Reusing Project Gutenberg texts
From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free electronic books (ebooks).
Project Gutenberg actively encourages distribution and reusing of its texts. This page is intended to be a place to record examples of where and how its texts have been reused by various people.
Contents |
Reformatted ebooks
- Munseys.com The reformed blackmask following an extraordinary set of circumstances(details), with around 25,000 titles. (Blackmask was an Australian site which reformatted and categorized many texts from PG and other sources.)
- Manybooks.net A site which reuses almost all PG titles, and converts them into many formats.
- Mobileread a site which offers a very nice, generally well-formatted set of titles.
- Samizdat Express A commercial site which sells CDs of (mostly) PG texts, grouped by various themes.
- PublicLiterature.org Offers an online reader for PG books.
New print editions
- Some Project Gutenberg titles have been prepared for print-on-demand sites, such as Murder in the Gunroom at Lulu.com (PG link: Murder in the Gunroom
). This is now available from Amazon by a number of different publishers, as is most of H. Beam Piper's other works.
- Microlibrary is an effort to develop an affordable print-on-demand service for public domain and open access educational materials.
Dramatic adaptation
- The Angel of the Odd from The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 was edited and adapted for audio by Dave Johnson, Also The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving adapted by Dave Johnson and Starring Alan Zain at DaveFilms
Pedagogical use
- A Self-Study Group has been set up, using Virgil's Aeneid for translating practice.
- A Princess of Mars converted to Morse Code
Non-literary adaptation
- Someone has adapted Darwin's Origin of species as a decorative wall hanging
- A student in a natural language processing class used Right Ho, Jeeves to create a concordance
- Excerpts from PG texts have been used to try to hide the nature of spam emails [1]
- InFact Book Search has incorporated thousands of PG texts into a "vertical search and text analysis infrastructure".
Linguistics
- Wiktionary, a wiki-based Open Content dictionary, uses PG texts to determine the frequency of words in the English language.
Audio versions
- LibriVox is a volunteer effort to record works in the public domain and make them available for free on the Internet. Project Gutenberg is the main source for these texts.
Acoustic modelling
VoxForge collects transcribed speech audio for the creation of Acoustic Models for use with Open Source Speech Recognition Engines. "Basically we provide users with a list of phonetically balanced prompts (passages from Out-of-Copyright texts from Project Gutenberg), and walk them through the process of recording the prompts".
Spamming
Spammers regularly harvest PG books to provide innocent-looking text to poison your spam filter.
PG uses
Historical Fiction (Bookshelf) uses A Guide to the Best Historical Novels and Tales , by Jonathan Neild as source for the page itself. The idea and the page have been taken from the "Distributed Proofreaders" Wiki.
The Project Gutenberg (Bookshelf) page shows books on PG which base themselves on books on PG.
What you cannot do
There are some uses which are not possible with Project Gutenberg ebooks.
- For this you need a paper book http://www.sublackwell.co.uk/gallery.php?id=1
- A cartoon in German c't computer magazine
