{"id":343,"date":"2012-10-14T10:56:27","date_gmt":"2012-10-14T10:56:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=343"},"modified":"2012-10-15T12:58:14","modified_gmt":"2012-10-15T12:58:14","slug":"reading-for-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"Reading for all"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One thing I meant to mention (but forgot!) in the recent Reading for Boys post (<em><a href=\"http:\/\/xislblogs.xtreamlab.net\/slwoods\/?p=324\" title=\"Reading for boys\">posts passim<\/a><\/em>) was the vast wealth of e-books available to read for free from one of the gems of the internet &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/\">Project Gutenberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 354px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/1\/17\/Lenin_reading_Pravda.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"image of Lenin reading Pravda\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/1\/17\/Lenin_reading_Pravda.gif\" width=\"354\" height=\"451\" \/><\/a><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lenin &#8211; just one of the thousands of authors available for free from Project Gutenberg. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Project Gutenberg was founded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Michael_S._Hart\">Michael S. Hart, who died in 2011<\/a>. Hart&#8217;s other claim to fame is as the inventor of the electronic book (or ebook). In Gutenberg&#8217;s early days, Hart is reputed to have produced many of the texts himself.<\/p>\n<p>The aims of Project Gutenberg are to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks;<\/li>\n<li>Help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy;<\/li>\n<li>Give as many ebooks to as many people as possible.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Gutenberg offers over 40,000 free ebooks in various formats &#8211; <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/EPUB\">epub<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Amazon_Kindle#File_formats\">Kindle<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Pdf\"><acronym title=\"Portable Document Format\">PDF<\/acronym><\/a>, <acronym title=\"Hypertext Markup Language\"><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Html\">HTML<\/a><\/acronym>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Plain_text\">plain vanilla text<\/a>, etc. &#8211; in 60 languages as at September 2011.<\/p>\n<p>All the authors featured are out of copyright in the USA. Consequently, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Category:Bookshelf\">Gutenberg&#8217;s catalogue<\/a> contains thousands of works in all fields: authors from ancient Greece and Rome, medieval literature, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Category:Political_Science_Bookshelf\">politics<\/a>, philosophy, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Category:Children%27s_Bookshelf\">children&#8217;s literature<\/a> and so on. If these are your desire, why pay the likes of Amazon for the privilege of acquiring a text that&#8217;s in the public domain when the same work is more than likely free of charge from Gutenberg or its <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Gutenberg:Partners%2C_Affiliates_and_Resources\">partners and affiliates?<\/a> Of course, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gutenberg.org\/wiki\/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Needs_Your_Donation\">Gutenberg accepts donations<\/a> to support the work of its volunteers and keep the servers running.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One thing I meant to mention (but forgot!) in the recent Reading for Boys post (posts passim) was the vast wealth of e-books available to read for free from one of the gems of the internet &#8211; Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg was founded by Michael S. Hart, who died in 2011. Hart&#8217;s other claim to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[22,12],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-translation-and-language-related-matters","category-open-source-software","tag-language","tag-open-source"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.slwoods.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}