Electronic Books

Project Gutenburg

• Founded by Michael Hart, the Project Gutenberg's philosophy is to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote, and search. The project was developed as a joint effort of hundreds of volunteers. In observance of copyright laws, the project focuses on classic "public domain" literature.
• Goals:
  • Promote literacy, particularly in classic literature.
  • Dispense 1,000,000 books by the year 2001.
  • Provide nominal or free access to classic works of literature.
• There are three portions of the Project Gutenberg Library, that can basically be described as:
  • Light Literature; such as Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan, Aesop's Fables, etc.
  • Heavy Literature; such as the Bible or other religious documents, Shakespeare, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, etc.
  • References; such as Roget's Thesaurus, almanacs, and a set of encyclopedia, dictionaries, etc.
• To Access the Gutenberg Project:

  http://www.gutenberg.net/
  FTP:  mrcnext.cso.uiuc.edu (not between 10am .. 5pm)
  Dir:   /etext
            ../articles	info about the project
            ../etext93	texts added in 1993...

• Example: Lewis Carroll
  • Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
    

Project Bartleby

Founded in 1993, at Columbia University, The Public Library of the Internet project implements strict editorial and quality-control procedures and maintains an archive of selected classic works. The project has four major development goals.

1. Accurate and Loyal Editions Project Bartleby electronic media represent with 100% accuracy an original work--a goal achieved by professional editorial standards that spare no expense in the scanning, data entry, data manipulation, spell-checking, proofreading, and markup protocols. The quality of the services make them suitable for both pleasure reading and professional scholarship.
2. Free Public Access Project Bartleby media are made available free to the public for educational purposes. Allowing freedom of choice to great literature and reference materials is the foundation of any public library--supporting research, building literacy, and abetting democracy.
3. Careful, Well-Researched Selection Project Bartleby converted materials originally in the public domain based on some of the following criteria: (a) preponderance of use in educational settings; (b) fairness to works in all literary and reference fields, especially to alternative authors; (c) availability of extant authoritative editions that will not be superseded in print; (d) reference works of general interest; (e) at the request or as a byproduct of academic projects; (f) regard for authors' place in an intellectual history; and (g) above all, a fundamental love for the literary value of the work.
4. State-of-the-Art Presentation To maintain its role as a leader in electronic-publishing methods, Project Bartleby was committed to explore the presentation and experience of multimedia techniques as they became standardized.

Online Book Initiative

• Project funded by The World (commercial net services provider)
• Provides texts other than just classic literature
• Access

  FTP:  world.std.com (not between 10am .. 5pm)
  Dir:   /obi 
   

Further Exploration 

• Book Stacks
  
• The On-line Books Page
  
• Yahoo: Electronic Literature:Collections
  
• Hypertext Literature

Curator: Computer Science Dept : VA TECH. © Copyright 1998.
Last Updated: 10/7/98