Project Gutenberg

I love Project Gutenberg.

Project Gutenberg is the first and largest single collection of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.

Where else can you download the top 100 eBooks for nothing? Here’s the top 10 yesterday.

1. Manual of Surgery Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. by Miles and Thomson (814)
2. The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) by J. Arthur Thomson (447)
3. Manners, Customs, and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period by P. L. Jacob (236)
4. Searchlights on Health by B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols (223)
5. Our Day by William Ambrose Spicer (221)
6. Sex by Henry Stanton (219)
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (211)
8. Illustrated History of Furniture by Frederick Litchfield (202)
9. Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World by Anonymous (184)
10. The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English by Ray Vaughn Pierce (177)

And the top 10 Authors yesterday?

1. Dickens, Charles (897)
2. Twain, Mark (841)
3. Miles, Alexander (814)
4. Thomson, Alexis (814)
5. Austen, Jane (739)
6. Doyle, Arthur Conan, Sir (718)
7. Verne, Jules (717)
8. Shakespeare, William (632)
9. Thomson, J. Arthur (451)
10. Baum, L. Frank (Lyman Frank) (418)

This is also neat:

The World eBook Fair from July 4 – August 4 2008 offers over a million free eBooks for download. Project Gutenberg is a proud content partner. Read more here.

They offer text, audio books, CD/DVDs and digitised sheet music comprising 14.8 GB of text and 91.5 GB of MP3s. Project Gutenberg survives on donations and volunteer work. As they say, even a single cent per download would make a difference.

So, here’s a plan. Create a Gutenberg eBook reader for the iPhone/iPod touch. That will permit browsing of the catalogue, download/caching of books. The reader will not be free but available for a token amount – every penny of which, outside of Apple’s 30%, will go straight to the Gutenberg Project. So, what do you think? On top of that, I’ll host a mirror of the Gutenberg site (the 14.5 GB text files) which this app will use to browse – which should reduce the network costs for Project Gutenberg.

Proposed Feature list

• Browses the entire Gutenberg site mirror
• Provides a quick search function (option to have the index auto-update and be cached locally as it’s only 3 MB uncompressed)
• Formats the text into a couple of readable fonts
• Provides a donate button.
• Download books to the device.
• Automatic Pagination
• Tell a Friend which gives them the link to the Gutenberg mirror
• Optional ‘send page to email’ would be nice.

Offers of help appreciated as are suggestions for features or thoughts about the ‘model’. Note – I’ve not asked Project Gutenberg about this. I just think it’s a good idea. I’d even start my secret project early if I thought some enterprising young souls were interested.