Project Gutenberg PrePrint Reading Room

Welcome!. This site, preprints.readingroo.ms has items submitted to Project Gutenberg which for some reason were not quite ready to be added to that collection. So, they are collected here for your reading enjoyment. In the future, we hope some additional work will be done (maybe by YOU!) to make them ready for wider redistribution. See below for a listing of materials available.

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Current Listings (most recent first)

2048 titles (approximately). Approximately 468 other titles have been promoted/published to Project Gutenberg.

• A Christmas Prayer by James W. Foley, 1915. Scans donated, and this needs to get a copyright clearance then converted to meet PG's production standards. Added December 18, 2023.
• Le Chanson de Roland, by Leon Gautier. This is the original 12th century French book, augmented in 1875 by editors Mame & Fils with a contemporary French translation plus extensive background notes. A translation into English is available as Project Gutenberg's eBook 23819. These files (PDF, RTF and txt) are very nicely done direct facsimile transcriptions of the printed volume, including page headers, hyphenation, etc., with notes and page layout similar to how it appears in print. The source upon which the transcription is based on is http://www.archive.org/details/lachansonderolOOgaut. Preparation for Project Gutenberg would include getting a copyright clearance and then creating an HTML eBook with derived plain text, in which images are included, page headers and other print artifacts are removed, footnotes/endnotes are gathered, and other general Project Gutenberg guidance & requirements are followed. Added September 10, 2023.
• Fifteen pamphlets for youth, associated with Dr. Roy C. Beery. These are from the 1950s and we have performed "Rule 6" research to demonstrate that at least some are in the public domain in the US, due to not having their copyright renewed. They cover a variety of life lessons and training for youth, such as on manners, health and drawing. Added September 10, 2023.
• Mil E Uma Noites by Carlos Jansen (Portuguse). These are clean scans of a 1908 printing of an 1882 book. It is a Brazillian adaptation of "1001 Nights" for children. These are just scans - they need the full process of digitizing as a Project Gutenberg eBook.
• Die Einführung der erzwungenen Ehelosigkeit bei den christlichen Geistlichen und ihre Folgen by Dr. Johann Anton Theiner und Augustin Theiner. Three volumes carefully digitized from old German Fraktur printed texts. These need copyright confirmation and conversion to HTML and plain text per Project Gutenberg's requirements.
• The Country Dance Book Parts I-VI & Graded 1-3 by Cecil Sharp, Butterworth George and Karpeles Maud. Scan sources include: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nc01.ark:/13960/t7vm53t12&view=1up&seq=5 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433015013166&view=1up&seq=11 https://archive.org/details/countrydancebook00shar2/page/12/mode/2up https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nc01.ark:/13960/t17m14k03&view=1up&seq=16 https://bubbaguitar.com/library/sharp/ https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nc01.ark:/13960/t0vq3sq8q&view=1up&seq=15 https://imslp.org/wiki/The_English_Country_Dance_(Sharp%2C_Cecil). HTML needs work, images need work, and generally this needs to be brought up to Project Gutenberg's standards. Added September 19, 2021.
• Three books with epub and HTML versions. These would need copyright clearances and final formatting, for inclusion in the main Project Gutenberg collection. Added January 28, 2021.
  • "The Athenian Oracle A Selection." Edited by John Underhill (1892).
  • "Our Iron Roads: Their History, Construction, and Administration." Frederick Smeeton Williams (7th edition, 1888) - with illustrations.
  • "Legendary islands of the Atlantic; a study in medieval geography." William Henry Babcock (1922) - with illustrations.
• The teachings of Zoroaster and the philosophy of the Parsi religion, by Shapurji Aspaniarji Kapadia. Added December 21, 2020. Needs proofreading, formatting, and conversion to HTML+text.
• Copy of the Testimonials Services and Recommendations of Rai Bahadur Pandit Ram Prasad Tewari. This is a short book provided upon the subject's retirement from the Military Works Services, after serving from 1880 to 1920. He was the first Indian to be an Officiating Garrison Engineer. Submitted for digitization by his great grandson, Vibhu Tewary. Due to its publication date, this is in the public domain in the US. Added March 26, 2018.
• L'Illustration, No. 3720, 13 Juin 1914. Project Gutenberg has a number of these issues already. Added January 14, 2018.
