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Link to original content: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/60600/60600-h/60600-h.htm
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.
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Figure 2: Michael Hart’s sunroom workspace in his Urbana home
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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.
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Figure 3: Image from the Doré illustrations of Dante’s Inferno
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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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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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"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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