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Have you considered having a detailed version history for each book (etext)? The process of submitting fixes to typos etc in books involves sending an email (https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html) and although the last time I did this (2011) the fixes did get applied reasonably quickly (couple of days), it all felt a bit opaque. The version history could also include the project (usually PGDP correct?) the etext originated from; that way one would be able to compare against the actual page scans.

I have very mixed feelings about Standard Ebooks and would much prefer being able to use Project Gutenberg directly, but one good thing Standard Ebooks does is that every book has an associated git repository (on GitHub), so it's (in principle) possible to see a history of fixes to the text over time.

Huh that's interesting: 4.5 seconds for the TCP handshake and an additional 9.2 seconds for the TLS handshake. Is this some kind of captcha, since most bots would disconnect before that, so if you complete it once then it knows you're good? (Until the bots catch on of course, but so long as it works it's relatively unintrusive and not discriminatory against uncommon client software (that is, non-Chrome/ium).) The rest of the requests were lightning fast

When I thought about Project Gutenberg I remembered that original brutalist non-design. The current site has been very tastefully updated but looks like it's still very accessible if you turn styles off. Great job!

The book list elements on front page render as both horizontally and vertically scrollable divs on mobile - seems like an opportunity for improvement.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for the free work! Project Gutenberg is nice to have :).

On the site I noticed the library boxes have roughly a single extra line causing a scrollbar to appear and the last line to be chopped off https://i.imgur.com/PQ8T0qc.png is there an issues/bug portal to properly submit these kinds of things?

Thank you for your work. This site is an international treasure.

Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet

Oh, my! This does look nice. Thank you for your hard work!

I can't say for project Gutenberg specifically, but in general a huge issue I see is OCR errors. What do you all do to address OCR?

There's a minor bug with chrome in android where the menu will not close when you tap outside the menu or on the menu link/button

Great Work. Thank you. I'm also a programmer. If you are ever short on help, let me know. I would love to contribute.

Very cool! Do you have a recommended way for an agent to see an index of the books and epub links?

(I can’t quite tell if that’s an egregious abuse of the site or you’re perfectly fine to share without human eye balls hitting your www?)

Wanna let you know you’re doing great work and you have my dream job, thanks to the team for everything!

[dead]

Thanks so much for the work you and your team do!

"Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Michael Hart was given an operator’s account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois."

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

wikipedians, please help update this article.

Prescient

I've used https://standardebooks.org/ to pull nicely formatted Project Gutenberg books on any e-reader that supports a browser (in my case, Boox).

Technically, I can also just directly pull the epub from Project Gutenberg, but sometimes the formatting leaves a lot to be desired.

Once you get an e-reader that runs a semi-capable OS (ex - stock android, even an older version), it's hard to go back to something like a kindle.

Used to be one could sort of get that with the Project Librivox:

https://librivox.org/

e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox).

FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores --- Amazon apparently has a similar setup for the Kindle Store:

https://www.amazon.com/Public-Domain-Books-Kindle-Store/s?k=...

Rather a shame that PG didn't monetize by putting their books up there pre-emptively.

Most of them offer their own paid storefronts and have a perverse incentive not to offer a large area full of free books.

I've heard that the newest Kobo e-readers have a browser that you could use to go to gutenberg.org and directly download files.

but yes, generally I agree with your point. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.

You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers - even the Kindle supports it.

No money for them.

We're supporting EPUB3 for the vast majority of books! At the same time we also have a "Plain Text" version for each as in a sense it's the most robust. PdFs are in the works!

As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.

Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.

I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.

The common issue with PDFs is that e-readers generally have terrible support for them.

PDF coming this year.

I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.

I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.

Haha well there is an exciting movie about concrete coming out, “The History of Concrete” by John Wilson. Surely the superfans are studying up

bot traffic would be my guess too. I doubt there was a sudden global spike in interest in "Concrete Construction Methods" :D

Project Gesperrtberg

very glad this has been resolved (I'm from Germany myself)

That's interesting. What about the new design prevents you from doing it? Genuinely asking here. We may fix it if it's actionable

Is that a Kindle issue?

You can download books in most browsers. I know Amazon have done things to make life difficult for other stores in the past.

that's cool! one of my "pet-ideas" is actually to make an AI-agent that does all that typographical work for any PG book to make it nicely printable without any manual labor whatsoever. Maybe that's doable now ...

good to hear - that was a lot of work!

that's cool!

Moby Dick is consistently one of the Top Downloads

Nowadays we depend on scans from Internet Archive, Hathitrust, and other sources. Some scans are better than others. Bear in mind that our illustrations need to be in the public domain and usually from the same edition as the text. https://www.gutenberg.org/help/errata.html

:D

the amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else is possibly the coolest aspect of PG imo

Flatland: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=flatland

I've heard good things. Also - Sherlock Holmes :)

Not a recommendation per se but I used to use Amphetype on Gutenberg texts to practise touch-typing. There's something about writing out a book that hits differently to reading it. You skip less, odd parts stick with you. I think the last one I tried was The Island of Dr Moreau.

From the newest releases page I stumbled into "Some Nigerian fertility cults" by Percy Amaury Talbot & am enjoying it so far.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78684

I used to use the Online Books Page new books listing similarly:

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/new.html

just heard back that the server provider has been doing a security update. Maybe you were one of the users that got unlucky as a result... maybe try later if still interested

I've reported it.

good question. first though - maybe some bot has downloaded it often for whatever reasons and our systems didn't detect it as bot traffic. just a guess.

maybe there's a way to read more productively using AI: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1990577951671509438

could be a trick to ease that fear :D