I've Just Discovered This....

[badstar]

http://www.gutenberg.org

maybe I'm behind some of the times, but I've just discovered project Gutenberg, a website dedicated to making available, free of charge, the text of thousands of literary works whose copyrights have expired within the US...just a little while ago, I was perusing the poetic works of Percy Shelley.

Comments

[justchelsea.livejournal.com]

Ever seen sacred-texts.org? Same principle, only with public domain religious writings from several dozen religions/belief systems.

[forexample.livejournal.com]

Project Gutenberg goes back to 1971. The history and philosophy (and the philosophy is simultaneously cool and interesting) is at
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_History_and_Philosophy_of_Project_Gutenberg_by_Michael_Hart

Back in 1992 one of the full time staff at JHU was scanning books in for it. He had shelves of paperbacks with loose pages held together with rubber bands.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

Congratulations on your discovery! You have much good reading in store for you.

For a while, I volunteered at Distributed Proofreaders project - a group that scans, OCRs and proofreads public domain texts to add to PG. :)

[sherarara.livejournal.com]

You can also view pages from other countries, for instance Australia, where the copyright whatevers run out at different times than in the US. Certain things are available from foreign sites that aren't available in the US.

But you shouldn't view those pages, because that would be illegal.