Gregory B. Newby

“ Today, we know US copyright is based on the creative expression of ideas through authorship. Markup and spelling changes do not qualify. As a result, Project Gutenberg volunteers are able to “harvest” public domain materials on the Internet, once they are determined to match public domain print materials. This is not a frequent occurrence, however, since most volunteers prefer to work on items that are not yet digitized.
Similarly, Project Gutenberg claims no copyright on the “sweat of the brow” labor which is applied to make eBooks from print sources. ”

“ Those other very large projects are primarily devoted to scanning, and then provide raw OCR output with a few automatically generated formats.
Such items are only partial eBooks — really, they are pictures (scans) of books, with some additional automated features. These are valuable, but do not provide the reading experience or quality of presentation that Project Gutenberg strives for. Using current technology, it takes human intellect and effort to convert a picture of a book to a true, functional, eBook. ”

“ Many were automatically generated via text-to-speech software. There are also a number of readings/performances by human readers, including from Project Gutenberg’s partner, Librivox. Today, automated text-to-speech is accessible by most people with a computer or mobile phone, so there is less emphasis on that format. Human readings/performances continue to be of interest, especially when the performance, as well as the original Project Gutenberg source eBook, is granted to the public domain. ”

“ Today, Project Gutenberg’s plain text offerings are most often derived automatically from another master format. The most common master format is HTML, which offers advantages of ubiquity and ease of authoring. LaTeX is also used as a master, mainly for mathematical texts. ReStructured Text (RST) was encouraged by Project Gutenberg, due to the ease of conversion to other formats. ”

“ Access to literary works enables literacy, which in turn opens the door to education and, it is hoped, opportunity. Interest in literary works that could be freely redistributed led to an emphasis on books and other items that are in the public domain. ”

“ Digitization and production techniques, at the time of this first eBook, were ad hoc and informal. A single eBook producer would edit a single file, from a single source. The first eBook’s printed source was a single sheet of paper, without hyphenation, a book cover, images, or other characteristics of book-length sources. In 1971, capitalization was not an issue, as only upper case letters were available in the character set used by the system.
Figure 1: Top view of a Model 33 Teletype, salvaged from the computer laboratory where Michael Hart typed the first eBook. ”

“ Project Gutenberg creates and freely distributes electronic books (eBooks) . This document offers elements of the story of Project Gutenberg’s methods and practices for creating those eBooks, and the surrounding procedures for making them as widely available as possible. ”

“ Fully automated conversion from master formats to eBook formats (2013) .
Project Gutenberg has ongoing initiatives to improve service offerings to readers. There are no definite timelines for these, and assistance (or partnerships!) are always of interest. Some future initiatives may include:
Continued efforts to separate the “collection” from the “interface,” making it easier for different Web-based skins to be used to access content; Mechanisms for creation of personal bookshelves, “shopping carts” or other reading lists, for users to more easily track items of interest ”

“ Improvements in ability to identify and filter items by the author’s death date, which is the most common criterion for public domain status of older items, in countries other than the US; Better tracking of sources used, including for harvested scans; even with no guarantee of faithfulness to a particular print source, information about source is frequently requested ”

“ These scanners, which are still in operation, are faster. They also tend to produce an image that is properly aligned, versus the skewing that sometimes occurs with flatbed scanners. An important difference is the printed books are damaged: prior to scanning, the spines of the books are cut off, in order for the individual pages to be ingested by the scanner.
Figure 3: Image from the Doré illustrations of Dante’s Inferno
It has been Project Gutenberg’s intention to make all the original images from the scanners available, alongside the finished eBook. ”