The Project Gutenberg FAQ

I have a question not answered in this FAQ. How do I ask it?

If it's a question of active interest to the general body of volunteers, you can ask it on the gutvol-d mailing list. See <http://www.gutenberg.net/subs> for joining it.

For other questions, you should check our Contact Information page at <http://www.gutenberg.net/contact> and e-mail the appropriate person.

Subject Areas

General FAQ

About Project Gutenberg

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G.1. What is Project Gutenberg?

Project Gutenberg is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works.

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G.2. Where did Project Gutenberg come from?

In 1971, Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 worth of computer time on a mainframe of the era. Trying to figure out how to put these very expensive hours to good use, he envisaged a time when there would be millions of connected computers, and typed in the Declaration of Independence (all in upper case--there was no lower case available!). His idea was that everybody who had access to a computer could have a copy of the text. Now, 31 years later, his copy of the Declaration of Independence (with lower-case added!) is still available to everyone on the Internet.

During the 70s, he added some more classic American texts, and through the 80s worked on the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare. That edition of Shakespeare was never released, due to copyright law changes, but others followed.

Starting in 1991, Project Gutenberg began to take its current form, with many different texts and defined targets. The target for 1991 was one book a month. 1992's target was two books a month. This target doubled every year through 1996, when it hit 32 books a month.

Today, we have a target of 500 books a month.

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G.3. What has Project Gutenberg achieved?

Project Gutenberg is the original, and oldest, etext project on the Internet, founded in 1971.

At the end of 2003, we are not only still going, we have made over 10,000 eBooks available, with a current production target of 400 more each month.

We have many mirrors (copies) of our archives on all seven continents.

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G.4. Who runs Project Gutenberg?

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization. Dr. Gregory B. Newby <gbnewby@pglaf.org> is our volunteer CEO. Professor Michael Hart <hart@pobox.com> is our Founder and Executive Director.

In terms of the day-to-day production of eBooks, our volunteers run themselves. :-) They produce books, and submit them when completed. Our Production Directors help with general volunteer issues. The Posting Team check submitted texts and shepherd them onto our servers. You can find current contact information for these people on the Contact Information page at <http://www.gutenberg.net/contact>.

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G.5. How many people are in Project Gutenberg?

It depends how you count them. We don't do roll-calls or give out membership cards. At the end of 2003, Distributed Proofreaders at <http://www.pgdp.net/> sees maybe 400 people turn up to do some proofing each day, Distributed Proofreaders Europe <http:///dp.rastko.net/> another 50 or so, and not everyone works through the DP sites. It would be a reasonable guess that 2,000 or so people will be doing some work for PG this month.

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G.6. How can I contact Project Gutenberg?

There are lots of ways to contact us, depending on what you want to talk about. The Contact Info page <http://www.gutenberg.net/contact> on the main web site lists them.

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G.7. How can I help Project Gutenberg?

Donate money! We're an all-volunteer project, and we don't have much to spend, so even a little goes a long way. Our Donation page <http://www.gutenberg.net/donate> tells you how.

Produce a text! Turn an old book into an immortal etext. The Volunteers' FAQ [V.1] tells you how.

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G.8. How can I keep in touch with what Project Gutenberg is doing?

Subscribe to one of the Newsletters--weekly or monthly!

The page <http://www.gutenberg.net/subs> gives details of how to subscribe, unsubscribe and access the archives.

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G.9. What is the relationship between Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg of Europe, Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Project Gutenberg of Australia, and Project Runeberg?

These are all entirely separate organizations. Projekt Gutenberg-DE, Project Gutenberg Europe, and Project Gutenberg of Australia use the "Project Gutenberg" trademark with permission, and they operate within the copyright rules of their respective countries. Project Runeberg has no specific connection with Project Gutenberg; we both have the same aims, but Project Runeberg specializes in Nordic literature.

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About Project Gutenberg publications

G.10. Does Project Gutenberg publish only books?

No.

Project Gutenberg also publishes other cultural works like movies and music, but the bulk of our collection is books.

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G.11. What books does Project Gutenberg publish?

Any books that we legally can, and that our volunteers want to work on.

We cannot publish any texts still in copyright without permission. This generally means that our texts are taken from books published pre-1923. (It's more complicated than that, as our Copyright FAQ explains, but 1923 is a good first rule-of-thumb for the U.S.A.)

So you won't find the latest bestsellers or modern computer books here. You will find the classic books from the start of this century and previous centuries, from authors like Shakespeare, Poe, Dante, as well as well-loved favorites like the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Tarzan and Mars books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Alice's adventures in Wonderland as told by Lewis Carroll, and thousands of others.

These books are chosen by our volunteers. Simply, a volunteer decides that a certain book should be in the archives, obtains the book and does the work necessary to turn it into an e-text. If you're interested in volunteering, see the Volunteers' FAQ at [V.1] below.

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G.12. What other things does Project Gutenberg publish?

We have published some music files, in MIDI and MUS formats. We have published the Human Genome. We have published pictures of the prehistoric cave painting from the south of France. We have published some video files and some audio files, including a Janis Ian track and readings from public domain books.

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G.13. How does Project Gutenberg choose books to publish?

Project Gutenberg, as such, does not choose books to publish. There is no central list of works that volunteers are asked to work on. Individual volunteers choose and produce books according to their own tastes and values, and the availability (or price!) of the book.

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G.14. What languages does Project Gutenberg publish in?

Whatever languages we can! As above, this is decided by what languages our volunteers choose to work with.

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G.15. Why don't you have any / many books about history, geography, science, biography, etc.?
Why aren't there any / more PG books available in French, Spanish, German, etc.?

If we can legally publish a book, and it isn't in the archives, it's because no volunteer has produced it yet. At the moment, we have a predominance of English language novels because that is what most people have chosen to work on.

We're always looking for new languages and topics, and always delighted to see people producing them. If we don't have enough of the types of books you would like to see, why don't you help us out by contributing one? If the people interested in a particular area don't contribute, we'll always be short in that area.

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G.16. Why don't you have any books by Steven King, Tom Clancy, Tolkien, etc.?

Project Gutenberg can publish only books that are in the public domain [C.10] unless we have the permission of the copyright holder. Current bestsellers have not yet entered the public domain, and we're not likely to get permission from the authors to publish them.

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G.17. Why is Project Gutenberg so set on using Plain Vanilla ASCII?

Don't misrepresent us--we support and publish many open formats, but, yes, we do want to have a plain text version of everything possible.

We're looking at our history, and we're planning for the long term--the very long term.

Today, Plain Vanilla ASCII can be read, written, copied and printed by just about every simple text editor on every computer in the world. This has been so for over thirty years, and is likely to be so for the foreseeable future. We've seen formats and extended character sets come and go; plain text stays with us. We can still read Shakespeare's First Folios, the original Gutenberg Bible, the Domesday Book, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Rosetta Stone (though we may have trouble with the language!), but we can't read many files made in various formats on computer media just 20 years ago.

We're trying to build an archive that will last not only decades, but centuries.

The point of putting works in the PG archive is that they are copied to many, many public sites and individual computers all over the world. No single disaster can destroy them; no single government can suppress them. Long after we're all dead and gone, when the very concept of an ISP is as quaint as gas streetlamps, when HTML reads like Middle English, those texts will still be safe, copied, and available to our descendants.

The PG archive is so valuable, yet free and easily portable, that even if every current PG volunteer vanished overnight, people around the world would copy and preserve it.

