Item — HN Reader

How is this different from this project? https://www.gutenberg.org/

It seems books that are so old they enter the public domain end up at Gutenberg in eBook format.

I had a friend of mine, Mike Crawford, who died. He refused to put his works in a book and put it up on websites. Well nobody can maintain his website but if he did a book and submitted it to Gutenberg under creative commons his work would live on past him. Many books are on websites for free with advertising or donations to keep them running.

1 comments

(1) Project Gutenberg offers fully transcribed books (not just OCR) that are also reformatted to be readable in the browser (or as EPUB's). The Internet Archive just stops at the scanning stage and provides page images.

(2) The Internet Archive apparently has some arrangement to "lend" books that are still under copyright, and most (if not all) of the books that BWB supplies to them are going to fall under that. But they do have a lot of stuff that's totally out of copyright too, with no such restriction. Even PG (as well as its sister site, Distributed Proofreaders) takes a lot of their "source" material from the IA.