Project Gutenberg: A Description

Editor’s Note: The following is an early article from TESL-EJ. We were in the early years of the World Wide Web, and the imagination of many scholars was ignited. Dr. Michael Hart was thinking of all the books in the world that could be made available on the Internet for free. Volunteers from around the globe began scanning and typing open-access books to share with the world, and Project Gutenberg was born (http://gutenberg.org).

Michael Hart died September 6, 2011. He was a great friend of TESL-EJ, and will be known in history as the inventor of the e-book.
In order to maintain the pagination of the original, we have left the original pagination signals in, which look like this [-1-], [-2-], etc. The footer does not indicate page numbers.

April 1994 — Volume 1, Number 1

Project Gutenberg: A Description

Editor’s note. At the request of Dr. Hart, we are leaving
this description in its original, unformatted state.]

Michael Hart, Professor of Electronic Text
Executive Director of Project Gutenberg Etext
Illinois Benedictine College, Lisle, IL 60532
No official connection to U. of Illinois–UIUC
hart@uiucvmd.bitnet or hart@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu

Project Gutenberg is dedicated to the effort
of increasing education and literacy around the world.

Project Gutenberg has been encouraging the development of Etext
for the past 22 years in all aspects of Electronic Texts: from
the simplest posting of short works in the public domain to the
largest and most complex commercially copyrighted works. These
efforts are designed to encourage the creation and distribution
of Etexts in all manners, all sizes, all formats to all people.
Project Gutenberg now has over 100 Etexts on-line, including two
editions of the Bible’s 66 books and over 40 Shakespeare plays,
poems, etc. which count as only one book for each Bible and for
a Complete Shakespeare. Your comments and suggestions on the
books are most appreciated, so we may continue the improvement
process
.
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Project Gutenberg has been releasing Plain Vanilla ASCII Etexts
on the Internet and its previous incarnations since about 1971.

The goal of Project Gutenberg is to encourage the creation, and
unlimited distribution, of some 10,000 Etexts by the end of the
year 2001. Currently [1993] four books per month are scheduled
for release, which doubles to eight books per month in 1994 and
sixteen in 1995, etc.[-1-]

The books fall mainly into about half a dozen categories:

Light Literature: books for the whole family, such that parent
or child can each bring the other to the computer to “Read More
About It” as the Library of Congress Program puts it. Examples
of Light Literature are often scheduled to match the presenting
of movies or television programs on the same subject, such that
kids are more likely to be currently familiar with the books.

Examples: Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables

Heavy Literature: books for the more serious readers requiring
a greater commitment to reading and studying the materials:

Examples: Paradise Lost and Regained, Moby Dick, and Descartes

Reference: Roget’s Thesaurus, World Factbooks, Census Figures,
the NAFTA treaty, the Consumer Price Index, math constants

Computers: Email 101, Zen and the Art of the Internet, as well
as Surfing the Internet, The Online World [Shareware]

Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Flatland, etc.

Plus releases scheduled for timely releases at Christmas,
[such as Dickens’ Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas]
and Easter, [such as the Bible and the Apocrypha {upcoming}].

We are also planning a library of Etexts in French, German,
and Latin as well as other languages. Project Runeberg
in Swedish, etc. is doing the Scandinavian classics.

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[-2-]More information available on request.

We have had some problems with people not getting a
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get filename.ext [bin first if binary]
Use the “dir” command if you need to know file names
and sizes.

The Newsletters contain the most up to date index:
To get the most current Newsletter and articles —

cd etext/articles
get gutxxxx.xxx [example gutjan.94 for Jan. 94
or send email to listserv@vmd.cso.uiuc.edu or @uiucvmd
containing the following line: sub gutnberg your name
and you will be subscribed to the GUTNBERG listserver.[-3-]
[INDEX100.GUT is the long for index of first 100.]
[0INDEX.GUT in cd etext is updated every morning.]
[get etext/articles/* {all files for more details}]

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FTPMail service which allows me to request FTP via EMail.
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If you want to get a file in this way try sending your equivalent
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If you are lucky you will receive your etext by email. I use Compuserve
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connect 128.174.201.12 (this is the address of the ftp
server)

chdir etext/etext93 (this changes to the right
directory)

chunksize 50000 (this gives the maximum size
file I can receive)

get filenamr.txt (this is the file name and file
type of the etext. I don’t know
if you can get binary files
this way but it is worth a try)

quit (this is self-explanatory)

An Example of a Recent File:

In commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day,
Project Gutenberg announces:

Jan 1994 Collected Articles of Frederick Douglass,
a Slave [dugl210x.xxx]
[-4-]
=====================================================
You will find this file in /etext94 on
mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu, anonymous ftp

cd etext
cd etext94
get filename.ext [type bin first for .zip files]

Thank you for your time and consideration,

[-5-]

&copy Copyright rests with authors. Please cite TESL-EJ appropriately.

Editor’s Note: Dashed numbers in square brackets indicate the end of each page in the paginated ASCII version of this article, which is the definitive edition. Please use these page numbers when citing this work.