If the ZIP format loses popularity, and is replaced by better compression, it will be easy to convert the zip formats automatically (and we post all plain-text files in unzipped format as well). If hard drives are replaced by optical memory, it will be easy to copy the files onto that. If even ASCII is superseded by Unicode or one of its descendants, it will be possible for our grandchildren to convert it automatically (and ASCII is included in Unicode anyway).

By contrast, many of us have files saved in proprietary formats from word-processors only 5 or 10 years old that are already impractical for us to read. Some of our files produced just a few years ago using non-ASCII character sets like Codepage 850 are already giving problems for some readers. Some eBook reader formats launched within the last few years are already obsolete. We have learned from that experience.

We also encourage other open formats based on plain text, like HTML and XML, and even occasionally not-so-open ones when simple formatting isn't enough, but plain text is the only format we're sure of in a rapidly-changing technological landscape.

Please see also the FAQ [F.1] "What formats does Project Gutenberg publish?" for more detailed discussion of formats.

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Readers' FAQ

About Finding eBooks

R.1. How can I find an eBook I'm looking for?

For PG books, the simplest way is to go to the home page at <http://www.gutenberg.net>, type the Author or Title into the search form, press the "Search" button, and follow the choices.

More finding and browsing options are available at the "Find an eBook" page at http://www.gutenberg.net/find

There is a full-text search available at

http://public.ibiblio.org/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?site=localhost&a=p&p=about&c=gberg&ct=0

where you can search not only for titles and authors, but any words or phrases you want to look up. For example, entering "Ample make this bed" and running an "entire books" search for all words leads you to Poems Of Emily Dickinson, Series Two. It does, however, lag behind, since it must be rebuilt periodically. At the end of 2003, it is about 5 months behind. While search engines like Google do reference our texts, they typically catalog only the first 100K or so of each file, so if you're searching for a quote near the end of a book, they may not find it.

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R.2. Can I get a complete list of Project Gutenberg eBooks?

Yes. GUTINDEX.ALL is the raw list of files posted. You will find it at: <http://www.gutenberg.net/GUTINDEX.ALL>

When we post a book, the posting information contains title and author, eBook number, base filename and schedule year and month. For books after 10,000, it just contains title, author and eBook number, since that is all we need to find books after 10,000. This raw information goes into GUTINDEX.ALL.

After posting, the text is automatically cataloged, with limited information. Later, our catalogers get to work and add more information --things like full title, subtitle, author birth and death dates, Library of Congress Classification, full filenames and sizes. When a book has been cataloged, it is entered onto the website database so that you can search for it.

People who want to bypass the search on the website and find books themselves may want to use GUTINDEX.ALL, since it doesn't wait for the cataloging. GUTINDEX.ALL is updated weekly, usually on Fridays.

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R.3. How can I download a PG text without using the web catalog?

We have to divide this question into two answers, for books up to 10,000, and books after 10,000, or reposted since we moved past 10,000.

Books posted after 10,000 go into a new, simpler, naming scheme. Books REposted after we passed 10,000 (around November 2003) also use this scheme. We are reposting many older books, with improvements and corrections, all the time, and older books may also be reposted into the new scheme.

You can see clearly from the line in GUTINDEX.ALL whether the book is in the old naming scheme or the new naming scheme. Where the line starts with a Month and Year, and contains a file-name template in square brackets, the book is still in the old scheme, for example:

Feb 2005 Mike, by P. G. Wodehouse     [mikewxxx.xxx] 7423

The line for the same book, in the new naming scheme, would omit the Month and Year, and the filename base, and look like:

Mike, by P. G. Wodehouse                             7423

Books after 10,000 -- the new naming scheme

To find a text with a number over 10,000, or one that has been reposted since we passed 10,000, you must know the eBook number. You can get this from <http://www.gutenberg.net/GUTINDEX.ALL>.

Once you know the number, you can find the directory containing all formats of it. Formally, the directory for the eBook will be contained in a hierarchy of directories, each one a single digit, being all the digits of the etext number except the last, in order. The name of the directory for the eBook itself will be the number of the eBook. But it's easier to see by example.

The files for eBook number 10214 will be found in the directory /1/0/2/1/10214 on the download site you choose. So, for example, if you are downloading eBook 10214 from our main site by HTTP from www.gutenberg.net, you can just go to

http://www.gutenberg.net/1/0/2/1/10214/ and download whichever of the formats you want.

Or, instead of typing in the whole address, for numbers beginning with the digit "1", you can just go to http://www.gutenberg.net/1/ and navigate down the list of directories.

Books before 10,000 -- the old naming scheme

In short, just browse to:

<http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/>

choose the schedule year of the text (newly-posted texts will usually be in the latest year) and look down the list to find the filename you're looking for.

In general, you need to know:

a) the address of an FTP site
b) the schedule year of the text you want
c) the basename of the text you want.

The fastest and safest FTP site to use for this is ftp.ibiblio.org, which is the first of our two primary posting sites (the other being ftp.archive.org). We post to these two sites, and then other sites copy from them at intervals, so with any FTP sites other than these two, the file may not be available immediately.

You can get the schedule year and basename of the text from its line in GUTINDEX.ALL. Let's take an example. The file

Mar 2004 The Herd Boy and His Hermit, by C. M. Yonge [#32][hrdbhxxx.xxx]5313

has been posted just a few hours ago as I write this. From the GUTINDEX entry, the schedule year is 2004, and the basename of the text is hrdbh.

We divide our texts into directories (folders) based on the schedule year, so this eBook will be in the directory for 2004, which will be named something ending in /etext04. All the directories are named etext plus the last two digits of the year. (Somebody's going to have to change that convention in about 87 years from now! :-) We currently have directories starting at 90, running through the 90s and then 00, 01, 02, 03, 04. All eBooks produced before 1991 are in the /etext90 directory, so if you're looking for

Dec 1971 Declaration of Independence                      [whenxxxx.xxx]  1

or

Aug 1989 The Bible, Both Testaments, King James Version   [kjv10xxx.xxx] 10

you should look in /etext90.

As it happens, ibiblio supports both HTTP (web) and FTP access to the text, so we can just browse to <http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/> and choose the 2004 directory from there.

If you want to automate this, you could also use the more direct address <ftp://www.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext04/>

The equivalent address for ftp.archive.org is <ftp://ftp.archive.org/pub/etext/etext04/>

Either way, we see a long page of files, in alphabetical order. Scroll down to the "H"s and look for hrdbh. We see four files with this basename:

hrdbh10.txt
hrdbh10.zip
hrdbh10h.htm
hrdbh10h.zip

This means that both plain text and HTML formats are available, and you can choose to download them either zipped or uncompressed. For more detail about conventions for filenames, see the FAQ "What do the filenames of the texts mean?" [R.35]. The main thing you need to know is that any file beginning with hrdbh is some format or edition of this book.

Finally, all you have to do is click on the format you want to download.

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R.4. You don't have the eBook I'm looking for. Can you help me find it?

Sorry, no. We can suggest (see below) some other places to look for publicly accessible books on the Net, but we can't do the search for you.

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R.5. Where else can I go to get eBooks?

The On-Line Books Page <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/> specializes in creating a list of all books on-line from any source. Searching there is a good place to start.

If you're looking for commercial books, like current textbooks or bestsellers, you're not likely to find them here, since recent books are not in the public domain. For these, you should look for commercial booksellers on the Net--any search engine will direct you to some if you enter search terms like "shop ebook".

