Project Gutenberg

Logo

The Project Gutenberg ( PG) is a web-accessible and created by volunteers digital library. On the project website over 42,000 mainly English-language e-books can be (as of 2014), read and download free. One of the partner projects, the Project Gutenberg- DE, which offers primarily German -language literature.

This supported by the American Michael S. Hart Project Gutenberg began in 1971 and is named after the inventor of the modern printing press, Johannes Gutenberg. The project is the world 's oldest digital library, it is created and expanded by volunteers. For this purpose, since the 1970s, copyright-free literary texts are typed, uploaded and proofread manually. Increasingly since the 1990s are also book scanner and OCR softwares are used. Since the mid- 1990s, the texts offered on the Internet are available.

The books are in various data formats available ( ASCII text files, Plucker, Mobipocket, EPUB and HTML files), and can both individually and in larger packages - download - right sizes for CDs or DVDs. Files are offered as HTTP, FTP and peer-to- peer downloads (via magnet links ). In addition to electronic texts, there are also pictures, movies, audio files, and other document types. Some files are under a copyright, in these cases, the authors have given their consent to be included in the project. For proofreading the project is massive support from Distributed Proofreaders.

History

They started the Project Gutenberg by Michael S. Hart, the first document was published on 1 December 1971.

The corpus consists mostly of English-language works, but also works in other languages ​​are added in the PG. In addition to the works of human authors may be retrieved since November 2002, the decoded genome of the Human Genome Project. In addition to written works, there are also read aloud, acoustically recorded books.

All files of the Project Gutenberg principle can be downloaded and redistributed; regarding the redistribution is only the restriction that the unchanged (English unaltered ) Text must have the leader of the Project Gutenberg. Should the further distributed text have been changed, it may not be called Gutenberg text. However, the legal assessment of the legality based on the basis of U.S. law; the Project Gutenberg explicitly points out that copyright law of the country where the user lives, can be decisive.

The project has published more than 42,000 works, including more than 700 German -language books. Much of the published works is by organizing Distributed Proofreaders processed ( proofread ).