Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

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JJSeiko about 3 hours ago 110 commentsRead Article on gutenberg.org

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Discussion (110 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

JSeiko•about 3 hours ago

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/

jefurii•about 1 hour ago

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!

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

sadly HN doesn't have a "heart" emoji I could use :D

Wistar•about 1 hour ago

♡

Falimonda•about 3 hours ago

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!

JSeiko•about 3 hours ago

good feedback thanks! Doing an iteration on the homepage design is actually pretty high on the priority list. will keep your feedback in mind!

freedomben•24 minutes ago

I can't say for project Gutenberg specifically, but in general a huge issue I see is OCR errors. What do you all do to address OCR?

lapetitejort•20 minutes ago

I uploaded a PDF to archive.org that auto-OCRs with plenty of mistakes. I have found no way of updating the entire stack of documents produced. I wonder if Project Gutenberg is similar

xrd•about 2 hours ago

Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.

excitednumber•about 2 hours ago

Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet

ExtremisAndy•about 2 hours ago

Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

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)

smallnix•about 2 hours ago

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

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

I've messaged the guy who's best suited to fixing this. He'll be on it this weekend

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

will open an "Issue" for it

shuvrojit•about 2 hours ago

Great Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

https://github.com/gutenbergtools

autocat3 and gutenbergsite are repos responsible for generating gutenberg.org

samcollins•about 3 hours ago

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?)

jzs•about 2 hours ago

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.

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

Donations are always appreciated ;)

samcollins•about 2 hours ago

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...

kay_o•about 3 hours ago

Check out https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html

Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.

gluejar•about 1 hour ago

if what you want is all the text, please use the tarball or data files at https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/feeds

JSeiko•about 3 hours ago

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.

ancientcatz•about 2 hours ago

OPDS?

gluejar•about 2 hours ago

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

TimorousBestie•about 1 hour ago

Wanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

it's not my day job. PG is open-source. I'm "just" a contributor

TimorousBestie•about 1 hour ago

Oh, right. That makes sense.

BiraIgnacio•about 2 hours ago

Thanks so much for the work you and your team do!

throw0101c•about 2 hours ago

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

gluejar•about 1 hour ago

wikipedians, please help update this article.

mcdonje•about 1 hour ago

Prescient

fmajid•29 minutes ago

Worth mentioning the Project Gutenberg ZIMs. You can download the entire ENglish Gutenberg corpus for about 60GB (English Wikipedia ZIM complete with images is ~120GB):

https://ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html

Someone1234•about 2 hours ago

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).

horsawlarway•about 2 hours ago

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.

robin_reala•6 minutes ago

To be precise, the vast majority of SE is from Gutenberg, but we also source from Faded Page, Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource and occasionally do our own transcriptions.

everybodyknows•about 1 hour ago

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 ...

svat•about 1 hour ago

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-...

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

standardebooks.org is great!

WillAdams•about 1 hour ago

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.

dessimus•13 minutes ago

>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

Why is it 'plundering' for B&N to print physical books, transport them to their brick-and-mortar stores to sell? There are real costs associated to doing so. It would not have zero cost for me to print and bind a copy myself at home.

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

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.

WillAdams•38 minutes ago

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).

GaryBluto•about 2 hours ago

Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

probably true. Maybe an true open-source eReader should exist.

WillAdams•36 minutes ago

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)

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

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.

daveoc64•about 1 hour ago

You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers - even the Kindle supports it.

cstever•about 2 hours ago

No money for them.

gluejar•about 1 hour ago

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.

ssgodderidge•about 1 hour ago

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

sovietswag•25 minutes ago

Haha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

bot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D

JKCalhoun•about 2 hours ago

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.)

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

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!

JLO64•about 2 hours ago

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.

everybodyknows•about 1 hour ago

You can contribute to Standard Ebooks by finding OCR errors, then pushing your fixes to https://github.com/standardebooks

dempedempe•about 2 hours ago

Source can be anything with the original text, but, more often than not, ends up being PG.

