With the number of ebooks on the rise, three main sections were set up:
(a) “Light Literature”, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
Through the Looking-Glass, Peter Pan and Aesop’s Fables; (b) “Heavy
Literature”, such as the Bible, Shakespeare’s works, Moby Dick and
Paradise Lost; (c) “Reference Literature”, such as Roget’s Thesaurus,
almanacs, and a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries. (A more detailed
classification was created later on.)
“Light Literature” was the main section in number of ebooks. As
explained on the website in 1998: “The Light Literature Collection is
designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the
person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we
hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etext of Peter
Pan when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they
read Alice in Wonderland after seeing it on TV. We have also been told
that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg
etext releases (from Moby Dick in The Wrath of Khan; a Peter Pan quote
finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to
Through the Looking-Glass in JFK. This was a primary concern when we
chose the books for our libraries. We want people to be able to look up
quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books,
easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy-to-
find etext format.”
Project Gutenberg's goal is more about selecting books intended for the
general public than providing authoritative editions. As explained on
the website in 1998: “We do not write for the reader who cares whether
a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ‘:’ or a ‘;’ between its clauses.
We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% accurate
in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our
proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public
is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by
a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an
‘authoritative edition’ we will have to wait some time until this
becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions
of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a
scholarly level.”
The etexts, later called ebooks, were stored in the simplest way, using
the low set of ASCII, called Plain Vanilla ASCII, for them to be read
on any hardware and software. As a text file, a book could be easily
copied, indexed, searched, analyzed, and compared with other books.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account