Unglue.it joins GITenberg | unglue.it

"Unglue.it has been of two minds about public domain ebooks. On the one hand, we recognize that the public domain contains the greatest literary works ever produced, and ebooks of these works need to be on any serious reader’s ebook shelf. On the other hand, there are plenty of web sites already focused on the public domain- Project Gutenberg is the grandaddy of them all. Other websites- Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.com to call out the best – have done a pretty good job of taking public domain books and make them easy to find and download. Some sites are based in countries where books enter the public domain sooner than in the US. You can get books like 'The Great Gatsby' on Feedbooks or ebooks@Adelaide, even while they’re under copyright here in the US. To be frank, the websites focusing on public domain books haven’t met many of the needs of libraries. I can search for Huckleberry Finn on many library catalogs and be told that the only ebook held by the library is checked out. There’s a good reason for that. Many of the ebooks in Project Gutenberg aren’t formatted so well in for epub or mobi, despite the high quality of the plain text digitization. With 50,000 texts in Project Gutenberg, it’s hard to tell which ones are top quality and which ones would cause support problems for overworked librarians. We loaded a few hundred titles from Project Gutenberg into Unglue.it to see what happened. As you might expect, these classics accumulated a lot of faves, and so we’d occasionally go and clean up some ebook files. Since we use Github to manage our website code, the natural thing to do was to put the cleaned-up ebook files in Github, in case someone else wanted to use them – there was no obvious way to get them into Project Gutenberg itself. I thought it would be cool if more of project Gutenberg was in Github. Then I discovered GITenberg. Back in 2012, Seth Woodworth, an ebook technologist, wanted nicer ebook editions of classics from Project Gutenberg. And Github was the obvious platform collaboration. So he created a Github organization, named it 'GITenberg', and created thousands of Github repositories for Gutenberg texts. It was a no-brainer for Unglue.it to join the effort ..."