Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg.
We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!).
If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/
Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there.
However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
> All Project Gutenberg metadata are available digitally in the XML/RDF format. This is updated daily (other than the legacy format mentioned below). Please use one of these files as input to a database or other tools you may be developing, instead of crawling or roboting the website.
When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!
While PG has probably gotten a lot of use and growth with the growth/maintreaming of the Internet since the 1990s, (TIL) it started back in 1971:
> Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. 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. […]
Nice to see so much appreciation for what we do. (I'm the new-ish executive director.) Any wikipedians reading this, the article about PG is... aging. Last I looked, it said we offered Plucker files. @Jseiko has done some nice work.
I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).
e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox).
FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores --- Amazon apparently has a similar setup for the Kindle Store:
the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.
It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it.
If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).
Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others.
> 23644 downloads in the last 30 days.
I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot?
Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.)
I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)
I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.
My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…
I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.
(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)
As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
We're supporting EPUB3 for the vast majority of books! At the same time we also have a "Plain Text" version for each as in a sense it's the most robust. PdFs are in the works!
As a Kindle user, I still miss the old version of the site. The new one looks great on normal desktop, but the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser.
I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work.
Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right.
Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now.
that's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...
I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?
Nowadays we depend on scans from Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and other sources. Some scans are better than others. Bear in mind that our illustrations need to be in the public domain and usually from the same edition as the text. https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html
Every day you'll get much more than you're bargaining for, right into your feed or inbox. Easy download books you're interested in and put them on your Kindle.
good question. first though - maybe some bot has downloaded it often for whatever reasons and our systems didn't detect it as bot traffic. just a guess.
I've found that the larger open-weight AI models do a great job of explaining the old non-fiction content on PG, particularly magazine articles which are a good size for the AI to handle. It breaks down the long wall-of-text paragraphs for you and explains all the historically relevant background that would've been assumed to be known back in the day.
If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present day it will also do that very nicely, highlighting the places where the text shows old-fashioned viewpoints that would be sharply criticized today.
Hi! I'm one of the programmers at Gutenberg. We've been improving the site a lot over the past few months (and more is coming!). If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again: https://www.gutenberg.org/
The book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement.
Keep up the good work!
good feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!
Very cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links?
(I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)
brother ... are we really THAT stupid now?
Check out https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html
Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.
not yet, but that's not a bad idea imo. Dealing with Ai crawler traffic is definitely a challenge if that's what you were referring to.
OPDS?
OPDS 2.0 coming RSN. email us if you want to test. OPDS 0.x is currently available (not recommended) by adding .opds to the end of a url
Now i'm not associated with gutenberg in any form, but they do have a page for offline consumption:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html
Perhaps you can find the information you are looking for there.
However if you plan on scraping or otherwise hitting them with a ton of traffic, consider at least to donate a good amount for the traffic you cause them. It ain't free after all.
Donations are always appreciated ;)
Thanks for the answers! Found it:
> All Project Gutenberg metadata are available digitally in the XML/RDF format. This is updated daily (other than the legacy format mentioned below). Please use one of these files as input to a database or other tools you may be developing, instead of crawling or roboting the website.
And strongly consider a donation! (My addition)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html#the-p...
if what you want is all the text, please use the tarball or data files at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/feeds
Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.
Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!
Thanks! We're currently working on a design update of the page of any specific book. Should be online soon (next 1-2 weeks or so)
Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet
Great Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.
https://github.com/gutenbergtools
autocat3 and gutenbergsite are repos responsible for generating gutenberg.org
There's a minor bug with chrome in android where the menu will not close when you tap outside the menu or on the menu link/button
will open an "Issue" for it
I've messaged the guy who's best suited to fixing this. He'll be on it this weekend
Thanks so much for the work you and your team do!
Wanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!
it's not my day job. PG is open-source. I'm "just" a contributor
Oh, right. That makes sense.
When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!
sadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D
♡
While PG has probably gotten a lot of use and growth with the growth/maintreaming of the Internet since the 1990s, (TIL) it started back in 1971:
> Michael S. Hart began Project Gutenberg in 1971 with the digitization of the United States Declaration of Independence.[5] Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer in the university's Materials Research Lab. […] This computer was one of the 15 nodes on ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet. 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. […]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gutenberg
wikipedians, please help update this article.
Prescient
Nice to see so much appreciation for what we do. (I'm the new-ish executive director.) Any wikipedians reading this, the article about PG is... aging. Last I looked, it said we offered Plucker files. @Jseiko has done some nice work.
I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).
I've heard that the newest Kobo e-readers have a browser that you could use to go to gutenberg.org and directly download files.
but yes, generally I agree with your point. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.
Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.
probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.