• Frederick Hoehn submissions, including a revision of the King James Bible and a number of other items. Some are fragmentary, and there is some repetition and overlap. Recovering the King James Bible for publication of an eBook would be worthwhile, and would mostly require formatting. Added December 14, 2016.
• Susan Warner, two titles in French. These have been scanned and reformatted. Additional proofreading and formatting are needed. Added January 31, 2016.
• German book from 1906, Hoher Als Die Kirche. This is a PDF of page images, and is not very well scanned. It might be the basis of a new eBook, or it might be too difficult to use. Added January 12, 2016.
• The Pentagon Papers. This is a massive trove which, to date, is available only as scanned PDF files with raw optical character recognition. Added July 4, 2014.
• The Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society. An important historical document. Added September 20, 2014.
• Information Technology Tales by Brad Bradford. This is a contemporary book, with a forward by Michael Hart. Added June 30, 2011.
• The CIA World Factbook 1982, 1984-1987. Page scans added April 16, 2011.
• The Science-History of the Universe - Volume 1 - Astronomy. Raw scans only. Added September 5, 2010.
• Rosetta Stone. Challenging title, needs conversion to digital formats. Added August 24, 2009.
• ProyectoSarmiento materials, in Spanish. Added April 27, 2009.
• Words Close Together disk image. This is a large ISO (disk image) you could burn to a DVD, for a standalone Windows-based application. WCT provides advanced searching capabilities, as well as the ability to view/read eBooks on your computer. Visit www.wordsclosetogether.com for more information, and you can also order a packaged DVD from there. Added February 2, 2009.
• US History of COMSEC, by the US National Security Agency. This 1973 publication was released to the public domain, but is heavily redacted especially in the beginning. It is raw scans as a PDF file. Added February 2, 2009.
• Various Religious Texts as computer-generated audio files. Received from Brother Scott, as with the Bible, below. Added February 6, 2009.
• The King James Bible as computer-generated audio files (one per book). Project Gutenberg has generally stopped adding computer-generated audiobooks to the "main" collection at www.gutenberg.org, but we like to share such audio files when we receive them. Received from Brother Scott. Added December 23, 2008.
• US founding audio as computer-generated audio files (one per book). The Bill of Rights, the US Constitution and the US Declaration of Independence as computer-generated audio files. Also received from Brother Scott. Added December 23, 2008.The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind by James Boyle via www.thepublicdomain.org. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. PDF only - we're working on plain text.
• Italiano plus, a variety of items, mostly in Italian. We think these are all in the public domain in the US, but not all items have clear provenance. Some raw scans, some OCR. 31 titles. Added 11 December 2008.
• Sacred Books volume 50, scans at 50DPI. Ready for OCR, proofreading, and turning into an eBook. Added 1 December 2008.
• .lit collection, 1750 titles converted to .lit format. Many are from the Project Gutenberg collection, many are not, and probably a few are not public domain in the US. Unfortunately these do not include titles. Added 20 October 2008.
• Esperanto Collection: This collection of eBooks in Esperanto includes several translations of public domain titles, but also some that we are not so sure of. For adding to the Project Gutenberg collection, each will need to have a copyright clearance done -- in addition to any needed formatting. These were submitted by Dr. Donald Broadribb of York, Western Australia. Added 17 October 2008.
• The Golden Bough audio eBook. Generally, Project Gutenberg has not been adding computer-generated eBooks to the 'main' US collection. This version is so enjoyable that we wanted to share it, though, and it has a few extra files as well. Added 27 April, 2008
• Jonathan Zittrain's Future of the Internet. Released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license, the author encouraged redistribution by Project Gutenberg, but did not want the standard PG trademark license to "wrap" the eBook, as we have done with a few dozen other titles. This title requires conversion to text and resolution of the licensing issues, prior to moving to the main PG collection. The Web site for this title is http://futureoftheinternet.org/. Added July 15, 2008.
• Oxford English Dictionary. The first part of the first volume, from 1888. This is a large file (nearly 190MB, either PDF or TIFF), and complex to turn into a fully-featured eBook with good markup. Added December 3, 2007.
• Proclamation of Neutrality (1793) by George Washington. A short historical document that needs to be compared to the known public domain text, and probably incorporated into a collection of similar documents (since it's a little short for a PG eBook). Added July 16, 2007.
• Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, France, 1789. This is a little short for a PG eBook, so might be combined with some other items. Added July 15, 2007.
• The Family Jewels: CIA reports provided to the National Archives. These are OCR reports in PDF form, and need conversion to editable text/html. Added July 1, 2007.
• Commission on the Intelligence of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. A government report that needs a better formatted text file. Added June 24, 2007.
• Rossum's Universal Robots (RUR), by Karel Capec, translated into English by Paul Selver and Nigel Playfair. This is PDF, with cut-and-paste text, so needs formatting. It was determined to be in the public domain in the US based on no copyright renewal (PG's "Rule 6"). Added December 31, 2006.
• Adrian Bowyer presentation. This file contains the Open Office/Powerpoint/.pdf of the presentation Dr. Adrian Bowyer gave on October 21, 2006-- at the ACM Conference at The University of Illinois. Added October 24, 2006.
• Mitchell's Class Method for Cornet, a musical instruction book for the cornet with many short scores. Added October 11, 2006.
• Fabrication files from the MIT fabrication laboratory (FABLAB). These were used to make 3D objects using a variety of technologies. You can't fax a pizza yet, but they're getting closer! They need some additional meta-information and instructions in order to be added to the main PG collection. 3 items. Added September 6, 2006.
• Report on Orphaned Works from the US Library of Congress. Needs conversion from PDF to editable format. Added September 6, 2006.
• Principia Mathematica, the 1726 edition by Isaac Newton. This is just a raw scan from MIT's Burndy Library, and needs digitization -- but it's a challenge, due to lots of equations and figures. Maybe LaTeX? Maybe MathML? Added August 15, 2006.
• HOPE6 presentation, a video of Project Gutenberg founder Michael Hart and PGLAF CEO Dr. Gregory Newby doing the keynote presentation at the HOPE Number Six conference in New York, July 22 2006. Could be more effective in a more compressed format.
• WAP collection, with 200 free titles formatted for WAP-enabled cell phones. More information about this format is available from the donor of these titles, mobilebooks.org.
• Ultimate DVD, consisting of over 37000 files and over 20000 titles/formats. Many of these are part of the Project Gutenberg collection, but many are not. Released by the compiler under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike license. These titles are believed to be in the public domain in the US. See the README.TXT for more information. Added May 21, 2006 (counted as one title).
• Laws of Destiny Never Disappear: Culture of Thailand in the Postlocal World, by Prof. Matti Sarmela, ISBN 952-91-9353-X. PDF eBook (4 files). Added April 24, 2006.
• Military-Civilian Teamwork in Suicide Prevention, by Meyer Moldevan. Published in 1994, this is an analysis of policies, practices and outcomes related to suicide prevention. Separate scanned PDF files, which include news clippings and other difficult-to-format items. Added April 24, 2006.
• Citizenship Packet, given to a new US citizen in June 2005. Includes a US citizenship guide, and a letter from US President George Bush. Added April 24, 2006.
• Two eBooks by Serbian author DuÅ¡an Gojko. The .txt files have issues with character set conversion, but the RTF documents look good. Grand Hotel, short stories, three editions 1993 - 1994 and Album fotografija 1991/1993, novel, 2003. Added April 24, 2006.
• Contos do Entardecer, by Antonio Ribeiro de Almeida. A contemporary title, which is only in .doc format. Added April 24, 2006.
• Cops, an early movie. It stars "Buster" Keaton, and was written by Keaton with Eddie Cline. Added April 24, 2006.
• 3D file and presentation addressing revitalization of the downtown Champaign, Illinois area. Contributed by Victor Jimenez. This is Project Gutenberg's first 3D file! Added February 20, 2006.
• Manuel De Lacunza (1731–1801)'s La Venida del ls Mesías en Gloria y Magestad ("The Coming of the Messiah in Glory and Majesty"). Added February 14, 2006.
• The Smarandache Collection. Copyrighted items donated by Floretin Smarandache. These are mostly PDF files, and await conversion to editable formats and further formatting. 137 titles added February 10, 2006.
• J.W. Buel's Heroes of Unknown Seas and Savage Lands. Added January 27, 2006.
• W.W. Campbell's Handbook of Practical Astronomy. Added September 6, 2005, additional version added in 2009.