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R.6. I see some eBooks in several places on the Net. Do different people really re-create the same eBooks?

It does happen, but mostly by accident. Anyone experienced in eBook creation will first search the usual places to see whether anyone else has already transcribed the book they're interested in. If it has been transcribed, they will not duplicate the effort.

Etexts that are in the public domain very often float around the Net for years--stored in a gopher server here, posted to Usenet there, held on someone's local computer for a year or two and then reformatted as HTML and uploaded to a web site somewhere else. And this is good, because we want texts to be copied as widely as possible.

Public domain eBooks are fair game for anyone to copy, correct, mark up, package and post: that's what being in the public domain means.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often quickly copied and reformatted, and posted on other sites like Blackmask at <http://www.blackmask.com> and Steve Sakoman's site at http://www.sakoman.net/.

If you find an eBook in many different places, the odds are good that it came from one original source, and was copied around.

It does sometimes happen that people duplicate the transcription of books already made into text. Sometimes it's because they didn't find the version already made. Sometimes they have a different edition, and want to transcribe that. Mostly, though, we all try not to do more work than we have to.

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About Using the Web Site

R.7. Why couldn't I reach your site? (or: Why is your site slow?)

There may be a bottleneck somewhere else between you and the site. If at first you don't succeed, don't tell us, just try, try again. The correct address is:

http://www.gutenberg.net/

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R.8. I get an error when I try to download a book.

Many FTP sites throughout the world hold the whole Project Gutenberg archive of texts. An FTP site is just a computer on the Internet that specializes in holding files for download and sending them to people on request. You can find a list of FTP sites that hold Gutenberg texts at <http://www.gutenberg.net/list>.

When you're searching or browsing for titles and authors, you're on this Project Gutenberg site, but if you choose one of the mirrors, or another method of downloading, when you click on the book to download it, you are connected to an FTP (or HTTP) site. At the time you click on the filename, your browser contacts an FTP site and tries to download the file from there. If you get an error, it could be because the FTP site is busy, or because there's a network traffic bottleneck between you and that FTP site, or because the text you're looking for is missing from that FTP site.

Usually, the easiest solution is to choose another FTP site to download your text from. Go to the Search page, choose a different FTP site, and search again for your text.

Tip: You should always try to choose the FTP site closest to you. Not only are you helping to minimize Net traffic by choosing a nearby site, but your file will download faster!

If all else fails, note the year and the filename of the book you want, if it's below number 10,000, or its number, if above 10,000, choose an FTP site from this list and click on one of them. Then browse your way through the listings to the file you want.

For example, if you find "Lady Susan" by Jane Austen, you will see that it was published by Gutenberg in 1997, and its filename is lsusn10.txt, so browse to one of the FTP sites, choose the directory called /etext97 and click (or right-click and Save, depending on your browser) on the file lsusn10.txt. Or, in the case of Clarissa, Volume 6 by Richardson, which is #11364, you will find it in the directory /1/1/3/6/11364

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R.9. I searched for a book I know is in Project Gutenberg, but got no results.

First go to the Advanced Search page. Sometimes you may miss in searching because of alternative spellings, so try searching separately using just one word in Author or Title. Read the Search Tips.

If that fails, you can Browse through the site catalog. Let's say you're looking for "The Wandering Jew" by Eugene Sue.

Go to the PG Find-an-eBook page: <http://www.gutenberg.net/find>

Once on this page, click on: "S" in "Browse by Author"

You should now see a list of all of the Authors whose last name starts with "S". Scroll down till you find the direct links to the Sue, Eugene works.

Click on the work you are interested to, then click on the file link found on the page you were brought to, Etext Card ID -3350- when selecting the work, as immediately above.

On this page, above the excerpt, there are download links:

Click on the link of your choice - plain text or zipped, and from ibiblio.org or other.

If you choose one of the mirrors, you are then brought to a new page, asking you to select an "Download site". Further details on how and why to choose an "FTP Site" are available on this page.

Select a site, and the file will be downloaded, or offered for download, depending on which format you selected and which browser you use.

If you can't find your text either way, the book has not been cataloged. If you know that the book has been posted recently, and maybe hasn't made it into the catalog yet, read the FAQ "How can I download a PG text without using the online catalog?" [R.3]

If even this doesn't help, don't despair! We don't have it, but it may be elsewhere on the Web. Go to the major search engines and try there. You can also try looking in the Book Search section of The On-Line Books Page <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>, and if you have no luck with that, you might be able to find it listed as being In Progress somewhere on their Books In Progress and Requested page at <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/in-progress.html>.

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R.10. Can I copy your website, or your website materials?

No.

Keeping the PG site updated with the latest e-text releases is an ongoing job, and our experience is that people, however well-intentioned, do not keep copies up to date. We want there to be one clear source for people seeking the latest Project Gutenberg information, and we think that having a lot of out-of-date copies and partial copies scattered around the net would be a bad thing.

We welcome mirrors and copies of our e-texts, in new FTP sites [R.14], but the main web site itself is copyrighted and may not be copied.

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R.11. Your site doesn't look right in my browser. I clicked on a button, and nothing happened.

We take a lot of trouble to ensure that our website uses only valid, standard HTML, and we're not even slightly tempted to use glitzy features that look good in one browser but don't work in another, so we can promise you that our site is not the problem.

If you actually clicked on a button, like the Search button, and nothing happened, you might be behind a proxy or web filter that doesn't like you making POST requests. If you have a web filter switched on, turn it off, reload the page and try again.

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R.12. What does that thing about "Select FTP Site" mean?

Our texts are not actually held on the website. The website just holds an index; the files themselves are held on many sites throughout the world, called FTP sites. When you have found the book you're looking for, and you make that final click to get it, you're not actually talking to our website any more--you are transferred to the FTP site you selected. Some FTP sites are near you; some are far away. Some may be faster than others, even if they are about the same distance; some may have temporary technical problems.

You should usually select the FTP site nearest you. If you find you're having problems with that one, you can select another.

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R.13. What exactly is an FTP site anyway?

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, one of the oldest and most reliable protocols of the internet. This is the method by which a file can be copied from one computer to another.

We now have some HTTP (web) sites containing eBooks as well, including our main site at http://www.gutenberg.net. You can use either HTTP or FTP.

An FTP site, or FTP server, is a computer that holds files that people can upload and download. In the case of PG, the Posting Team upload our texts when they're ready to two main FTP servers, <ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org> and <ftp://ftp.archive.org>, which serve as our master copies.

Other FTP sites around the world automatically download the files from these master sites, so they have a full set of PG publications for you to download. Because they only check for updates and new files at intervals, some FTP sites may be a day or two behind. Some FTP sites don't have space available for everything, so they may hold only the zipped versions of the files. But most FTP sites will have the entire PG collection. These are called FTP "mirrors", since they are a copy of the original.

Many FTP sites exist that offer a full PG mirror but are not on our FTP sites list. Commonly, these are in schools, where they serve the local students, but don't have enough bandwidth to offer downloads to worldwide users.

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R.14. Can I become an FTP mirror?

Yes! We're always looking for more FTP mirrors.

If you manage an FTP site with 100 GB or so of free space, please check our Contact Information page <http://www.gutenberg.net/contact> and contact the appropriate person, who will make the arrangements for you.

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R.15. Can I make a private FTP mirror for my school, library or organization?

