Project Gutenberg Archives

Screen capture of Project Gutenberg homepage 3/15/2023

Do you remember when you first discovered the internet? For me, it wasn’t until around 1995, the first time I bought a computer with a modem. At that time, we had Freenet, which was text based. Green text on a black screen. Yet it was amazing. Libraries of information, and all of it for free. There was a primitive search engine called Yahoo. And there was Project Gutenberg. One could access thousands of books online–for free!

At that time, Project Gutenberg was about twenty-five years old. It was the brainchild of a University of Illinois student, Michael Hart, who in 1971 uploaded a transcribed copy of the Declaration of Independence onto what was then the ARPANET in its infancy, making it freely available to anyone who had access to that network. It was his way of saying “thank you” for the free computer access he enjoyed at a time when this was a precious commodity. In so doing, Hart became inventor of the e-book.

Other freely available texts followed in what he named “Project Gutenberg” for Johannes Gutenberg, the printer who invented movable type, making the printing revolution possible. Hart believed one day the public would have wide access to computer networks, and he envisioned making books and other texts in the public domain available at no cost to anyone. His goal was to make 10,000 e-books available by the year 2000.

By 1995, Project Gutenberg had moved to Illinois Benedictine College. Hart had a number of volunteers working with him. Until 1989, text was manually digitized. Optical scanners sped up the process, with volunteers enlisted to proofread scanned text for accuracy against the original. In 1994, Pietro Di Miceli took on developing the Project Gutenberg website, which won many awards for design in its early years. This was at the time when Mosaic became a widely available internet browser and we moved from text to graphical user interfaces.

By 2003, a DVD was released with 10,000 items from Project Gutenberg, most of the collection at that time, realizing Hart’s goal within three years of his original target. Today, Project Gutenberg is hosted at the University of North Carolina and offers more than 60,000 items in its collection. It continues to be a volunteer driven project, with volunteers selecting books to digitize. Distributed Proofreaders allows volunteers to collaborate on digitizing books, both lightening the load and speeding the process.

If you have not used Project Gutenberg, the homepage serves to help one navigate the site. You can search and browse by author, title, subject, language, type, popularity, and more. There are Bookshelves of related e-books by topic. You can look up the most downloaded titles (tops is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet). You can look up the recently added works. There is a section on Tablets, Phones and eReader How-tos. There are options to download books as e-pubs, in Kindle formats, and in other formats.

And all of this is still free. While much enhanced since my first visits in 1995, it still reflects the values and vision of the early internet, which so many thought a wondrous place. At the page, 50 years of e-Books: 1971-2021, there is this statement:

Everyone should have free, unlimited access to the world’s literature. Whenever they want, with a variety of formatting and delivery choices. “Literature,” said Hart, “should be as free as the air we breathe.”

At a time when some state and individual actors are trying to limit access to particular texts, it seems this work is more important than ever, even if it is focused on books in the public domain. These books also have “dangerous ideas” — ones that speak to our basic human rights and the liberties that we can never take for granted. Hart’s first upload, The Declaration of Independence, was one of those.

Some books I got for free–look for reviews here!

It is only shameless to borrow ideas if you do not give credit. I came across this idea the other day on the blog site of another book blog, Fiction Book Review. Citra posted fifteen ideas for non-book review blogs. There were several ideas I really liked so you might see my own take on these in coming weeks.

So here are some quick and easy ways to save money on books:

Of course the library is the most economical option of all. You don’t even have to think about storing the book after you’ve read it.
There are a huge number of books available via Kindle, Nook, Google, and other sources like Project Gutenberg and the Christian Classics Ethereal Library that are free because they are in the public domain. There are also some free new releases–although I won’t vouch for the quality of those! Amazon Prime members get to select one free new release for their Kindle reader each month.
Borrow (and return!) books from friends. Most friends are glad to see their books get a second reading and if you return them (unless they explicitly give the book to you), you are likely to be able to borrow more.
Hang out with people who give away books. I’m one of those and I am good friends with others who do the same. Recently, I was at meetings where a speaker (and friend) was giving away books on race and ethnicity. I picked up two after waiting for others to grab them!
Enter book giveaways. BookRiot and Goodreads are two sites I know who routinely give books away.
Review books. If you are an established reviewer (with a blog or other review platform), you can request books for review, sometimes in print and often via e-galleys on Netgalley and Edelweiss. You must be prepared to read them in short order and write a review and usually post it not only on your blog but on commercial sites like Amazon.

All these are in the category of free. Sometimes, you may need to pay a little to acquire books you want, particularly if they are recent releases.

Friends of the Library book sales. Often books are for sale for $.50 or less, and many times at the end of the sales you can buy as many as you can stuff in a bag for $5 (or whatever ridiculously low price they set). And the money supports the library. Only danger is buying books you’ll never read in large quantities.
Thrifty Christian Reader is a site that posts the latest deals on e-books both from a Christian perspective, and other worthwhile literature. Recently I learned of a sale of University of Chicago e-books through them.
Of course, used book stores are often a great place for deals. Unless it is a rare book or a book in high current demand, you should be able to buy the book for half price or less. Many have bargain bins and often I’ve made great finds there. One man’s trash…
I hate paying full price for a book. Often at places like Barnes and Noble, you can find books on sale, and combine sales prices with coupons and membership discounts. Last year, I bought Thomas Piketty’s Capital at under half price new.
Of course there are various online booksellers from Amazon (you can find them) to ABE Books and Half.com (now under eBay). Many of these connect buyers with third-party sellers, often selling out of print books at reasonable prices.
Develop a relationship with a bookseller who stands for things you stand for. I admire the work of Byron Borger and Hearts and Minds Books. He offers discounts on featured books, though not usually as deep as the big booksellers. I’ve bought some of these and always have been happy with the books and the speedy shipping.

This last won’t save you a ton, but what you spend will not only allow you to acquire books you want but to invest in booksellers you believe in.

Perhaps the real issue is that when you get good at this, you are tempted to acquire (hoard) far more than you can read. But that is for another post!