Editor's Note:  We are pleased to present a series of articles by Marie Lebert.  Marie writes from Paris and these articles are an adaptation of articles that have appeared in Actua Litté.  The link to the original article, in French, appears at the end of each piece.  PB The first ebook was available in July 1971, as eText #1 of Project Gutenberg, a visionary project launched by Michael Hart to create free electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21st century, Project...

Received the following email from Marie Lebert in Paris.  For those of you who can read French: Here are some news for your bilingual (English-French) readers inTeleRead, if relevant.Thank you,Marie,writing from Paris, the City of Lights---We began publishing a collection of 50+ articles to celebrate the 40thanniversary of the ebook (on 4 July 2011), under the title "L'ebook a40 ans" (The ebook is 40 years old).The daily articles detail milestones from 1971 to 2011, per chronological order.Here are the first articles (in French):L'ebook a 40 ans > 1971 > Le Projet Gutenberg, un projet visionnairehttp://www.actualitte.com/dossiers/1448-anniversaire-ebook-projet-gutenberg-visionnaire.htmL'ebook a 40 ans > 1974 >...

On her blog Words About Words, Charlotte English takes a look at the notion that e-book readers are the province of the wealthy, or at least the well-off. There is a perception, she notes, that the readers are expensive, and filling it with e-books is more so if you buy at full price. However, this isn’t quite true in practice. English suggests that the sort of people who would be likely to buy e-books at full price are the same sort who walk into bookstores every weekend and come out with four or five new books each visit—and nobody...

In February, I covered the International Sheet Music Library Project, a sort of Project Gutenberg-like e-repository for public-domain sheet music. As I mentioned at the time, music publishers are not very happy about this site, as it undercuts their lucrative business of selling printed versions of public domain music without having to pay anybody royalties. Lately, this unhappiness has come to a head with the British trade group Music Publishers Association of the UK sending a DMCA takedown notice to the ISMLP’s domain registrar, GoDaddy. Under the terms of the DMCA, GoDaddy had no choice but to disable the...

From Project Gutenberg News, an article by Michael Hart: Today, just six weeks after Project Gutenberg posted its 40,000th internally created book, the 30,000th English ebook has now been placed online: The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia, by Archibald Henry Sayce. Thanks go out to Delphine Lettau, David King and the Online Distributed Proofreaders Team; who by the way, recently created their 20,000th free ebook for PG, and to Al Haines for doing the final preparations and publication. A quick look at our numbers indicates that about one quarter of the internally produced Project Gutenberg books are non-English and...

From the Distributed Proofreaders website (blockquotes omitted).  Congratulations!!! Just half a year after our 10th anniversary, we have reason to celebrate another big milestone. As of today, Distributed Proofreaders has contributed 20,000 unique titles to the bookshelves of Project Gutenberg, free to enjoy for everybody. Out of curiosity, I had a look at the numbers. It took us more than six years to post the first 10,000 books, reaching that milestone in March 2007.  We have doubled that number in just a bit over four years. That’s on average about 2500 projects posted per year! In addition to being the...

Usually these posts are for questions by readers, but I had a burning e-book-related question that I need answered, and I can’t figure out a better place to do it than here. I’m just about to start preparing the Kobo Reader my Dad asked me to buy for him, and as I mentioned before he’s a huge fan of Anthony Trollope. I’d like to load the Kobo up with every Trollope work I can, and there are 76 of them on Project Gutenberg—but downloading them one at a time could be rather time-consuming. And Project Gutenberg does not keep...

The UK’s Prospect Magazine has a piece by Leo Benedictus looking at the besieged state of libraries in the UK (with over 450 library closures planned), and wondering whether this is as terrible a thing as library supporters contend given how well e-book readers work. Benedictus suggests that some defenders of libraries might be doing so less out of a belief in libraries’ intrinsic beneficence than a moral obligation to defend endangered species, and many of the benefits of libraries can be found in e-book readers. The talk of a future in which children...

This weekend I went down to my parents’ house, spending half of Saturday and most of Sunday visiting with my parents, brother and sister-in-law, and two-month-old niece, and blogging from home. (That’s me at left, blogging from my parents’ kitchen table with my Kobo and iPad visible in the background.) When I went, I took my new Kobo Wireless reader and the Literati I was reviewing with me. While the Literati didn’t last long, the Kobo made a lasting impression on my father. (I wish I’d remembered to photograph him reading it.) A longtime fan of Anthony Trollope,...

When I finished the infographic and showed it to my wife, she said: “Forty years? No way. Four, maybe.” “Four, maybe” – it’s what most people think. Most people are still convinced that e-books are a fad. That’s why I was looking for a convenient, all-in-one way to challenge this myth. I hope it works. Every year shows not only the information about e-books, but also other facts and achievements. This builds a good, thought-provoking time reference. Share this infographic if you think it deserves it. I wanted to put it on the web before this year’s edition of Read an E-Book...

Here is the full text of Project Gutenberg's response to the Bear's letter letter we mentioned below. Thanks to reader Greg Weeks for posting the link in a comment to the article. Blockquotes omitted: ** This message is granted to the public domain ** From: Greg Newby [mailto:gbnewby@pglaf.org] Sent: Monday, October 25, 2010 1:52 AM To: Greg Bear and others Subject: Re: Takedown Request -- The Escape by Poul Anderson On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 05:53:54PM -0700, someone wrote: > Dear Dr. Newby: > ... [ delete by gbn ] Dear Greg, Astrid, and others: My apologies for my long delay in...

The Washington Post has a story on this today. Gutenberg contributor Linda M. Everhart complained in an e-mail in late October that Amazon was selling a title she'd contributed to Gutenberg, Arthur Robert Harding's 1906 opus "Fox Trapping," for $4. "They took the text version, stripped off the headers and footer containing the license, re-wrapped the sentences, and made the chapter titles bold," wrote Everhart, a Blairstown, Mo., trapper. She added that "their version had all my caption lines, in exactly the same place where I had put them." In follow-up messages, Everhart pointed to such other instances of Kindle cloning...