Arguably
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=biz.bookdesign...
should be opensource --- it does at least work to support Project Librivox (or at least that's my understanding)
I've used https://standardebooks.org/ to pull nicely formatted Project Gutenberg books on any e-reader that supports a browser (in my case, Boox).
Technically, I can also just directly pull the epub from Project Gutenberg, but sometimes the formatting leaves a lot to be desired.
Once you get an e-reader that runs a semi-capable OS (ex - stock android, even an older version), it's hard to go back to something like a kindle.
standardebooks.org is great!
HTML editions from the two sites contrast interestingly:
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1513/pg1513-images.html
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...
Each has its particular advantages relative to the other ...
Curious, what are the advantages you see in each relative to the other?
Also one should probably compare the former to the single-page version on standardebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/romeo-...
No money for them.
Used to be one could sort of get that with the Project Librivox:
https://librivox.org/
e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox).
FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores --- Amazon apparently has a similar setup for the Kindle Store:
https://www.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Books-Kindle-Store/s?k=...
Rather a shame that PG didn't monetize by putting their books up there pre-emptively.
the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.
It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it.
If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).
You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers - even the Kindle supports it.
Looks like the top downloaded book yesterday[0] was Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs by Gillette and Hill.[1] Beat out Moby Dick, Count of Monte Cristo, Frankenstien, Romeo and Juliet, and others.
> 23644 downloads in the last 30 days.
I wonder if this is bot behavior? 23k downloads feels like a lot?
[0] https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top [1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24855
bot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D
Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.)
I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)
I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.
My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…
I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.
(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)
I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.
Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.
As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
Source can be anything with the original text, but, more often than not, ends up being PG.
You can contribute to Standard Ebooks by finding OCR errors, then pushing your fixes to https://github.com/standardebooks
I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.
We're supporting EPUB3 for the vast majority of books! At the same time we also have a "Plain Text" version for each as in a sense it's the most robust. PdFs are in the works!
I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.
it's also very "accessible" - good for assistive technologies and people with "ou-of-the-ordinary" requirements
PDF coming this year.
The common issue with PDFs is that e-readers generally have terrible support for them.
The project was geo-blocked in Germany for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039
very glad this has been resolved (I'm from Germany myself)
Gutenberg is awesome. There is also
https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think
https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden
As a Kindle user, I still miss the old version of the site. The new one looks great on normal desktop, but the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser.
That's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable
And now it's time to put my foot in my mouth. I haven't used it in a while because it was frustrating, but you guys seem to have already fixed it :)
The previous version of the site had two major flaws:
1. The search bar had been removed from the top of the page, and hidden behind a "Click here to search" (or similar) link partway down the page
2. Once you opened that page, the coloring of the site was so washed out on e-ink that the text input was hard to find.
Thanks for fixing it!
"you guys seem to have already fixed it" - that's what we like to hear :)
Is that a Kindle issue?
You can download books in most browsers. I know Amazon have done things to make life difficult for other stores in the past.
I remember printing out project Gutenberg books in the mid-90s, four regular pages to an A4 page, double-sided on my inkjet. I had a background in typography, so I made it work.
Any yes, the text needed a lot of processing to make it right.
Now, in my early fifties and with declining eyesight, that's out of reach now.
Thanks for sticking with the project!
that's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...
A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.
good to hear - that was a lot of work!
I keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR
I've reported it.
I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!
I'm slightly curious how PG handles heavily illustrated books. I've downloaded some years ago, and the quality of the illustrations was always pretty poor. Has it been improved lately? What's the QA like for illustrations?
Nowadays we depend on scans from Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and other sources. Some scans are better than others. Bear in mind that our illustrations need to be in the public domain and usually from the same edition as the text. https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html
Made an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/
that's cool!
I find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.
:D
personally I'm a fan of the other "PG" as well.
PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.
the amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else is possibly the coolest aspect of PG imo
Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use
Moby Dick is consistently one of the Top Downloads
Their feeds of new books is a goldmine:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/feeds.html
Every day you'll get much more than you're bargaining for, right into your feed or inbox. Easy download books you're interested in and put them on your Kindle.
I used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html
How did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?
good question. first though - maybe some bot has downloaded it often for whatever reasons and our systems didn't detect it as bot traffic. just a guess.
Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.
Awesome
I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI
maybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438
could be a trick to ease that fear :D
I've found that the larger open-weight AI models do a great job of explaining the old non-fiction content on PG, particularly magazine articles which are a good size for the AI to handle. It breaks down the long wall-of-text paragraphs for you and explains all the historically relevant background that would've been assumed to be known back in the day.
If you ask it to assess the relevance of the text in the present day it will also do that very nicely, highlighting the places where the text shows old-fashioned viewpoints that would be sharply criticized today.