Yes.

We like all FTP mirrors to be open to as many people as possible, but we know that not all schools have the resources to be a public mirror, so we welcome all mirrors.

And anyway, you don't even have to ask, because we don't control what happens to our texts once we post them!

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R.16. When I clicked on the file I want, nothing happened.

When you select a file for download, your request goes to the FTP site you selected, not to our website. If the FTP site you selected is having problems, or if there is the Net version of a traffic jam between you and it, you may have problems downloading.

Select a different FTP site [R.12] and try again.

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R.17. How many texts are downloaded through the web site?

We don't really do statistics, but in one particular month for which we did, we had a figure of about 800,000 searches completed. Since the final request for download goes to the FTP site selected and not to our website, we can't confirm that all of these were actually downloaded, but we expect that most people who have gone all the way through the search will finish the job.

In another month, we had about 1,000,000 downloads of files from ftp.ibiblio.org, our main FTP site at the time. This does not count downloads from other FTP sites, of course. Why are there more downloads than searches? Because people who are already familiar with getting PG texts can skip the website search and download straight from the FTP sites.

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R.18. What are the most popular books?

We very rarely do statistics, but on one occasion in late 1999 when we did, we found the top author searches to be:

1. shakespeare
2. poe
3. doyle
4. melville
5. dante
6. joyce
7. shaw
8. christie
9. conrad
10. porter
11. verne
12. hemingway
13. darwin
14. miller
15. woolf
16. zola
17. king
18. eliot
19. churchill
20. smith
21. twain

and the top individual books searched for to the point of downloading were:

1. Lady Susan, by Jane Austen
2. 1st PG Collection of Edgar Allan Poe
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
5. A Christmas Carol, by Dickens
6. The King James Bible
7. Twelve Stories and a Dream, by H.G. Wells
8. Stories by Modern American Authors
9. Lock and Key Library, Magic & Real Detectives
10. [Hans Christian] Andersen's Fairy Tales
11. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

These numbers vary a lot. When a movie based on a classic is released, downloads of that eBook go through the roof!

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About Downloading and Using Project Gutenberg eBooks

R.19. Should I download a ZIP or a TXT file?

If you know how to unzip a file, then downloading the zip is faster. For some non-text eBooks that contain multiple files, like HTML with included images, only a zip file may be available. For some other formats, like MP3 or MPEG, there may not be a zipped version available because the native format of the file is already compressed enough that zipping it doesn't save much.

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R.20. I've got a ZIP file. What do I do with it?

Unzip it.

If you want a free program, you could try the open source Info-Zip software available at <http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/tools/zip/info-zip/> for Mac, MS-DOS, Unix, Windows and just about everything else you might have.

If you want a commercial program, PKZIP from <http://www.pkware.com> and WinZip from <http://www.winzip.com> are among many popular shareware utilities that allow you to unzip files.

Mac-users using Stuffit Expander may like to set a preference (File / Preferences / Cross Platform) to "Convert text files to Macintosh format . . . When a file is known to contain text". This gets rid of strange characters (linefeeds), which are not wanted on a Mac, at the beginnings of lines. MacZip is another free program for Macs. Mac users can also try ZipIt or other shareware programs available from the Info-Mac archives, e.g. from <ftp://mirrors.aol.com/pub/info-mac/_Compress_&_Translate/>.

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R.21. I tried to unzip my file, but it said the file was corrupt, or damaged.

The chances are that it didn't download correctly. Try downloading it again. If you don't succeed the second time, try downloading the unzipped version.

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R.22. I see gibberish onscreen when I click on a book.

To save download time, our etexts are stored in zipped form as well as text form. Zipped files are smaller, and take less time to transfer to your computer, but you need a program to unzip them. If you try to view a zipped file directly, it looks like gibberish.

You can recognize zipped files easily because their filenames end in .zip.

If this happens, either make sure you're asking your browser to Save the file rather than display it (often, you right-click the file and choose Save) or else click on the version of the file that ends in .txt instead of .zip. You don't need a zip program to view .txt files.

Looking at a zip rather than a text file is by far the most common reason for this problem, but there are some others. If you're quite sure that you're not looking at a zip file, then it could be that the file you downloaded is in a character set that your viewer doesn't recognize, like Big-5 [V.78] for Chinese texts, or Unicode [V.77]. If this is the case, you will have to find a viewer that works on your computer for the specified character set. We may also have an ASCII version of the same text available for you--we do try to have ASCII versions for everything [G.17], but some languages, like Chinese, just cannot be sensibly expressed in ASCII.

If you can see most of the characters, enough to be able to make out the text, but there are regular gibberish characters, black squares, empty boxes or obviously missing characters scattered about through words, then you are probably looking at an "8-bit" text [V.79], with accented characters, and your viewer doesn't handle the character set. See the FAQ "I can read the text file, but a few characters appear as black squares, or gibberish" [R.31].

If there are a very few gibberish characters, black squares or obviously missing characters in the text, then it's likely that this was intended to be a 7-bit text, but a few 8-bit characters like the British pound symbol or accented letters slipped through.

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R.23. Can I download and read your books?

Yes. That's what Project Gutenberg is all about--making texts available free to everyone!

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R.24. What am I allowed to do with the books I download?

Most Project Gutenberg e-texts are in the public domain. You can do anything you like with these--you can re-post them on your site, print them, distribute them, translate them to other languages, convert them to other formats, or redistribute them in unchanged form. However, if you distribute versions under the Project Gutenberg trademark, we do impose some conditions, which are explained in the header and/or footer in each text.

Some Project Gutenberg e-texts have copyright restrictions. You can still download and read these, but you may not be allowed to reproduce, modify or distribute them. When browsing or searching on the site, you will see these copyright-restricted texts indicated in the listings. For fuller information about them, download the e-text and read the header or footer of the file, which will spell out the conditions in detail.

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R.25. Does Project Gutenberg know who downloads their books?

No, and we don't want to!

Like any Internet transfer, our sites have to know the IP addresses that contact them; without that, no communication is possible. But we do not trace, hold or examine them beyond what is necessary to deal with any problems or maintain logs or statistics. We never identify IP addresses with people.

Further, we encourage people, sites, schools around the world to mirror, or copy, our texts to their sites. Once that happens, we have no control over them, and we never have any idea who or even how many people access them after that.

Even further, we encourage people to distribute the texts on disks, CDs, paper, and any other storage format they can find. We encourage them to convert the texts to other formats, and share them.

For most people reading this, anonymity is probably not an issue, but you may live in a place or time where reading Paine, or Voltaire, or the Bible, or the Koran, is considered suspicious or even subversive. We don't know who you are, and what we don't know, we can't tell.

Currently (2004), by means of DRM (Digital Rights/Restrictions Management) many commercial publishers can make a list of exactly who is reading which of their eBooks. We don't know, and we don't want to know.

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R.26. I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text. How should I report them?

The first thing to remember is that the people who actually make the corrections you suggest are very experienced, and are used to seeing lots of different types of errata reports. So the exact format of your report isn't really very important--just get the report to us in any clear form that we can understand.

Beyond that, here are some tips to avoid misunderstandings.

It's always helpful if you report the full title, etext number, year and filename of the text you are correcting. We have multiple editions and versions of some texts, like Homer's "Odyssey", and unless you tell us exactly what text you mean, we may have to spend some time searching and guessing.

