What Is The Gutenberg Project?
Project Gutenberg is an initiative to provide free electronic copies of literary texts. It started in the 1970s and moved onto the World Wide Web in the 1990s. Over 19,000 ebooks are now available through Project Gutenberg and its website boasts more than 2 million downloads per month. Copyright restrictions are one of the great constraints facing Project Gutenberg. As a result, it provides very few modern texts but most of the work of famous authors from the pre-modern age is readily available. Although English language texts predominate in the selection of available ebooks, some works in other languages, such as French, German, and even Latin, are provided too. Project Gutenberg depends on volunteers for the work it does. Thousands worldwide collaborate to create and check the accuracy of texts, and the website boasts an innovative online proofreading facility which allows volunteers, working remotely, to compare the scanned image of a book page to the electronic text being created f
