In case you haven’t heard of it, Project Gutenberg and its affiliated sites feature more than 100,000 free books in 55 languages, all free for download. They’re all in the public domain — either because their authors have been dead for more than 50 years, because their U.S. copyrights have expired, or because they were never copyrighted in America in the first place — so no legal headaches.
To give you an idea of the variety you’ll find there, yesterday’s top downloads included Pride and Prejudice, Arthur Thomson’s The Outline of Science, Shakespeare, the Kama Sutra, Ulysses, The Art of War and Miles and Thomson’s Manual of Surgery. Great stuff for the commute home, if you’ve got an iPhone, Palm or other PDA to read it on.
The Project is non-profit and donation-supported, so if you download and you can afford it, try to throw a buck or two their way.
For you history buffs out there, Johannes Gutenberg is commonly believed to have invented the moveable-type printing press (above) in the mid-1400’s. The first thing he printed for the masses was the Bible, which really irritated Church authorities who insisted that their scriptures could only be interpreted by trained clergymen. Not everyone could afford the world’s first mass-produced book — according to Wikipedia, it cost something in the area of three years’ salary for regular folk — but it was still significantly cheaper and faster to create than the hand-written tomes that it eventually displaced. Apparently, 48 copies of the “Gutenberg Bible” still exist today.
While Gutenberg was probably the first European to figure out moveable type, he didn’t invent the technology. That honour goes to an engineer named Bi Sheng, who pioneered the technique some 400 years earlier in China. While Gutenberg’s press is certainly impressive, and changed the course of history, he only had a 26-letter alphabet to wrestle with — Bi Sheng’s press could handle 3,000 Chinese characters.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Asher Vijay // May 17, 2008 at 12:11 am
You know who else was cooler than Gutenberg? Petrucci. He was the first to use the printing press to publish music! 1501 was a good year.
2 maya // May 21, 2008 at 3:57 pm
huzzah! the day is mine!
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