By Gregory B. Newby
CEO Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
Contents
ITEMS ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR ONE OF THREE REASONS
COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND EARLY MARKUP
EVOLUTION IN PROOFREADING: DISTRIBUTED PROOFREADERS
COPYRIGHT CLEARANCE OR PERMISSION
EVOLUTION OF MASTER SOURCE FORMATS
"NO SWEAT OF THE BROW COPYRIGHT"
PAST INNOVATIONS AND FUTURE INITIATIVES
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. Project Gutenberg seeks to make the world’s great literature enjoyable and accessible.
The first Project Gutenberg eBook was created on July 4, 1971. Michael S. Hart had been granted access to a powerful mainframe computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and realized that his greatest impact would be by digitizing and distributing free literature (for more history, see: The eBook is 40 (1971-2011), by Marie Lebert).
Michael took a printed copy of United States Declaration of Independence to the computer laboratory, where he sat at the teletype terminal and typed this first eBook. He distributed it via email to the people he knew about via the Internet’s predecessor, ARPAnet, which was available at UIUC. At that moment, the first eBook had been freely distributed to the online community of the day.
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. The paper roll was where output would be printed.
During the next twenty years, from approximately 1971-1991, techniques of digitization would be dramatically improved, and regularized. Ongoing developments since then have tracked the available technologies for eBook creation and use, as well as preferences and interests of the many volunteers who would produce those eBooks. Throughout the history of Project Gutenberg, these techniques, while refined and clearly articulated, have remained flexible (see the Volunteers’ FAQ)
Project Gutenberg’s founder, Michael Hart, was motivated by completely free and unencumbered redistribution of literary works. 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.
The public domain is, today, understood to be those items that are not copyrighted. Copyright in the United States, where Project Gutenberg operates, is defined as a temporary monopoly by authors (or their agents), in order to benefit from commercial potential and thereby fostering continued creation:
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries” United States Constitution
1. They are ineligible for copyright. In the US, this includes works created by the US Government;
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Because of its emphasis on literary works, Project Gutenberg has mostly focused on items for which the copyright term has expired. Until 1998, this included items published 75 years earlier. For example, items from 1920 entered the public domain when their copyrights expired in 1995. The US Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 changed the term to 95 years for most literary works, so new items (from 1923 onward) will not enter the public domain before 2019.
Figure 2: Michael Hart’s sunroom workspace in his Urbana home
There are over one million published works from 1923 and earlier, and these are the main items that Project Gutenberg continues to digitize and distribute. In addition, there were approximately one million works published in the United States from 1923-1964 but not renewed. Those items entered the public domain when their first copyright term ended, 28 years after publication. The copyright procedures utilized are online at Copyright procedures
The eBook collection, and all other aspects of Project Gutenberg, relies on volunteers to grow. Therefore, selection of items is done mainly by volunteers. Project Gutenberg seeks to limit duplication in the collection, and instead prefers to add items not already in the collection. Improvements to existing items is ongoing, mainly when errata reports are submitted by readers.
It took over two decades to release the first 100 eBooks, with #100 being published in 1994. Most of those first eBooks were collected through personal interaction with Hart. He would guide or participate in the digitization process, often developing procedures to deal with new characteristics. Footnotes and endnotes, italics and underscores, bold text, and different fonts all presented challenges for representation as plain text. Primitive markup techniques were developed, such as using an underscore character to surround underscored text, _like this_.
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Errors in eBooks often reflect errors in their printed sources, and Project Gutenberg encourages fixing those errors.
From 2002-2004 an important innovation was developed, in support of the creation of new Project Gutenberg eBooks. This was Distributed Proofreaders, an early example of what is now known as crowdsourcing. Through Distributed Proofreaders, volunteers engage in a portion of the eBook creation process — whether it is copyright clearances, proofreading (a page at a time!), or formatting, checking, and finalization before uploading. Those portions, when coordinated together, lead to the creation of new eBooks from printed sources.
Distributed Proofreaders has become the single largest source for new eBooks to the collection, accounting for approximately half of all titles. Distributed Proofreaders has also innovated substantially in the use of HTML+CSS (cascading style sheets) for very attractive presentation of eBooks in Web browsers.
