Project Gutenberg (often abbreviated as PG) is a volunteer effort to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works via book scanning. Founded in 1971, it is the oldest digital library. Most of the items in its collection are the full texts of public domain books. 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 December, 2006, Project Gutenberg claimed over 20,000 items in its collection, with an average of over fifty new e-books being added each week.

These are primarily works of literature from the Western cultural tradition. In addition to literature such as novels, poetry, short stories, and drama, Project Gutenberg also has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. The Project Gutenberg collection also has a few non-text items such as audio files and music notation files.

Most releases are in English, but there are also significant numbers in many other languages. As of August 2006, the non-English languages most represented are (in order): French, German, Finnish, Dutch, and Spanish.

Whenever possible, Gutenberg releases are available in plain text, mainly using US-ASCII character encoding but frequently extended to ISO-8859-1. Other formats may be released as well when submitted by volunteers, with the most common being HTML. Formats which are not easily editable, such as PDF, are generally not considered to fit in with the goals of Project Gutenberg, although a few have been added to the collection. For years, there has been discussion of using some type of XML, although progress on that has been slow. (from Wikipedia)

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New Additions

• The Secret of the Night by Gaston Leroux
• Typee by Herman Melville
• Marvel Carbureter and Heat Control by Anonymous
• Story of Waitstill Baxter by Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
• Twilight Land by Howard Pyle
• Tattine by Ruth Ogden
• The Shape of Fear by Elia Wilkinson Peattie
• The Survivors of the Chancellor, diary of J.R. Kazallon, passenger by Jules Verne
• The Young Adventurer by Horatio Alger
• The Works of Max Beerbohm by Sir Max Beerbohm
• The Trees of Pride by G. K. Chesterton
• Path Flower and Other Verses by Olive T. Dargan
• Nothing to Say by QK Philander Doesticks
• Short Stories from Syros by Emmanuel Roidis
• Linnuyu by Yusheng Youhuan
• Les Corneilles by J.-H. Rosny
• Scènes préhistoriques by J.-H. Rosny
• The Rural Life Problem of the United States by Horace Curzon Plunkett
• An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut by Abner Stocking
• The Last American by J. A. Mitchell