RattlesnakeJake•about 2 hours ago

Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.

skrtskrt•about 2 hours ago

The common issue with PDFs is that e-readers generally have terrible support for them.

jiffygist•about 2 hours ago

I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.

gluejar•about 2 hours ago

PDF coming this year.

graemep•about 2 hours ago

I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.

the_af•about 2 hours ago

I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

it's also very "accessible" - good for assistive technologies and people with "ou-of-the-ordinary" requirements

ndr42•about 2 hours ago

The project was geo-blocked in Germany for a long time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29024039

debo_•17 minutes ago

Project Gesperrtberg

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

very glad this has been resolved (I'm from Germany myself)

RattlesnakeJake•about 2 hours ago

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.

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

That's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable

RattlesnakeJake•about 2 hours ago

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!

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

"you guys seem to have already fixed it" - that's what we like to hear :)

graemep•about 2 hours ago

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.

kreyenborgi•about 1 hour ago

Gutenberg is awesome. There is also

https://www.fadedpage.com/ from Canada I think

https://runeberg.org/ from Sweden

smilespray•about 1 hour ago

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!

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

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 ...

smilespray•26 minutes ago

That is doable. Most of my work was regexp and repetitive stuff. And the typograhpy stuff is achievable with the current state of the art models. Not that I remember what I did, it was 30 years ago.

JSeiko•16 minutes ago

Interesting!

seizethecheese•about 2 hours ago

A big pet peeve of mine with Project Gutenberg was the lack of mobile styling. Looks like it’s been fixed! Awesome.

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

good to hear - that was a lot of work!

jwpapi•30 minutes ago

Please give me some book recommendations :)

JSeiko•17 minutes ago

Flatland: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=flatland

I've heard good things. Also - Sherlock Holmes :)

klondike_klive•20 minutes ago

Not a recommendation per se but I used to use Amphetype on Gutenberg texts to practise touch-typing. There's something about writing out a book that hits differently to reading it. You skip less, odd parts stick with you. I think the last one I tried was The Island of Dr Moreau.

jwpapi•11 minutes ago

Ulnar Nerve Entrapement :/

oidar•about 1 hour ago

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?

gluejar•about 1 hour ago

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

aronhegedus•about 2 hours ago

Recently downloaded Moby Dick from here:) very easy to use

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

Moby Dick is consistently one of the Top Downloads

mowmiatlas•about 2 hours ago

Made an app that allows reading PG books as audiobooks on iPhone https://loudreader.io/

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

that's cool!

autoexec•about 1 hour ago

I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!

bryankaplan•about 1 hour ago

I find it interesting that the context of this comments page apparently overrides the normal definition of “PG” on HN.

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

personally I'm a fan of the other "PG" as well.

monegator•42 minutes ago

I keep getting PR_CONNECT_RESET_ERROR

JSeiko•10 minutes ago

just heard back that the server provider has been doing a security update. Maybe you were one of the users that got unlucky as a result... maybe try later if still interested

JSeiko•39 minutes ago

I've reported it.

AndrewStephens•about 1 hour ago

PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

the amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else is possibly the coolest aspect of PG imo

carlosjobim•about 2 hours ago

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.

WillAdams•about 1 hour ago

I used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html

kgwxd•about 1 hour ago

How did "Concrete Construction: Methods and Costs" come to be the #1 download?

JSeiko•about 1 hour ago

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.

taubek•about 3 hours ago

Thank you for reminding me about this project. Didn’t visit it in a long time.

solarity_studio•about 2 hours ago

Awesome

brcmthrowaway•about 2 hours ago

I can't read anymore due to fear of not being productive with AI

JSeiko•about 2 hours ago

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

zozbot234•39 minutes ago

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.

JSeiko•29 minutes ago

so maybe Karpathy has a point that LLM-assisted reading should be a thing. Would be cool if that worked on E-Reader screens as well. Maybe when the browsers on E-Readers become good enough ...