Gutenberg:News

2006

• December 30, 2006: Project Gutenberg's website is now available in Portuguese. This is the first full version of the documentation in a language other than English. Other versions are welcome.

• October 1, 2006: Another month of the WorldEBookFair. During October 2006, about 1/2 million free eBooks are available. Sponsored by the World eBook Library, Project Gutenberg, and others.

• May 12, 2006: Distributed Proofreaders, book-provider to and part of Project Gutenberg, has become incorporated as the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation, in order to be better able to deal with the cost of running a web application with tens of thousands of users.

• May 4, 2006: 1/3 Million eBooks Free from July 4 Through August 4. Press release: 1/3 of a million books, or 10 times the number found in the average public library, will be available for free downloading via the Internet and World Wide Web beginning July 4, as Project Gutenberg and the World eBook Library act on their dreams of increased world literacy and education.

• March 4, 2006: Which book should every adult read before they die? That is the question the British Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLAC) asked librarians. According to The Guardian, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee received the most votes, followed by the Bible (ca. 150), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1955) by JRR Tolkien, 1984 (1949) by George Orwell, A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens, Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë, Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929, in German as Im Westen nichts Neues) by Erich Maria Remarque, His Dark Materials trilogy (2000) by Phillip Pullman and Birdsong (1993) by Sebastian Faulks.

• February 22, 2006: Distributed Proofreaders published its 8000th ebook at Project Gutenberg: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870. Written by W.E.B. Du Bois, it was the book of his PhD dissertation; in 1895, Du Bois was the first black American to receive a PhD from Harvard.

2005

• December 13, 2005: Robert Sheckley, one of the few authors represented with copyrighted works at Project Gutenberg, died December 9 at age 77 in Poughkeepsie. According to a New York times obituary, Sheckley "is considered one of science fiction's seminal humorists, and a precursor to Douglas Adams"; but "a better comparison might be to Kafka, a fabulist who could never understand why his friends didn't laugh when he read his stories to them". (We don't actually have Adams; but the link is to a free online text adventure game by him.)

• November 01, 2005: Sony CD installs "rootkit". If you stay away from file sharing networks because you fear virus infections, you'll also have to stay away from copy-protected CDs from now on. At least one commercially distributed Sony CD has been found to install a "rootkit" software which should prevent user from making copies of the CD. A naive removal of the "rootkit" files will make the system CD drive unusable. For more details see: The Register or Slashdot.

• October 22, 2005: This month marks the fifth anniversary of Distributed Proofreaders, a website designed to make helping Project Gutenberg easy by breaking up the tedious work of checking our etexts for errors in small, manageable chunks.

• October 2, 2005: Apart from War of the Worlds, three more films will have been based on public domain books at the end of 2005, according to the Based on the Book website: Pride and Prejudice, Dorian Gray (English, Dutch and French), and Oliver Twist (English and French).

• August 31, 2005: Project Gutenberg has all the light classics for your summer reading needs: the works of Frank L. Baum ("Oz"), Edgar Rice Burroughs ("Tarzan"), Victor Appleton ("Tom Swift", remastered in glorious HTML), et cetera. Are there any missing? Please tell us about them.

• July 9, 2005: A grocery store in Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada accidentally sold several copies of the sixth Harry Potter book before the authorised release date. The Canadian publisher, Raincoast Books, obtained an injunction from the Supreme Court of British Columbia prohibiting the purchasers from reading the books in their possession. See the Wikipedia article.

• July 6, 2005: The European Parliament rejects the proposed Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, ending four years of intense debate and lobbying.

• July 4, 2005: Project Gutenberg's 34th Anniversary greetings.

• July 1, 2005: Yes, we have War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. We have an audio eBook, too.

• June 17, 2005: Read our ebooks on Apple's iPod. Recent iPods have an application called Notes that can be used to read with: Daniel Duris has a free conversion service, and Make Magazine explains how it works.

• May 9, 2005: Bicentenary of Friedrich Schiller's death. We have many works by Schiller both in English and in German.

• April 23, 2005: We have Shakespeare in German, French, English and even Finnish. Also check out the works attributed to Shakespeare.

2004

• October 9, 2004: Distributed Proofreaders publishes its 5,000th etext. Read the full press release.

• September 14, 2004: New Top 100 books and authors page.

• July 18, 2004: Full text search added to the Advanced Search page.

• June 21, 2004: Read Michael Hart: Changing the world through e-books, an article by Marie Lebert.

• June 20, 2004: About Us pages updated.

• June 17, 2004: New catalog system with more search options and full unicode support for foreign languages.

• June 16, 2004: Bloomsday Centenary. Yes, we have James Joyce's Ulysses.

• June 14, 2004: Yes, we have Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days in English, in a Junior Edition, in Dutch, as well as the original French.

• April 24, 2004: Many updates to our Audio eBooks pages.

• April 12, 2004: New RSS Feed of newly added or changed eBooks. Updated nightly.

• April 12, 2004: Web site looks dull? Try a new skin.

• April 1, 2004: Project Gutenberg buys Amazon.com.

• File Sharing How-To updated with information about Magnetlinks URLs, now provided via our Online Catalog page. Welcome peer to peer users! Please download Project Gutenberg eBooks, and share them.

• Sheet Music Project pages updated, adding additional scores available for transcription.

• Project Gutenberg is a participant in Yahoo!'s Content Acquisition Program. Thanks to Yahoo! for making this service freely available to Project Gutenberg. Use the Yahoo! search to search the Project Gutenberg eBook collection's metadata (author, title, brief description, keywords).

• PG-EU: Project Gutenberg of the European Union is underway! Visit the under-development proofreading pages for DP-EU (modeled after Distributed Proofreaders) online at dp.rastko.net.

2003

• November 14, 2003: New Web Site. The gutenberg.net domain was moved from promo.net/pg/ to ibiblio.org. This change will allow us to offer new pages and new services. Some of the pages are new, and many are renamed or were not moved. Please use the navigation links on this page, and inform the webmaster if you encounter anomalies or have suggestions.

• October 2003: Project Gutenberg's 10,000th ebook is now online: The Magna Carta. Thanks to everyone who has made this milestone possible!

• September 2003: Visit Radio Gutenberg to hear computer-generated audio of some of Project Gutenberg's public domain eBooks.

• August 2003: Support the Public Domain. The vast majority of Project Gutenberg's content is in the public domain in the United States. Project Gutenberg would like you to consider supporting efforts to restore balance to copyright laws by expanding the public domain. For more information about these efforts, visit http://eldred.cc.