Project Gutenberg: e-books in the public domain

I imagine that most of you already know him, but for those who do not, I will comment a little: the Gutenberg Project is one of the biggest projects of collection and distribution of public domain books. It has been in operation since 1971 with the intention of collecting books in the public domain (those that lack copyright because it has expired or because they never had it) and make them available to the largest possible number of users.

They currently make up Project Gutenberg more than 40.000 books, most of which is in English (34.498), but there are also a significant number of publications in Chinese (406), German (932), French (2.144), Italian (359), Spanish (343), Portuguese (539) and various other languages, including Esperanto ( 84).

It is named after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the movable type printing press who, back in 1450, facilitated the publication of "industrial" books. The invention of the printing press allowed an increasing number of people were accessing books that, until then, they had been available to very few and, consequently, a greater diffusion of culture (well, let's not exaggerate, books were still a "luxury item").

Faced with some existing business projects (such as 24Symbols, to give a recent example), taking as reference the idea of facilitate free access to books and the dissemination of culture, and anticipating the existence of widespread access to the network, Michael Hart took the first step towards the creation of Project Gutenberg with the digitization of the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Let's not lose sight of the fact that, in 1971, digitizing was synonymous with spending a good time pounding on the keyboard to transform text into a computer file. The generalization of scanners and OCR greatly facilitated, as you can imagine, the process of expansion and consolidation of the project.

Related article:

Kobo Aura One review

Participating in Project Gutenberg thousands of volunteers who are engaged in tasks of digitization, review and publication of books, with the aim (as I have already said) of making culture available to as many people as possible. In this way, any book that is included in the Gutenberg Project website can be distributed without any type of restriction as long as the project's lead is maintained and the content is not altered in any way.

Initially the books were only available in text files but, with the evolution of digital reading, the most popular digital formats have been introduced: .epub, .html, .pdf or .mobi, among others. In addition to digitized books, there are also audiobooks, images or music, always under the same premise: "free of copyright."

In this way, on the Gutenberg Project website we can practically find all the great classics of literature: Shakespeare, Molière, Plato, Verne, Dickens, Dante, Cervantes, etc. Something extremely useful from an educational point of view; in fact, if a few years ago I had had a reader and a connection to the project it would have saved me many trips to the public library (to discover that El Quijote was on loan).

It has a good search engine and, once you locate the advanced search engine, you can set filters by author, title, language, subject, category, file type, etc. From there, I recommend you move around the web, look for the authors or books that most attract your attention and enjoy.

Obviously, whoever wants it can collaborate on Project Gutenberg in various ways, for example by digitizing, reviewing and correcting books (it is also possible to make a simple donation).

It is not the only project of this type that exists. For example, the Public Library of Science which, as its name suggests, focuses on scientific and medical publications or the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes that allows us to freely access a good number of Spanish and Latin American publications.

More information - 24Symbols: a Spanish project in the world of the ebooks

Source - Gutenberg Project