Gutenberg:Help on Bibliographic Record Page
From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks).
Contents |
Table: Bibliographic Record
This table contains all information we collected about the book.
Creator
- The person or entity that wrote the book.
Title
- The title of the book.
Language
- All languages used in the book for main bodies of text. A foreign citation alone does not get a language tag.
LoC Class
- Library of Congress Classification. PG only uses the first 2 letters. This classification may help you find books in a special area of interest, although more than one half of our books don't have LoC info. Thus, if you don't find the book you are interested in using the LoC class, it does not mean that we don't have it.
Subject
- One or more subjects. Note that more than half of our books don't have subject information added.
Etext-No.
- This is the Project Gutenberg catalog number. Every PG ebook has a different one.
Release Date
- This is the actual release date for ebooks with etext-no. greater than 10,000. Ebooks with etext-no. up to 10,000 got a release date according to a release plan. We were always ahead of the plan, so ebooks actually got released before the release date.
Copyrighted
- Says if this book is copyrighted in the U.S. If you don't live in the U.S. you have to check the copyright laws of your country before downloading an ebook! PG does not know the copyright status of any of its ebooks in any country except the U.S. You may download a copyrighted ebook for your personal use but have to contact the copyright owner if you want to redistribute it. Books without copyright are in the public domain and you may redistribute them at will. Note: this field is an indication only. Always look at the license inside the book before distributing a book.
Table: Formats Available For Download
Edition
Obsolete field. Contains the version number of the etext. No longer used.
Format
HTML
The standard format of the WWW. Use any web browser to display this file format.
This is the recommended format to download. Not all ebooks are available in HTML format though.
Plain Text
A text file formatted with a fixed line length. Best viewed with an editor like Windows Notepad in a monospaced font like Courier.
Every ebook is available in plain text format with very few exceptions. Exceptions are made for mathematical texts where a representation of formulas is impossible in plain text.
Plucker
You can read plucker files on your Palm™ organizer or smartphone. Plucker is Free Software. Get the plucker viewer.
A plucker ebook is generated from the HTML file if there is one, else from the Plain Text file. If the source file is a Plain Text file, the program must guess at the structure of the text. Thus plucker files may contain formatting errors like verse lines run together or paragraphs wrongfully marked as headers etc. They are good enough for reading though.
Our plucker ebooks do not contain images.
You may also install the plucker distiller software and generate plucker ebooks yourself. This gives you control over more options, like including images, etc.
AVI
AVI files can contain both audio and video. They can generally be played with media players such as Windows Media Player, WinAmp, or Mplayer. See wikipedia for more information.
CSS
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are generally used to make HTML pages look nice, and are not intended for direct viewing. Your web browser will find these files as referenced by the HTML files that use them. See wikipedia for more information.
DVI
The output format of a typesetting system called TeX. Generally more common on Unix-like platforms. Can be viewed using xdvi or Evince. See wikipedia for more information.
EPS
Short for "Encapsulated PostScript", it can generally be viewed with any PostScript viewer.
A free PostScript viewer is available.
See wikipedia for more information.
GIF
An image format generally viewable by any web browser. See wikipedia for more information.
ISO
A logical copy of a CD-ROM or other optical media. Most CD/DVD authoring utilities can deal with ISO images. A free tool for mounting these images on a Windows machine as though they were inserted into a CD-ROM drive is available. A tool for burning ISOs to a physical CD-R or CD-RW on Windows is available.
Encoding
Plain text files often come in more than one encoding. us-ascii encoding is supported on virtually any device but has a very limited choice of characters. It is not suitable for any language except English. iso-8859-1 (also known as Latin1) is supported on any Windows-class machine or better. It is suitable for most Western European languages. utf-8 is suitable for any language but needs a display program that knows utf-8 and you have to install appropriate fonts for the language you are trying to display.
Compression
File compression can significantly reduce the size of your download. If you are on a slow internet connection, consider downloading the file compressed with zip. Once downloaded you have to uncompress the file before you can use it. To do this use a program like Unzip or WinZip.
If you are on a fast internet connection you probably don't want to bother with uncompressing files. In that case download the uncompressed version.
Size
The approximate file size.
Download Links
- The mirror option in the Download list allows you to select which location to download a file from. Because the main distribution choice (the iBiblio server in North Carolina) might not be the best one for you, selecting a mirror could provide a faster download.
- The p2p option supports the Magnetlink standard to allow you to find a file on a peer to peer network such as Kazaa or Limewire. While this might not be the fastest download option in some cases, it offers the benefit of putting the Project Gutenberg eBooks you download into a directory where other p2p users can access it. Also, a "friendly" filename is specified, to make it easier to keep track of your Project Gutenberg eBooks.
- For more information about Magnetlinks, see http://www.magnetlinks.org/
- For more information about Project Gutenberg's encouragement of peer to peer (p2p) file sharing for free eBooks, see the File Sharing How-To.
- Generally, files may be downloaded via either HTTP or FTP from any mirror. However:
- Some mirrors have chosen to not supply some file types, i.e., .mp3. Others offer the .zip versions only.
- Our CD & DVD images might not work by HTTP due to the file size.
- Most mirrors update daily, but sometimes new eBooks take a little extra time to be harvested by mirrors.
Some Interesting Notes
Bibrec pages are cached and regenerated daily. If a book was posted today it may take until tomorrow to show up in a bibrec page.