Especially, please check and report the exact filename of the text. It is amazingly common for people to report problems with abcde10.txt, when abcde11.txt is already posted, and has these and other errors already fixed.

When there are only a few errors, it's usually easiest to cut and paste the line or lines where the error is into your e-mail, with your comment.

It can also be useful to give the line number of the place where the error is, and some people who check texts regularly do this. If this seems natural to you, do it; if it doesn't, don't.

An ideal report for a typical errata list might look like:

    Title: The Odyssey, by Homer
           Translated by Butcher & Lang
           April, 1999  [Etext #1728]
    File:  dyssy08.txt

 Line 884:
   back Telemachus, who bas now resided there for a month.
     "bas" should be "has"

 Line 1491:
   Ithaca yet stands. But I wouldask thee, friend, concerning
      "would" and "ask" are run together here

 Line 1563:
   in his father's seat and the elders gave place to him
      This is the end of a paragraph, and needs a period at end.

 Line 15346-7:
    'Hearken to me now, ye men of Ithaca, to the
    will say. Through your own cowardice, my friends, have
       I think there is something missing between "the" and "will"

But the following would get the job done as well:

 
    In Homer's Odyssey, translated by Butcher and Lang, from /etext99,
    file dyssy08.txt, I found the following errors:

    Telemachus, who bas now resided   
    change "bas" to "has"

    But I wouldask thee,
    "would ask" run together

    and the elders gave place to him  
    needs period

    ye men of Ithaca, to the
    will say.                         
    line missing between "the" and "will"?

Where there are more than, say, 50 changes, it may be easiest all round just to submit a corrected version of the file. However, if you do this, please do not re-wrap the paragraphs unless it is absolutely necessary (and I can't think of a case where it might be, since we can re-wrap texts too); we need to check your suggestions before reposting, and if the file is very different, it is difficult and time-consuming for us to find your real changes among all of the changes in the lines. Instead just add a comment in your mail like "I think this text needs rewrapping."

If you are a regular, and have used any of the standard Gutenberg tools like Gutcheck or Guiguts to find errors, please don't list these in your mail. We will be running gutcheck and a basic spellcheck as standard on every updated text that we repost, and it just wastes time to have lots of duplicates. You might just mention something like "gutcheck finds a lot of bad quotes"; we'll know what to do from there. Please concentrate your report on the errors that we won't find, or might miss, with a standard automated scan.

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R.27. I've found some obvious typos in a Project Gutenberg text. Who should I report them to?

The Posting Team, who post the books, also make the corrections, and ultimately, the corrections need to go to them.

Many producers put their e-mail addresses in their texts, specifically so that readers can contact them when errors are found. If you see that in your text, you should try to contact the producer first. This is especially true if the corrections aren't obvious, as in the case of missing words. The producer is likely to have the original book, and will probably be able to confirm your corrections without visiting a library. If the book needs the corrections, the producer can then notify the Posting Team.

If you get no response from the producer, or if there is no e-mail address listed, or if the corrections are small and obvious, you should send them to the email address for reporting errors listed on the Contacts Page where members of the posting team will deal with them.

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R.28. I've reported some typos. What will happen next?

This varies wildly. Sometimes, you may just get a response e-mail in a day or three saying thanks, and that we've fixed the typo. This is normal when you've just reported one or a few obvious typos.

Where there is some text missing, or the changes you suggest are otherwise not obvious, we may have to find someone with an eligible copy of the book to confirm the changes, and that might take time. Normally, you will get an e-mail explaining that within a week.

Sometimes, even though you've noticed only one or two small typos, one of the Posting Team who was looking at it may find many more, and decide that the whole text needs to be re-proofed. This may also take time.

If the text needs a lot of changes, we may post a new EDITION [R.35] of it, with a new filename: e.g. abcde10.txt may become abcde11.txt. In this case, you will receive a copy of the e-mail sent to the posted list announcing the new file. Our current rule of thumb is that we create a new edition when we make twelve significant changes, but we judge each on a case-by-case basis, and especially will usually not make a new edition if the original was posted recently.

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R.29. I've got the text file, and I can read it, but it seems to be double-spaced or it has control characters like ^J or ^M at the end of every line.

This is most often seen on Mac or Linux. If you want to dig into why this effect happens, see the FAQ "Why use a CR/LF at end of line?" [V.85].

Perhaps viewing it in a different editor or viewer will help, but it's usually easiest just to globally replace all of the control characters (if you see them) with nothing, or to replace all double line-ends with single line-ends.

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R.30. When I print out the text file, each line runs over the edge of the page and looks bad.

If you have a file ending in .txt from Project Gutenberg, it is usually formatted with about 70 characters per line, and with a Carriage Return/Line Feed pair (also known as a "Hard Return" or a "Paragraph Mark") at the end of every line.

This is the most widely accepted format for text files, but it's not ideal on all computers and all programs. 70 characters per line means that if you are using an unusually large or small font to print it, lines may wrap around or not reach across the page. The hard return means that on some systems, the lines may appear double-spaced.

Unfortunately, we can't advise you how best to format texts on all systems, mostly because we don't know every system! Here are a couple of tips you might try:

If your font is too big or too small, try setting the font to Courier size 10 or Times size 12. It may not be ideal, but it mostly works.

In a word processor, you may be able to remove the Hard Returns, but beware! if you remove too many, the whole text will become one paragraph. One common formula for removing the HRs goes like this:

1. First, all paragraphs and separate lines should be separated by two HRs, so that you can see one blank line between them. Where they aren't, as in the case of a table of contents or lines of verse, add the extra HRs to make them so.
2. Replace All occurrences of two HRs with some nonsense character or string that doesn't exist in the text, like ~$~.
3. Replace All remaining HRs with a space.
4. Replace your inserted string ~$~ with one HR.

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R.31. I can read the text file, but a few characters appear as black squares, or gibberish.

The text is using some character set that your editor or viewer isn't. For example, the text is using ISO-8859-1, and your viewer is using Codepage 850--or vice versa. You can see the plain ASCII characters, but non-ASCII characters like accented letters display as nonsense.

Look at the top of the file for a clue to the character set encoding: if it's there, it may help you to find which editor, or font, or viewer you should be using.

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R.32. Can I get a handheld device for reading PG texts? Which device should I get?

To read eBooks on a handheld, you need three things: the eBook content itself (which you can get from PG and other sites), a device (which I will sometimes call a PDA, even though technically, the RocketBook isn't a PDA) and the reader software that runs on the PDA.

In mid-2002, there are three main families of handheld devices people use for reading eBooks: Palms, Pocket PCs and RocketBooks (or their successor, REB1100s). In general, it is possible to use any of these in combination with any common type of personal computer.

Palms are very common, especially when you count not just the Palm <http://www.palmone.com/us/> itself, but PalmOS-based devices from other manufacturers, like:

Because of the number of makers of PalmOS-based devices, you can buy them with lots of combinations of features--color screen, audio, different memory sizes. Of course, Palms have other applications besides eBook reading. Palms are the smallest and most portable of the three classes, and tend to have the best battery life for travelling, but they also have the smallest screen. Just about all reader software will run on Palms, except the Microsoft Reader, which runs only on Pocket PCs, but you don't need the Microsoft Reader for Project Gutenberg eBooks.

In Pocket PCs, the Compaq iPaq <http://www.hp.com> and the Dell Axim <http://www.dell.com> are by far the most common at the end of 2003. More expensive and bulkier than a Palm, they have a bigger screen. Like the Palms, they can perform many functions besides reading eBooks. Only Pocket PCs can support the Microsoft Reader, but this is not necessary for reading Project Gutenberg eBooks.

