Project Gutenberg offers 75,000+ free public-domain eBooks in epub and Kindle formats, volunteer-proofread, no registration, running since 1971.
Key Takeaways
75,000+ titles searchable by author, title, subject, language, type, and popularity; top 100 list available.
100% free, no app required, works in standard browsers or eBook readers.
Powered entirely by volunteers via Distributed Proofreaders (pgdp.net); new volunteers can contribute one page a day.
self.gutenberg.org hosts self-published eBooks through the World Library Foundation as a separate track.
Accepts donations to fund further digitization; audiobook counterpart is LibriVox.
Hacker News Comment Review
Active Gutenberg developers confirmed ongoing site improvements, with the executive director and a staff programmer both engaging in the thread directly.
Italy-based users hit a DNS-level block after a Roman tribunal mistakenly seized the domain; workaround is switching to Google or Cloudflare DNS.
Commenters want better epub formatting and point to Standard Ebooks as a higher-quality pipeline built on top of Gutenberg source texts.
The entire English Gutenberg corpus is downloadable as a ~60GB ZIM file via ebookfoundation.org/openzim.html, useful for offline or airgapped use.
Notable Comments
@fmajid: Full English corpus available as a ~60GB ZIM download; English Wikipedia ZIM with images is ~120GB for comparison.
@Someone1234: No eReader vendor offers a native Gutenberg “store”; Kindle is hostile, others require Calibre as friction layer.
