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 A
couple of times in Web Line I have referred in passing to Project
Gutenberg. Ensuing readers’ comments have prompted a closer look.
Begun
in 1971, the Project
Gutenberg Electronic Public Library’s ongoing purpose is
.
. . to make information, books and other materials available . . . in
forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily
read, use, quote, and search.
Lack
of space permits me to list only a tiny fraction of the texts in the
database (most in English):
Cicero:
Orations (Selected) [Latin]
Descartes:
Discourse on Method
Hugo:
Les Misérables
Lincoln:
Gettysberg Address
Paterson:
Man from Snowy River
Shakespeare:
Complete Works
Sophocles:
Oedipus Trilogy
In
addition to Project Gutenberg, several further sources of literature in
electronic form exist on the Net. A significant one is Project
Bartleby at Columbia University. A couple of others are here
and here.
All
well and good, but for many people important questions remain. What’s
the use of having such literature on your PC? Who’d read Paradise
Lost from a screen, when they could curl up with it in an armchair?
Who wants to print out reams of loose-leaf paper containing the full
Sons and Lovers?
Here
is part of P. G.’s answer:
We
want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation,
movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these
quotations . . . You will be easily able to search an entire library,
without any program more sophisticated than a plain search program . . .
These . . . files are so plain that you can do a search on them without
even using an intermediate search program . . .
In
other words, the aim is to provide the world’s literature, not to be
read from cover to cover but for research purposes, taking advantage of
the computer’s power.
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