The RocketBook, and its successor the Gemstar REB1100, are quite different from the others. These were built specifically for reading eBooks, and do not have additional functions. They are not, technically, PDAs. Their screens are bigger, and excellent for reading, but do not offer color. They also don't offer a choice of readers--the dedicated reader is built-in to the device. Both of them require the eBooks you load to be formatted for their reader, and files made for them usually have the extension .rb for RocketBook. The REB1100 did not come with the RocketLibrarian, which is the program you run on your PC to turn an etext into a RocketBook file, but people are still making .rb files, and the RocketLibrarian is still available and popular among an enthusiastic group of Rocket users. (The REB1200 is entirely different from the REB1100, and, as far as we know, PG etexts cannot easily be transferred to it.)

In late 2003, Gemstar discontinued their eBook reader range, but there are many still around.

In summary, the Rocket/REB1100 is a dedicated reader, with a good screen, but limited to what it does.

Palms are relatively cheap and common, with a wide range of options, and the capacity to function as PDAs as well. They can run all common readers except the Microsoft one.

The iPaq <http://www.hp.com> has a good color screen, but is bulkier than a Palm, and can run lots of readers, including the Microsoft one, but not all Palm readers are available for Pocket PC. Like Palms, the iPaq can do other jobs besides displaying eBooks.

Different people make different choices among these for reading their eBooks, and they all work well; it's a matter of personal taste.

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R.33. How can I read a PG eBook on my PDA (Palm, iPaq, Rocket . . .)

To read a book on your PDA, you need to get the file into a format that your reader software understands. Each PDA reader program will work only with a specific format of file. Some will read several formats, but, in general, it's a jungle of competing options.

Unless you use a Rocket or REB1100, you will need to install at least one reader program, and many veteran readers install two or three to deal with different formats. There are many of them available. In an internal poll mid-2002 of Gutenberg volunteers who use PDAs,

were our favored choices for reader programs.

Further, the process may be different depending on which reader software you're using. Each format that a reader understands has one or more converter programs that run on your PC, and turn the plain text file into that format. So in general, you have to:

1. Download the PG text
2. Edit the text for the layout the converter wants (often HTML).
3. Use the converter to create a file of the format the reader wants.
4. Transfer the converted file to your PDA.

If all this sounds too complicated, remember that many people take and convert PG texts into many formats, and offer them for download from their sites. Of course, there is no guarantee that someone will have converted the particular eBook you want, but there are lots of options. Try Blackmask <http://www.blackmask.com>, which lists thousands of texts already converted for Mobipocket, iSilo, RocketBook and the Microsoft Reader.

There are many other sites that serve pre-converted PG texts.

MemoWare <http://www.memoware.com> is also a useful resource for converted eBooks, and has lots of information, including an excellent map of the readers and formats jungle at <http://www.memoware.com/mw.cgi/?screen=help_format>

Steve Sakoman's site at http://www.sakoman.net/ takes plain texts from PG and produced automated conversions to HTML and PalmDOC PDB.

If you're "rolling your own", you'll probably need to convert our plain texts to HTML at some point, because a lot of converters require HTML as input, and this is a common theme in readers' explanations of how they get texts onto their PDAs. Don't panic! You don't have to be a HTML wizard to do this--in fact, you don't need to know anything about HTML at all! Usually, it's just a matter of removing some line ends and Saving As HTML. You won't get a lot of fancy markup, or images out of thin air, but you will get the book.

One of the main things you usually have to do in making HTML is unwrap the lines. If you're making your HTML manually, this is usually done by replacing two paragraph marks with some nonsense marker like @@Z@@, replacing all single paragraph marks with a space, and replacing the nonsense marker with a paragraph mark. After unwrapping, the text can just be Saved As HTML.

This has the drawback that lines that shouldn't be wrapped--like poetry, tables or letter headings, will be wrapped. You may have to go through the text and add extra line breaks for these.

There are some applications that specifically assist with auto-converting text into HTML:

GutenMark <http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark> was specifically written for the purpose, and knows enough about PG conventions to do a very good job.

InterParse <http://www.interparse.com> is a Windows-based generic text parser that is very easy and intuitive to use.

The World Wide Web Consortium lists some other options at <http://www.w3.org/Tools/Misc_filters.html>

If you're using a RocketBook or REB1100, you don't have either the choices or the confusion to deal with. One of our volunteers who uses a RocketBook offered this recipe for getting a PG text onto a RocketBook:

On converting to Rocket:

1. Download text file.
2. Using your utility for showing formatting, enter your word processing program's edit mode.
3. Replace all double paragraph marks with some nonsense sequence that can't possibly actually be there, such as @@Z@@.
4. Replace all single paragraph marks with one single space (enter).
5. Replace your nonsense sequence with one paragraph mark.
6. Convert all your double spaces to single spaces. Repeat this until you get "0" for how many replacements were made.
7. Save in HTML.
8. Go into your Rocket Librarian. Use "import file using Rocket Librarian." Go and pick up the file, which will be automatically converted to .rb in this process.

This sounds long, but it usually takes me under three minutes except for a very long text. I've never taken longer than five minutes. You can just go in and pick up the text file with Rocket Librarian, but what you get onscreen doing this looks very odd. Steps 2-7 are not essential, and if I'm in a hurry to read something once I might skip them, but if it's something I know I want to keep I use them.

This formula is not ideal for poetry or blank verse--if you want to keep the lines unwrapped, you should avoid removing the paragraph marks.

Another volunteer, who reads on Mobipocket <http://www.mobipocket.com> offered this suggestion:

I use the MobiPocket Publisher, available free from www.mobipocket.com. It wants to take a HTML file as input, so the first thing I have to do is convert my PG text to HTML.

I usually do this by running GutenMark, available at <http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark>. I can also do it in Microsoft Word using the following sequence:

• Edit / Replace / Special and choose Paragraph Mark twice (or, from replace, you can type in ^p^p to get two Paragraph Marks) and replace with @@@@. Replace All. This saves off real paragraph ends by marking them with a nonsense sequence.
• Now Replace one Paragraph Mark (^p) with a space. Replace All. This removes the line-ends.
• Finally, replace @@@@ with one Paragraph Mark. Replace All. This brings back the Paragraph Ends.
• Now I can Save As HTML.

GutenMark does a better job of converting to HTML than my simple Word formula, since it recognizes standard PG features, and sometimes Mobipocket doesn't like the HTML produced from Word--it complains of a missing file, or doesn't recognize quotation marks.

Having got my HTML file, I open Mobipocket Publisher, choose "Project Gutenberg", Add the File I created, and just Publish it to MobiPocket .PRC format. Then I pick it up on my iPaq the next time I sync. The whole process takes two or three minutes, and the results, since I discovered GutenMark, are good.

I recently came across InterParse 4 at <http://www.interparse.com>. It doesn't have the built-in knowledge of GutenMark, so the results aren't as good, but it's really easy to use, and you can see the effect of your changes onscreen as you do it. For most PG books, all you have to do is just Open the text file and choose Options / Remove all CRLFs (Except at Paragraph End), then Convert / Text to HTML and Save As the HTML filename you want. Quick and painless.

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About the Files

R.34. What types of files are there, and how do I read them?

