Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg (often abbreviated as PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works. It is the oldest digital library, with the majority of the items it provides being full texts of public domain books.

Affiliated projects

All affiliated projects are independent organizations which share the same ideals, and have been given permission to use the Project Gutenberg trademark. They often have a particular national, or linguistic focus.

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• Project Gutenberg Australia hosts many texts which are public domain according to Australian copyright law, but still under copyright (or of uncertain status) in the United States, with a focus on Australian writers and books about Australia.
• PG-EU (http://www.gutenberg.nl) is a sister project which operates under the copyright law of the European Union. One of its aims is to include as many languages as possible into Project Gutenberg. It operates in Unicode to ensure that all alphabets can be represented easily and correctly.
• Project Gutenberg of the Philippines http://www.gutenberg.ph "aims to make as many books available to as many people as possible, with a special focus on the Philippines and Philippine languages".
• Project Gutenberg Europe http://pge.rastko.net is a project run by Project Rastko in Serbia-Montenegro. It aims at being a Project Gutenberg for all of Europe, and has started to post its first projects in 2005. It is running the Distributed Proofreaders software to quickly produce etexts.
• Project Gutenberg Luxembourg http://www.gutenberg.lu publishes mostly, but not exclusively, books that are written in Luxembourgish.
• Project Gutenberg Consortia Center http://www.gutenberg.us is an affiliate specializing in collections of collections. These do not have the editorial oversight or consistent formatting of the main Project Gutenberg. Thematic collections, as well as numerous languages, are featured.

Although Projekt Gutenberg-DE was given permission to use the Gutenberg name years ago, it is not considered to be an affiliated project, because of philosophical differences. Projekt Gutenberg-DE copyrights its product and limits access to browsable web-versions of its texts.

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For a list of other similar projects, some of which have been inspired by Project Gutenberg, see the list of digital library projects.

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