Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is not an individual author but a long-running volunteer project devoted to sharing books in digital form. It was founded by Michael S. Hart, who is widely credited with starting the eBook movement, and the project began in 1971 with the electronic posting of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Its focus is simple and enduring: make public-domain literature easy to read, download, and reuse in open formats on almost any device. Over time, thousands of volunteers have helped digitize and proofread works, building the collection into one of the best-known free libraries on the web.

For readers, Project Gutenberg often serves as a gateway to classic fiction, poetry, history, philosophy, and many other older works whose U.S. copyright has expired. If you see Project Gutenberg listed where an author name would normally appear, it usually means the book is being credited to the source that preserved and distributed the text rather than to a single living writer.