I recently updated my Future History: Spacefaring Societies, Resources and Logistics essay, that expands on the Afterwords and References chapters in my e-novel ‘The Universe–or Nothing.’ The novel (2006) is archived in the Project Gutenberg Library Archive Foundation (PGLAF) from where it may be freely downloaded at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/18257
We’ve just posted the 100th eBook. It’s from 1904, seems not to have been reprinted, and is a very interesting account of Toronto’s legal establishment in the 19th century: it’s a rather spectacular addition to the collection. Here’s the description from the website:
2008/03/25: As our 100th eBook, we’ve chosen this beautifully illustrated history of Toronto’s lawyers and judiciary – A true rarity and a delight to read, packed with anecdotes. You may end up thinking that the history of Toronto is the history of its lawyers!
Many of us dream of a universal digital library freely available on the web, i.e. available anywhere and at any time. Thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive and others, we are getting there, at least for the books from public domain. The process began a while ago with a few pioneers – It is running at full speed now. We still need to see copyright issues worked out in order to provide free access to as many works as possible. We still need large scale knowledge-building projects to get reliable reference, scholarly and educational content. We still need better quality OCR technology and in the future, go back to the original image files to provide a higher quality book. We still need more efforts, there are currently 25 million books belonging to the public domain and as of mid-2007, just over 2 million freely available on the internet.
Las líneas que siguen están dedicadas a todos los voluntarios del Proyecto Gutenberg en los cinco continentes. Gracias a ellos, más de 20.000 clásicos de la literatura mundial ya están disponibles en la red, en una versión gratuita y de gran calidad, con una previsión de una biblioteca de un millón de libros.
En 1971, Michael Hart creó el Proyecto Gutenberg con el objetivo de difundir gratuitamente bajo forma electrónica las obras literarias que pertenecían al dominio público. Hasta hoy, nadie consiguió obrar con más éxito para poner los clásicos de la literatura mundial a disposición de todos. Ni tampoco crear con tan pocos gastos una red tan inmensa de voluntarios en el mundo entero, sin derroche de competencias y de energía.