The vast majority of our files are plain text. You can read these with any editor or text viewer or browser. Some are HTML. You can read these with any browser.

For a fuller listing of other file types, and how to read them, please see the Formats FAQ [F.2].

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R.35. What do the filenames of the texts mean?

We have to divide this question into two answers, for books up to 10,000, and books after 10,000 (or older books reposted after we hit 10,000).

Books after 10,000 -- the new naming scheme

Since eBook number 10,000, we name our files based on the PG etext number; thus, the base of the name simply reflects the order in which the book was posted. 12345.txt is just the 12,345th book posted.

Also, when we correct an older book, we may repost it into the new naming scheme rather than just replacing it in the old scheme. When we do this, its naming conventions are the same as if it had been numbered after 10,000, and, additionally, we add a subdirectory "old/", into which we put all of the older files, so that they are preserved for anyone who wants to examine them. In this way, we will eventually move all e-books to the new naming scheme.

Formats or character sets other than plain ASCII then get extensions added to indicate the type of file. Character sets get digits; formats get letters. The most common of these are:

• -0 for Unicode
• -8 for 8-bit plain text
• -h for HTML
• -m for MP3
• -r for RTF
• -t for TeX
• -x for XML

Thus, eBook number 12345 may -- fairly typically -- have the files 12345.txt, 12345.zip, 12345-8.txt, 12345-8.zip, 12345-h.htm and 12345-h.zip, as well as other possible character sets or formats.

Other formats get appropriate three-letter extensions, like -pdf.

The complete set of naming rules for post-10K eBooks is:

1. Directory structure: the directory for the eBook shall be contained in a hierarchy of directories, each one a single digit, being all the digits of the etext number except the last, in order. The name of the directory for the eBook itself shall be the number of the eBook. Thus, eBook #12345 will be contained in:

/1/2/3/4/12345/

and 123456 in

/1/2/3/4/5/123456/

Where an e-book is a reposting of a pre-10,000 text, we will create an old/ subdirectory, containing all of the old files associated with that text. For example, consider:

Mike, by P. G. Wodehouse 7423

The corrected, reposted files will be found in:

/7/4/2/7423/

and the older, pre-10K files will all be held in:

/7/4/2/7423/old/

2. Filenames within the eBook's directory shall be the eBook's number, with extensions preceded by a minus sign, indicating character set or format.

a) A file without a character set or format indicator is plain 7-bit ASCII. [In practice, we might allow a few 8-bit characters -- up to a dozen or two -- and still call it ASCII]

* Example: 12345.txt [7-bit plain vanilla ASCII]

b) Character sets, for text files, get digits:

• -0 Unicode (including UTF-7, UTF-8, UCS-4, etc.)
• -5 Big-5
• -8 8-bit (including ISO 8859, Codepages, etc.)

* Example: 12345-8.txt [Text in some 8-bit encoding]

c) File types get letters. Ideally, one-letter formats should be standards-based and editable. For now, the following is the list of single-letter formats.

• -h HTML
• -x XML
• -r RTF
• -t TEX
• -m MP3

Other formats get preferably three (more if necessary) letters.

• -lit LIT
• -pdb PDB
• -doc Word DOC
• -mpg MPEG

* Example: 12345-x.xml [XML]
* Example: 12345-pdf.pdf [PDF]

When more than one variant of a format is posted, the poster will add additional letters as appropriate.

* Example: If a HTML of 12345 has been posted as 12345-h, and we are posting a new HTML if the same eBook broken into pages, it might be posted as 12345-hp.

3. Under the eBook's directory are all files for that eBook. The .txt files will be in the eBook's main directory, as well as other formats that require only one file (PDF, RTF...). Formats that are likely to require ancillary files get a subdirectory named for file type, with the file within. This is to make it predictable to find the formats, and to allow for any ancillary files to be stored in the subdirectory.

Formats that get a subdirectory include: HTML, TeX and XML. Formats that do not get a subdirectory include: PDF, RTF, LIT, PDB.

The subdir name for each shall be the name of the primary file that lives there.

* Example: The file 12345-h.htm will be at /12345/12345-h/12345-h.htm , and any ancillary files (such as JPEG or CSS) will be in (or below) the same subdirectory.

4. A .zip for each format will be in the main eBook directory. The .zip will unzip to a subdirectory if it's a multi-file format from #3 above, otherwise it will simply unzip a file. In the case of some pre-compressed formats, such as MP3, a .zip may not make sense, in which case it may be omitted.

* Example: 12345-h.zip will be at 12345/ , and when unzipped will create a subdirectory 12345-h/ with 12345-h.htm and any ancillary files.

* Example: 12345-pdf.zip will be at 12345/, and when unzipped will create 12345-pdf.pdf in the current directory.

5. Versions and editions: in the case of a new EDITION, a corrected file, the original file is renamed with an extension of its own posted date .yyyymmdd, and then replaced by the corrected file. So 12345.txt, when replaced, becomes 12345.txt.20030101 and the new, corrected file becomes 12345.txt.

New EDITIONS will get a "Most recently updated: " line added to their standard metadata.

The Release Date in the standard header will be the month and year of the actual first posting of that eBook.

6. Each file (e.g., 12345-h.htm) should have a Project Gutenberg header, metadata and footer. In cases where the file is not editable (such as PDF), or where adding a header isn't realistic (such as MP3), the header, metadata and footer can go in a "readme" file named for the file, with "-readme" added before the extension. The "readme" file shall be in the same directory as the file to which it refers, and shall be included in the ZIP file for that format. Where the format is multifile, there should be only one "readme" for all files.

* Example: "12345-pdf-readme.txt" for the file 12345-pdf.pdf Note: If we were able to add the standard header prior to creating the PDF file, it could be distributed as any other editable format without a readme.

* Example: "12345-m-readme.txt" for the files 12345-m-001.mp3, 12345-m-002.mp3, etc.

7. The GUTINDEX file(s) will have entries of the form:

Title, by Author eBook#

eBook # will be in 5 digits, followed by a "C" if copyrighted and "*" if reserved. "by " will be omitted if there is not enough space. Any additional data, such as a translator or subtitle, will be on a following line or lines surrounded by square brackets [] and indented by two spaces.

GUTINDEX will have approximate date indicators such as:

** MARCH 2004: 822 eBooks

The following is an example of etext# 12345, assuming it has ASCII, 8-bit and Unicode text files, a HTML and a HTML broken into pages, an XML, PDF, TeX, and LIT formats, and MP3. Assume that we couldn't edit the LIT, and so had to add a "readme" for that containing the header as in point 6 above.

The directory 12345 for the eBook will be at

1/2/3/4/12345/

and it will contain the files

  1/2/3/4/12345/12345.txt
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-0.txt
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-0.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-8.txt
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-8.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-h.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-hp.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-t.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-x.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-pdf.pdf
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-pdf.zip
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-lit.lit
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-lit-readme.lit
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-lit.zip

and in its subdirectories the further files

  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-h/12345-h.htm
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-h/image1.png
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-hp/12345-hp.htm
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-hp/page2.htm
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-hp/image1.png
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-t/12345-t.tex
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-x/12345-x.xml
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-x/12345-x.xsl
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-x/image1.png
 
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-m/12345-m-readme.txt
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-m/12345-m-001.mp3
  1/2/3/4/12345/12345-m/12345-m-002.mp3

Books up to 10,000 -- the old naming scheme

Older PG files are named for the text, the edition, and the format type.

