Since 1971, Project Gutenberg has been making classic works of literature available to the public at no cost and with no usage restrictions. It and similar projects are the biggest advancements in promoting global access to great works of literature since the invention of the printing press. So far, the volunteers at Project Gutenberg have digitized over 22,000 titles including the works of hundreds of authors. Since its website launched in 1994, it has been one of the most popular websites on the internet and has encouraged a number of imitators.
Project Gutenberg got its start in 1971 when founder Michael Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois, obtained access to a rare mainframe computer. Since that kind of access was valued at anywhere between $100,000 and $100,000,000 at the time, he thought he should do something worthwhile with it. Therefore, he began archiving great works of literature for the world to enjoy. Soon, the computer was connected to the earliest version of the internet. The number of titles have been increasing ever since. The advent of optical scanning greatly facilitated this process as did the invention of a new proofreading service. Today, Project Gutenberg has been adding an average of 50 titles per week.
The books contained in Project Gutenberg's collection of digitized are many titles from the Western literary tradition. Although there are a few works from elsewhere, most of the titles are part of that cannon of European and American authors that have been taught for so many years. The website does have a few titles in different languages and has regional sister-projects that concentrate on the literature of a particular group. The collection also contains some non-textual works like classical sheet music and audio files. Most of the titles, however, are text files in plain text format.
Perhaps the most unique thing about Project Gutenberg is the fact that all of its materials are in the public domain. Although they only publish titles that have passed into the public domain, they have the right to copyright the digitation and transcription of those works. They do not do that however. That means that anyone can use their books for just about anything. So long as you remove the copyright information at the beginning of each document, it is yours to use as you will. You can even use it for commercial purposes if you want.
This freedom of use has made Project Gutenberg the source of much of the content that appears on other websites. For example, there is an example called LibraVox.org that uses Project Gutenberg documents as the basis of their human read recordings of public domain books. Like Gutenberg itself, they reserve no rights. Like the volunteers of Project Gutenberg, these readers at LibraVox offer these titles for free simply because they love literature.
