Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's PracticesNewby, Gregory B.
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Forty-Five Years of Digitizing Ebooks: Project Gutenberg's Practices
Newby, Gregory B.
Project Gutenberg
The public domain is, today, understood to be those items that are not
copyrighted. Copyright in the United States, where Project Gutenberg
operates, is defined as a temporary monopoly by authors (or their
agents), in order to benefit from commercial potential and thereby
fostering continued creation:
“To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for
limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their
respective Writings and Discoveries” (United States Constitution,
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5).
ITEMS ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN FOR ONE OF THREE REASONS
1. They are ineligible for copyright. In the US, this includes works
created by the US Government;
2. Their copyright term has expired; or
3. They are granted to the public domain by the creator or their agent
(i.e., the rights holder).
Because of its emphasis on literary works, Project Gutenberg has mostly
focused on items for which the copyright term has expired. Until 1998,
this included items published 75 years earlier. For example, items from
1920 entered the public domain when their copyrights expired in 1995.
The US Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 changed the term to 95 years
for most literary works, so new items (from 1923 onward) will not enter
the public domain before 2019.
[Illustration: 0003]
Figure 2: Michael Hart’s sunroom workspace in his Urbana home
There are over one million published works from 1923 and earlier, and
these are the main items that Project Gutenberg continues to digitize
and distribute. In addition, there were approximately one million works
published in the United States from 1923-1964 but not renewed. Those
items entered the public domain when their first copyright term ended,
28 years after publication. The copyright procedures utilized are online
at https://www.gutenberg.org/help/copyright.html.
COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICY AND EARLY MARKUP
The eBook collection, and all other aspects of Project Gutenberg, relies
on volunteers to grow. Therefore, selection of items is done mainly
by volunteers. Project Gutenberg seeks to limit duplication in the
collection, and instead prefers to add items not already in the
collection. Improvements to existing items is ongoing, mainly when
errata reports are submitted by readers.
It took over two decades to release the first 100 eBooks, with #100
being published in 1994. Most of those first eBooks were collected
through personal interaction with Hart. He would guide or participate in
the digitization process, often developing procedures to deal with new
characteristics. Footnotes and endnotes, italics and underscores, bold
text, and different fonts all presented challenges for representation as
plain text. Primitive markup techniques were developed, such as using an
underscore character to surround underscored text, _like this_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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