Nearly all of these PG files are named in "8.3" format--that is, up to eight characters, a dot, and three more characters. (It should have been all of them, by the rules, but we had to break a few.)

The first five characters in the filename are simply a unique name for that text, for example, "Ulysses" by Joyce begins with "ulyss".

If the text has been posted as both a 7-bit and 8-bit text, then the first character of the filename will be a 7 or an 8, to indicate that. For example, we have both 7crmp10 and 8crmp10 for Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

The 6th and 7th characters of the name are the edition number--01 through 99. We normally start at edition 10 (1.0); numbers lower than that indicate that we think the text needs some more work; numbers higher than that mean that someone has corrected the original edition 10.

The 8th character of the filename, if it exists, indicates either the version or the format of the file. When we get a different version of the text based on a different source, we give it an a, b, c, as for example if the text is from a different translation. Where we have posted a text in a different format, we also add an eighth character--"h" for HTML, "x" for XML, "r" for RTF, "t" for TeX, "u" for Unicode are established formats. There have been some experimental postings with "l" for LIT, and "p" for either PRC or PDB.

So, for example:

To make it worse, we don't always stick to these rules, for example:

Some series have special, non-standard names. Shakespeare is named with a digit representing the overall source (First Folio, etc), then "ws", then a series number, so for example 0ws2610, 1ws2610 and 2ws2610 are all versions of "Hamlet". The Tom Swift series is named with a two-digit prefix denoting the series number, then "tom", so for example 01tom10 is "Tom Swift and his Motor-Cycle".

And what should we do with a text from a different source that is formatted as HTML? For example, if dyssy10b is the name of the third translation, what should the HTML version be named? dyssy10bh is obvious, but it uses 9 characters.

The problem, of course, is that we are trying to fit a lot of information into an 8-character filename, and as the collection grows, and the number of formats and versions increases, we come across more pressure on filenames, so while the filename is a good guide to the contents, it's not definitive.

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R.36. What is the difference within PG between an "edition" and a "version"?

We give the name "edition" to a corrected file made from an existing PG text. For example, if someone points out some typos in our file of "War and Peace", we will fix them, and, if enough are found to warrant a "new edition", then instead of just replacing the file wrnpc10.txt, we may make a new file wrnpc11.txt, and leave the original alone. A new edition is always filed under the same year and etext number as the original--it's just an update.

We give the name "version" to a completely independent e-text made from the same original book, but a different source. For example, Homer's Odyssey was translated by many different people, but they all worked from the same book. The translations by Lang, Butler, Pope and Chapman are very different, but they all come from the same root.

Thus, these are all "versions" of Homer's Odyssey. We give them all the same basename--dyssy--and each gets a new number, but we keep the original basename, and add a letter to the filename to indicate that they are "versions" of the same original book:

The differences don't have to be as extreme as this for us to create a new version. "Clotelle"/"Clotel", for example, was a book published multiple times in English by William Wells Brown, and each time, he changed the text. We preserve three different texts of the same book as different versions: clotl10 clotl10a and clotl10b.

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R.37. What is the difference between an "etext" and an "eBook"?

If there is any, it seems to be in the eye of the Marketing Department! Michael Hart started the whole thing, and coined the word "Etext". The term "eBook" is gaining in popularity, even for texts that are not full books, so we've started using that more now.

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R.38. What are the "Etext/Ebook numbers" on the texts?

These are simply a series of numbers. We give one to each etext as it is posted, so the earliest etexts have low numbers and later etexts have higher numbers. Etext number 1 is the Declaration of Independence, the first text that Michael Hart typed in to the mainframe that he was using in 1971.

A few numbers are reserved for books that we hope to have in the PG archive someday; for example, 1984 is reserved for Orwell's classic.

When we improve an text by making some corrections, we call it a new EDITION, and it keeps the same etext number, but when we post a different VERSION of the same text, from a different paper book--like different translations of Homer's Odyssey--each new version gets a new etext number.

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R.39. What do the month and year on the text mean?

Project Gutenberg sets a production target for itself. The idea is that we try to produce X texts in a month, and in books before #10,000, we dated the texts according to what month of our schedule they appear in. For example, if our target for September 2000 was 50 texts, and we actually produced 55, then the last five would be dated October 2000, and we'd get a head-start on the month. At the time of writing the original FAQ, in July 2002, that target was the publication of 200 books per month. However, our actual production far outpaced our targets, with the result that the "head-start" had accumulated so much that in July 2002, we were releasing books scheduled for March, 2004!

The fact that we were so far ahead of schedule makes this quite confusing for newcomers. If it bothers you, just don't think about it! But at least it's better than being behind schedule. We didn't always produce so many books. In the September 1994 newsletter, Michael Hart wrote:

   As always, I am terrified of the prospect of 
   doubling our output to 16 Etexts per month for
   next year, we really need your help!!!

That was when the Project's target was 8 Etexts per month. Today, our target is heading towards 12 eBooks per day!

In books after number 10,000, we abandoned the "Schedule Month, Year" idea, and the "Release Date" is the actual date on which we posted them.

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Copyright FAQ

C.1. What is copyright?

Copyright is a limited monopoly granted to the author of a work. It gives the author the exclusive right, among other things, to make copies of the work, hence the name.

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C.2. Does copyright differ from country to country? From state to state?

Copyright laws are constantly changing all over the world. Each country has its own copyright laws, some within the framework of international treaties, some not. Within the U.S., copyright laws are federal, and do not vary from state to state.

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C.3. What are the copyright laws outside the U.S.?

Sorry, we can't advise on copyright law outside the U.S. We can point you to resources like <http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/okbooks.html> which tries to summarize the various copyright regimes, but we can't guarantee that these are accurate. Even when they are accurate, it is very hard to express some of the subtleties of copyright law in a summary--for example, the question of what constitutes "publication" for copyright purposes is sometimes unclear.

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C.4. Why does Project Gutenberg advise only on U.S. copyright issues?

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is registered in the U.S. as a 501(c)(3) organization, and our two posting servers are situated in the U.S., so we are subject to U.S. copyright law, and only to U.S. copyright law.

Because copyright laws are so tangled and different between countries, not only in the broad sweep but also in the detail, and because Project Gutenberg is subject only to U.S. copyright law, we just don't have the expertise, time or resources to research and advise on the law in other countries.

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C.5. I don't live in the U.S. Do these rules apply to me?

Your country's copyright laws are different from those in the U.S., and understanding and dealing with them is up to you. If you have a book that is in the public domain in your country, but not in the U.S., it is perfectly legal for you to publish it personally there, but we can't.

Similarly, it may be legal for us to publish it here, but not for you to publish it, or perhaps even copy it, where you are.

There are organizations in other countries operating in more liberal copyright regimes that may be able to publish texts that we cannot. For example, Project Gutenberg of Australia at <http://www.gutenberg.net.au> can accept some works not eligible in the U.S.

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C.6. What is the public domain?

The public domain is the set of cultural works that are free of copyright, and belong to everyone equally.

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C.7. What can I do with a text that is in the public domain?

Anything you want! You can copy it, publish it, change its format, distribute it for free or for money. You can translate it to other languages (and claim a copyright on your translation), write a play based on it (if it's a novel), or a novelization (if it's a play). You can take one of the characters from the novel and write a comic strip about him or her, or write a screenplay and sell that to make a movie.

You don't need to ask permission from anyone to do any of this. When a text is in the public domain, it belon