For copyright, see copy. For uploads and compliance checks, see upload. We have published the Human Genome. We have published pictures of the prehistoric cave painting from the south of France. Now, however, we only publish literary works that were previously published.
The collection development policy has details. Project Gutenberg, as such, does not choose books to publish. There is no central list of works that volunteers are asked to work on. Individual volunteers choose and produce eBooks from printed books according to their own tastes and values, and the availability of a suitable printed book for digitization. Whatever languages we can! As above, this is decided by what languages our volunteers choose to work with. At the moment, we have a predominance of English language novels because that is what most people have chosen to work on.
Project Gutenberg can publish only books that are in the public domain in the United States. Current bestsellers have not yet entered the public domain. Project Gutenberg supports and publishes many open formats, but, yes, we do want to have a plain text version of everything possible. Today, plain text can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world.
This has been so for decades, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. The point of putting works in the PG library is that they are copied to many, many public sites and individual computers all over. No single disaster can destroy them; no single government can suppress them.
The PG library is so valuable, yet free and easily portable, that even if every current PG volunteer vanished overnight, people around the world would copy and preserve any item that is legal for them to have in their country.
Where did Project Gutenberg come from? No piece of paper, optical disk, or hard drive can be expected to survive indefinitely—the only way to safeguard the transmission of the written word to future generations is through massively redundant copying, with copies stored in as many different locations as possible. It helps make sure that the effort that Hart and PG volunteers put into their work is not lost.
Reflect on how different this approach is from the norm today. Other ebook publishers release their books in formats that are designed to discourage copying, and that can be read on hardware from only one vendor, tied to one specific device or reader. Project Gutenberg produces new, electronic editions of public domain works.
With only a few exceptions for some notable editions, it does not just create electronic copies of print books. In fact, the words in a Gutenberg text might not perfectly reflect any particular printed book. This is an important distinction. It emphasizes the actual creative work more than any particular printed text and reminds us that literature is about words, not paper.
Project Gutenberg was founded to distribute copyright-free eBooks free of charge. Currently, it offers more than 36, eBooks for download in variety of formats. The project is named after Johannes Gutenberg, the 15th century inventor of the printing press, which made possible a revolution in book creation and distribution.
Project Gutenberg is in many ways one of the internet pioneers of cultural freedom. Hence open source is no longer considered solely the domain of radicals but also that of big business. While there are obvious differences, Project Gutenberg is cut from similar, if not the same, cloth to other projects that strive for intellectual and cultural freedom; the GNU project and Creative Commons, for example.
It is one of those projects, like Wikipedia, that is almost inconceivable without the existence of a network like the internet though obviously Project Gutenberg preceded the internet proper.
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