By the early 1990s, scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) started to become widely available. Hart received a full scanning station via a grant from a computer manufacturer, which was used to produce several of the first 100 eBooks. The scanner was a flatbed model, which required the user to hold the book open, scan a page (or pair of pages) for ingest to the OCR software, then flip to the next page.
The OCR software would then automatically recognize the characters from the scan, and create an editable view of the text. Proofreading and formatting would then occur in the same way as for a typed text.
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Figure 3: Image from the Doré illustrations of Dante’s Inferno
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From approximately 1994-2004, procedures for digitization became more clearly articulated. This included the notion that a copyright “clearance” was the necessary first step for starting any new eBook for contribution to Project Gutenberg. The “copyright how-to” mentioned above was developed and refined, with guidance from a number of lawyers with expertise in US copyright law.
Project Gutenberg has always operated within the copyright laws of the US, and includes text in each eBook, and online at Project Gutenberg, making it clear that readers in other countries must follow the laws that apply to them. Project Gutenberg affiliates, which operate completely independently, exist to emphasize the literary works and languages of different countries, and they follow the copyright laws of the country or region in which they operate.
Generally, copyright clearance is simple. Items published prior to 1923, anywhere in the world, are in the public domain in the US. Prior to 1993, all copyright clearance actions required mailing a photocopy of the title page and verso (obverse) page of a candidate book to Michael Hart or Greg Newby, but then an online system was developed that accepted scans of those pages. A database maintains records of cleared items, and who submitted them. A few other copyright rules are sometimes applied, for items published after 1923.
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Carroll, Lewis. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Available: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11
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Among the first 100 items, there are mathematical constants and a musical performance. Government publications, notably the 1990 US Census and the CIA World Factbook from 1990 onward, were also included. The next few hundred items include movies, photographs of ancient cave paintings, and the first non-English items (Virgil’s Aeneid, Cicero’s Orations, and Caesar’s Commentaries, all in Latin).
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Non-English languages have some additional characteristics that were not well-suited for the plain text ASCII of Project Gutenberg’s early days. By the early 1990s, it was necessary to display accented characters, to accommodate languages such as French and Spanish. Later, languages such as Chinese would require entirely separate character sets.
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Table 1: Language counts as of August 1, 2016, for 52615 eBooks.
# of eBooks Language code Language or dialect
43095 en English
2711 fr French
1469 de German
1421 fi Finnish
739 nl Dutch
678 it Italian
540 pt Portuguese
504 es Spanish
427 zh Chinese
219 el Greek
128 sv Swedish
112 hu Hungarian
112 eo Esperanto
102 la Latin
66 da Danish
60 tl Tagalog
31 pl Polish
31 ca Catalan
22 ja Japanese
17 no Norwegian
11 cy Welsh
10 cs Czech
9 ru Russian
7 is Icelandic
7 fur Friulian
6 te Telugu
6 he Hebrew
6 enm Middle English
6 bg Bulgarian
4 sr Serbian
4 ang Old English
4 af Afrikaans
3 nai North American Indian
3 nah Nahuatl
3 ilo Iloko
3 ceb Cebuano
2 ro Romanian
2 nav Navajo
2 myn Mayan Languages
2 mi Maori
2 grc Greek, Ancient
2 gla Gaelic, Scottish
2 ga Irish
2 fy Frisian
2 arp Arapaho
1 yi Yiddish
1 sl Slovenian
1 sa Sanskrit
1 rmr Calo
1 oji Ojibwa
1 oc Occitan
1 nap Napoletano- Calabrese
1 lt Lithuanian
1 ko Korean
1 kld Gamilaraay
1 kha Khasi
1 iu Inuktitut
1 ia Interlingua
1 gl Galician
1 fa Farsi
1 et Estonian
1 csb Kashubian
1 br Breton
1 bgi Giangan
1 ar Arabic
1 ale Aleut
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Figure 3: Typical text view, showing fixed-length lines and spacing among components.
"A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT"
by MARK TWAIN (Samuel L. Clemens)
PREFACE
The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are
historical, and the episodes which are used to illustrate
them are also historical. It is not pretended that these
laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century;
no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in
the English and other civilizations of far later times, it
is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth
century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day
also. One is quite justified in inferring that whatever one
of these laws or customs was lacking in that remote time,
its place was competently filled by a worse one.
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