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.

Scope of collection

As of September 2005, Project Gutenberg claimed over 16,700 items in its collection, with new ebooks usually being posted every day.

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For the most part, these are works of literature from the western cultural tradition. In addition to literary forms such as novels, poetry, short stories, and drama, PG also has examples of forms such as cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. The PG collection also has a few non-text items such as audio files and music notation files.

Related Topics:
Literature - Western cultural tradition - Cookbook - Reference work

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While most Project Gutenberg releases are in English, there are also significant numbers in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, and Chinese, as well as increasing numbers in many other languages.

Related Topics:
German - French - Italian - Spanish - Dutch - Finnish - Chinese

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Whenever possible, Gutenberg releases are available in plain text, mainly using US-ASCII character encoding but frequently extended to ISO-8859-1. Other formats may be released as well, when submitted by volunteers, with the most common being HTML. Formats which are not easily editable, such as PDF, are generally not considered to fit in with the goals of Project Gutenberg, although a few have been added to the collection. For years, there has been discussion of using some type of XML, although progress on that has been slow.

Related Topics:
Plain text - US-ASCII - Character encoding - ISO-8859-1 - HTML - PDF - XML

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