# Public domain books in many languages


![gutenberg ](http://www.gutenberg.org/pics/pg-logo-002.png)I've long been
fascinated by book scanning projects, and written before about
OpenLibrary and Universal Library, as well as Google Books. However, as
neat as these projects are, we shouldn't forget sites like [Project
Gutenberg](http://www.gutenberg.org/), which have been around for much
longer. Project Gutenberg relies on volunteers to scan, OCR and
proof-read texts that have fallen into the public domain, with the goal
of creating high quality ASCII text versions of the books. This is
different from the large scale book-scanning projects mentioned earlier,
which rely on institutional investment, and mainly focus on making the
scanned images available. Sometimes, you can also get the OCRed text,
but it has not been proof-read or quality controlled.

While it's very neat to see pictures of old book pages, especially ones
with elaborate illustrations, ASCII (or increasingly Unicode) text has
many advantages. It can be searched and text-mined, copied and pasted
into any format, and displayed on any kind of device - whether it's a
text-to-speech device, an ebook reader, a cell phone, an eBook, or what
have you. There are also several websites (like
[manybooks.net](http://manybooks.net/)) which repurpose these text
files, for example by formatting them nicely, converting them to
different ebook-reader formats, etc.

I hadn't visited Project Gutenberg in years, but a friend of mine showed
me that they have kept adding books, and in fact radically expanded
their international offering. All of these languages have more than 50
titles available:
[Chinese](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/zh "Chinese (399)")
[Dutch](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/nl "Dutch (408)")
[English](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/en "English (23840)")
[Esperanto](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/eo "Esperanto (56)")
[Finnish](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/fi "Finnish (493)")
[French](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/fr "French (1389)")
[German](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/de "German (572)")
[Italian](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/it "Italian (184)")
[Latin](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/la "Latin (63)")
[Portuguese](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/pt "Portuguese (311)")
[Spanish](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/es "Spanish (227)")
[Swedish](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/sv "Swedish (51)")
[Tagalog](http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/tl "Tagalog (54)"),
and there are many others that are represented with a few books.

In addition, my friend showed me a few other sites that were in the same
vein. [lib.ru](http://lib.ru) has a huge collection of literature in
Russian, in HTML format. You'll find your Dostoyevski and Gogol, but
also [Russian translations of Chinese classics](http://lib.ru/POECHIN/),
as well as [Soviet-era science fiction](http://lib.ru/RUFANT/)! And in
Japanese, [Aozora](http://www.aozora.gr.jp/) has a huge collection of
public domain works. And China is amazing at making material available,
not caring too much about copyright - there is a plethora of sites where
you can easily view the full text of any modern novel in HTML -
[books.sina.com](http://books.sina.com/) is an example.

These resources are extremely useful, not least for me who is a learner
(and I can't even speak Japanese, but perhaps one day). It means that I
can download a Chinese book, and put it in Wenlin, or use an electronic
mouse-over dictionary for the Russian texts. I'd love to hear about
interesting book collections in other languages.

And then you have [LibriVox](http://librivox.org/) - a collective of
people who record public domain books, and release the audio books as
public domain. I've long been impressed by their work, and listened to a
number of their books, and my friend pointed out that they've now got
more foreign content than ever. Their [multilingual poetry
collections](http://librivox.org/multilingual-poetry-collection-001/)
are especially interesting.