Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Project Gutenberg, the long-running free digital library of public-domain books, is rolling out major improvements to its website, formats, and mobile experience while keeping its minimalist, accessible ethos. Contributors describe new EPUB3 support, forthcoming PDFs, OPDS feeds, offline catalogs, and ongoing UI work for book and homepage pages, alongside challenges like bot traffic and country-specific copyright blocks. Readers broadly praise the project as a cultural treasure, compare it with related efforts like Standard Ebooks and Librivox, and suggest refinements such as better typography, date-based search, and richer handling of illustrations.

Site Improvements & Design

  • Recent major redesign praised: better mobile styling, EPUB3 support, improved book pages coming soon.
  • Users appreciate the “no-frills,” fast, JS-optional design and want that preserved.
  • Some miss the ultra-simple old layout on e-ink devices; requests for a “lite”/minimal version.
  • Reported UI bugs: odd scrolling of front-page book lists on mobile, Android Chrome menu not closing, tiny scrollbars clipping text.
  • Suggestions: better pagination, line length control, notes, and easier search/filtering by original publication date.

Formats, Typesetting, and Quality

  • Historically text-heavy; now most titles have EPUB3, HTML, plain text; PDFs “in the works” and some want them, others warn of poor e-reader support.
  • OCR errors remain a concern; Distributed Proofreaders is recommended for higher quality text.
  • Handling of illustrations depends on upstream scan quality; public-domain constraints apply.
  • Internal git histories per book exist; users request public version histories and clearer errata workflows.

Access, Scraping, and Infrastructure

  • Official recommendation: use RDF/XML catalog dumps, tarballs, /cache/epub/feeds, OPDS, ZIMs instead of crawling.
  • Heavy bot/AI crawler traffic is degrading performance; patterns resemble DDoS from many single-request IPs.
  • Mitigations debated: IP blocking, AS blocking, captchas, proof-of-work, third-party anti-bot tools; concerns about usability, battery drain, and misclassifying real users.
  • Idea of feeding scrapers bogus data is strongly criticized as dangerous if humans are misclassified.

Licensing, Ecosystem, and E-Readers

  • PG license requires a 20% royalty on profits if their license text is retained with commercial redistributions; otherwise pure public-domain text can be used freely.
  • E-reader vendors rarely expose PG as a “store,” likely due to incentives to push paid content.
  • Workarounds: built-in browsers, KOReader, Calibre, Standard Ebooks, LibriVox integrations, and various third-party apps.

Legal and Geographic Restrictions

  • Past and present blocks in Germany and Italy discussed.
  • Italian block stems from a criminal case targeting piracy where PG domains were included; interaction with national copyright (especially translators’ rights) is contentious and unresolved.
  • Some argue for clearer legal status messages (e.g., HTTP 451) instead of generic 404s.

Community Sentiment

  • Strong, repeated appreciation for PG as a public-good, long-lived, volunteer-driven project.
  • Users share personal stories of learning, accessibility, and lifelong reading enabled by PG.