Information About Linking to our Pages
From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free ebooks.
Contents |
You are welcome to link to this site, but please follow the rules.
Rules
- You may link to our site. You need no permission to do so.
- If you link to one of our books, do not try to link directly to a file but use a canonical URL.
- We will not sign silly legal forms. You need no permission, so we won't sign grants.
- We do not participate in link exchanges. These often are attempts to boost search engine ranking with our popularity. We will however consider linking to your site if it contains valuable resources for our users, like book listings or author biographies.
- Unlike our books the Project Gutenberg site is copyrighted. It is expressly forbidden to make our contents look like it came from your site irrespective of the method used (frames, image inlining, roboting, rewriting, etc.). Just use plain links.
Do Not Link Directly to the eBook Files
Direct links to files will be redirected to the appropriate catalog page. Direct links to files are bad for these reasons:
- the file may get moved, breaking your link,
- a file represents just one available format, the user following your link may not be aware that there are other formats to choose from,
- a file represents just one edition, we may post an updated edition with a different filename,
- the user will not realize the wealth of related material to be found in our archive.
But if you run an independent search site for our books read the independent search site section below.
Canonical URLs to Books and Authors
If you want to link to one of our books or authors please use only the URL formats described here.
- http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/12345
This URL will always lead to the catalog page of the ebook with the number 12345 (replace 12345 with the ebook number you are interested in). - http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Mark_Twain
This URL will always lead to a list of all books by the author "Mark Twain". (Replace Mark_Twain with the author you are interested in. Use an underscore or a plus sign in place of spaces.) - Use http://www.gutenberg.org/author/Henry_James_(1843-1916)
if you have to disambiguate between authors. If only one date is known or certain use (1843-) or (-1916). The parens and the hyphen are required.
Image Inlining
If you want to use an image from one of our books on your web site, feel free to do so, but download the image and host it on your site. Don't use our bandwidth to put images on your site. (Tip: google for free image hosting services.)
Note: people kept inlining images hosted on our site adding much traffic to our servers often without even acknowledging where the images came from. We now configured our servers not to serve our images to third-party web sites any more.
Independent Project Gutenberg Search Sites
Some sites provide their own search engine for Project Gutenberg eBooks. Some of them are dedicated to Project Gutenberg only, other include books from a variety of free collections in their database.
If you are running a site that provides search functions for Project Gutenberg eBooks, contact us and we'll setup our servers to allow deep linking from your site. We request, however, that you prominently display a live link to the Project Gutenberg home page (http://www.gutenberg.org) next to the deep link to the eBook file. If you are dedicated to Project Gutenberg eBooks only, the link has to be displayed just once on every search results page.
Note that the Project Gutenberg Catalog is now available in machine-readable format. Please use one of those files to feed your database instead of roboting our site.