General Discussions

**Learning Newbie** · 12-20-2007, 02:30 PM

Most of their texts have about 400 lines of legalize at the top. The Prince is a bizarre exception. The first line of the book is still around line 400, but this time it's background about Nicolo Machiavelli's life.

The legal text says you can't remove the legal text, and that's fair. But instead of killing it off all together, can you split it into a law file and a book file? Project Gutenberg likes for their work to be mirrored and distributed, to make texts available and not overburden their server. It's totally fair to keep the legal text, but it seems like a bad thing to force a person to go looking for the start to a book you're recommending.

It seems like others are doing it?

**seolman** · 12-20-2007, 03:30 PM

I've never used it in a web app before. But it's an awesome resource for anyone who loves literature...

**Learning Newbie** · 12-20-2007, 04:15 PM

That it is, and when I read those long winded introductions, I realized just how much work they've done. Google has a scanner and fancy software. People actually typed this stuff, others proof read it. All to promote literacy and our shared heritage.

I'm not building a web app, but I like to quote some of the books I've read in the past, and I finally realized that some of these, I can point the person to the book itself in digital form, instead of just Amazon's sales page on that book. And then since people actually read my blog for whatever reason, I was thinking I can host these text files so if people are interested, A Tale of Two Cities is 800 KB, so easy on a blog, but if blogs are a community, it might be nice to let them offload some of the burden.

**joder** · 12-20-2007, 06:32 PM

I don't see why a reference to the license couldn't be a link.

I have been reading Project Gutenberg books for many years. One thing to do to make them more readable, is open them in OpenOffice.org, choose a readable font and save as PDF.