Project Gutenberg is a collaborative project to make texts freely and widely available, to anyone in the world who cares to read them https://www.gutenberg.org/about/. The name comes from Johannes Gutenberg, noted for his invention of the moveable-type printing press, which dramatically reduced the cost of making books and made access to books a lot more feasible for the working class.
Project Gutenberg has a lot of old books because many countries have laws that restrict the free distribution of original work for a period of time after the work is initially published. These are called copyright laws because they govern who has the right to copy a work of art. In the US (and in other places, but I’m most familiar with US law so I’ll use it as an example), copyright protections eventually expire and the work enters the public domain, meaning that it no longer has copyright protections i.e. anyone may freely copy the work, including Project Gutenberg. That’s why they are able to make so many older books available for download.
EPUB is a file format that makes text files a little bit nicer to read than just plain text, especially if you’re using an ereader, so Project Gutenberg will often provide the text in an EPUB format as well as in plain text.
Project Gutenberg is a collaborative project to make texts freely and widely available, to anyone in the world who cares to read them https://www.gutenberg.org/about/. The name comes from Johannes Gutenberg, noted for his invention of the moveable-type printing press, which dramatically reduced the cost of making books and made access to books a lot more feasible for the working class.
Project Gutenberg has a lot of old books because many countries have laws that restrict the free distribution of original work for a period of time after the work is initially published. These are called copyright laws because they govern who has the right to copy a work of art. In the US (and in other places, but I’m most familiar with US law so I’ll use it as an example), copyright protections eventually expire and the work enters the public domain, meaning that it no longer has copyright protections i.e. anyone may freely copy the work, including Project Gutenberg. That’s why they are able to make so many older books available for download.
EPUB is a file format that makes text files a little bit nicer to read than just plain text, especially if you’re using an ereader, so Project Gutenberg will often provide the text in an EPUB format as well as in plain text.