulting appearance and the lack of a markup possibility have often been perceived as bland and as a drawback of this format.
[29] Project Gutenberg attempts to address this by making many texts available in HTML, ePub, and PDF versions as well.
Another not-for-profit project, Standard Ebooks, aims to address these issues with its collection of public domain titles that are formatted and styled.
[31] The selection of works (and editions) available has been determined by popularity, ease of scanning, being out of copyright, and other factors; this would be difficult to avoid in any crowd-sourced project.
[32] In March 2004, an initiative was begun by Michael Hart and John S. Guagliardo[33] to provide low-cost intellectual properties.
[40] Gregory B. Newby,[41][42][43][44][45][46] while assistant professor at UNC School of Information and Library Science, and a long-time Project Gutenberg volunteer,[47] in 2001, became the foundation's first CEO,[34][48] later Arctic Region Supercomputing Center Director, later Compute Canada's Chief Technology Officer.
