Saturday, November 24, 2012

Literature: Project Gutenberg

Once upon a time a book was printed in a limited amount of copies. Those copies was sold and if you hadn't had the opportunity to buy one, you had a hard time to get a chance to read it. Sure, a few always ended up in public libraries, but few of them were blessed to have all books in the world. In the end you could need to face the fact that you would never get the chance to read a particular book.

With Project Gutenberg this may change. Not today or tomorrow, but in the long run. Maybe. At least it is a step in the right direction.

Project Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks. This is literature where the copyright has expired (within the United States) and therefore are available to scan and publish on the Internet; they are in the public domain.

Here you will find Grimm's fairy tales, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Gulliver's Travels, but also the Swedish Mor i Sutre, the Greek Καλαμιές στον άνεμο and Il pastor fido in lingua napolitana in Napoletano-Calabrese.

When I was a kid I saw a French TV-serie about the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin and I wanted to read the book on which the TV-serie was based on. My grandparents said they had a copy of it somewhere but it never turned up. And I didn't find anything at the library. They are there at Project Gutenberg. And yes, I've read them, now, finally, twenty-five years or so later.