Julie Styles, SCIS Cataloguing Librarian, explores the Project Gutenberg ebook library.
Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitise and archive the world’s cultural works and make them available in ebook form for free. To date, it has over 60,000 free ebooks on its database. On average it adds 50 new ebooks each week.
It’s collection features mostly older literary works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Most were published before 1924, with some published in the decades after.
You will find some of the world’s great literature at https://www.gutenberg.org/
Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Homer, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, the Brothers Grimm, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, and Emily Bronte are all available in multiple ebook forms for free.
In addition to novels, poetry, short stories and drama, the database also has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. You can also find a smaller collection of sheet music, audiobooks, still pictures, and moving pictures, including footage of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
Although Project Gutenberg primarily has works of literature from Western culture, there are also significant numbers in many other languages. Non-English languages most represented are French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese.
You can use the Search box to look for a particular title or browse titles by a favourite author.
The Bookshelves allow you to browse by genre, age group, and topic. And if you are undecided where to begin there are Top 100 lists of titles to get you started.
Project Gutenberg and SCIS
SCIS has made catalogue records for nearly 400 of these titles.
The best way to locate them in SCIS Data is to do an advanced search of the phrase ‘Project Gutenberg’, choosing Publisher field, and the exact phrase from the drop-down options.
Each record contains a convenient link to the resource on the Project Gutenberg database. Once at the resource, you should find multiple ebook formats to access.
If you want a title on Project Gutenberg, that we have not already made a record for, simply go to our online cataloguing request system and request the ebook: https://my.scisdata.com/CreateCatalogueRequest
Once you have mastered the international Project Gutenberg website you may also be interested in the Australian digitised collection at http://gutenberg.net.au/
Enjoy searching through this treasure trove!
Thank you so much…