Project Gutenberg (PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize and archive cultural works, as well as to "encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks." It was founded in 1971 by American writer Michael S. Hart and is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of books in the public domain. The Project tries to make these as free as possible, in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. As of 20 May 2020, Project Gutenberg had reached 62,108 items in its collection of free eBooks.
Michael Stern Hart was an American author, best known as the inventor of the e-book and the founder of Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make e-books freely available via the Internet. He published e-books years before the Internet existed via the ARPANET, and later on BBS networks and Gopher servers.
Distributed Proofreaders is a web-based project that supports the development of e-texts for Project Gutenberg by allowing many people to work together in proofreading drafts of e-texts for errors. As of June 2020, the site had digitized 39,000 titles.
Carson of Venus is a science fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the third book in the Venus series. Burroughs wrote the novel in July and August 1937. It was serialized in 1938 in six weekly installments from January 8 to February 12 in Argosy, the same publication where the previous two Venus novels appeared. It was published in book form a year later from Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Burroughs originally submitted the novel to a number of the "slick" magazines: Liberty, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and Ladies' Home Journal. All rejected the story.
Open Library is an online project intended to create "one web page for every book ever published". Created by Aaron Swartz, Brewster Kahle, Alexis Rossi, Anand Chitipothu, and Rebecca Malamud, Open Library is a project of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization. It has been funded in part by grants from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. Open Library provides online digital copies in multiple formats, created from images of many public domain, out-of-print, and in-print books.
Lost On Venus is a science fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the second book in the Venus series. It was first serialized in the magazine Argosy in 1933 and published in book form two years later.
Escape on Venus is a science fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fourth book in the Venus series. It consists of four interconnected stories published in Fantastic Adventures between 1941 and 1942: "Slaves of the Fish Men", "Goddess of Fire", "The Living Dead," and "War on Venus". A collected edition of these stories was published in 1946.
LibriVox is a group of worldwide volunteers who read and record public domain texts creating free public domain audiobooks for download from their website and other digital library hosting sites on the internet. It was founded in 2005 by Hugh McGuire to provide "Acoustical liberation of books in the public domain" and the LibriVox objective is "To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet".
Public Domain Day is an observance of when copyrights expire and works enter into the public domain. This legal transition of copyright works into the public domain usually happens every year on 1 January based on the individual copyright laws of each country.
Music is considered to be in the public domain if it meets any of the following criteria:
A copyfraud is a false copyright claim by an individual or institution with respect to content that is in the public domain. Such claims are wrongful, at least under U.S. and Australian copyright law, because material that is not copyrighted is free for all to use, modify and reproduce. Copyfraud also includes overreaching claims by publishers, museums and others, as where a legitimate copyright owner knowingly, or with constructive knowledge, claims rights beyond what the law allows.
The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a subscription-based project for the creation of a virtual library of public-domain music scores. Since its launch on February 16, 2006, over 495,000 scores and 59,000 recordings for over 152,000 works by over 18,000 composers have been uploaded. Based on the wiki principle, the project uses MediaWiki software, with an iOS app released July 10, 2018 and an Android app released March 28, 2019. Since June 6, 2010, the IMSLP also includes public domain and licensed recordings in its scope, to allow for study by ear.
Project Gutenberg Canada, also known as Project Gutenburg of Canada, is a Canadian digital library founded July 1, 2007. Their website allows Canadian residents to create e-texts and download books that are otherwise not in the public domain in other countries.
Distributed Proofreaders Canada is a volunteer organization that converts books into digital format and releases them as public domain books in formats readable by electronic devices. It was launched in December 2007 and as of 2020 has published about 4,600 books. Books that are released are stored on a book archive called Faded Page. While its focus is on Canadian publications and preserving Canadiana, it also includes books from other countries as well. It is modelled after Distributed Proofreaders, and performs the same function as similar projects in other parts of the world such as Project Gutenberg in the United States and Project Gutenberg Australia.
A free content, libre content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, work of art, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work.
Land of Terror is a 1944 fantasy novel by American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs, the sixth in his series about the fictional "hollow earth" land of Pellucidar. It is the penultimate novel in the series and the last to be published during Burrough's lifetime. Unlike most of the other books in the Pellucidar series, this novel was never serially published in any magazine because it was rejected by all of Burroughs's usual publishers.
The public domain consists of all the creative work to which no exclusive intellectual property rights apply. Those rights may have expired, been forfeited, expressly waived, or may be inapplicable.
E-book lending or elending is a practice in which access to already-purchased downloads or online reads of e-books is made available on a time-limited basis to others. It works around the digital rights management built into online-store-published e-books by limiting access to a purchased e-book file to the borrower, resulting in loss of access to the file by the purchaser for the duration of the borrowing period.
The Earth Gods is a literary work written by poet and philosopher Kahlil Gibran. It was originally published in 1931, also the year of the author's death. The story is structured as a dialogue between three unnamed earth gods, only referred to as First God, Second God, and Third God. As is typical of Gibran's works, it is a classic that focuses on spiritual concepts.
Standard Ebooks is a not-for-profit platform that curates, refines, and republishes existing copies of freely available public domain e-books no longer protected by U.S. copyright law. Its code is open source and is available for contribution from volunteers. Standard Ebooks sources its titles from sources like Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Wikisource, among others.
