The Essentials

Project Gutenberg is an electronic library dating back to the earliest days of the Internet. I remember it from when I first got on the Internet, back in the mid-1990s, but reading Wikipedia, it turns out it’s much older than that.

For decades, all of their books were available as plain text or one or two other formats (such as RTF), but now, a growing section of them are available in ebook formats such as ePub. That’s a point worth emphasizing: This library of books predates electronic books!

Almost all of the books on Project Gutenberg are in the public domain (at least in the United States), most because their copyright has lapsed. This makes them free to download, to translate, to convert into other formats, and indeed to do anything with. A few are under copyright, but entered under a free license such as one of the Creative Commons licenses.

This post is dedicated to Michael S. Hart, the late founder of Project Gutenberg.