Boston Public Library's "Virtual Branch" Adds 15K Titles from Project Gutenberg via Partnership With OverDrive
Michael Hart, the Founder of Project Gutenberg and the vast amount of content it offers is finally getting some of the attention and use it has deserved for a long time. Project Gutenberg recently began it's 40th year of existence. That's right, FOURTY years! This ebook by Marie Leber offers a history of Project Gutenberg through 2008.
+ Gurtenberg titles available from the "Virtual Branch" are "being scrubbed for quality. Only the best EPUB eBooks will be added OverDrive-powered websites."
+ "Every EPUB eBook downloaded from the Project Gutenberg collection will count as a circulation even though a user doesn't need to sign in to access the titles. We’ll have separate reporting functionality built into the Content Reserve admin portal so you can check your Project Gutenberg stats."
+ Gutenberg collections being rolled-out to OverDrive users in the U.S. and UK.
+ "As we investigate the finer points of international copyright law, we’ll expand availability to libraries in additional international territories."
You don't need a login and downloads are NOT restricted to BPL card holders. We just downloaded three titles in a matter of seconds.
You can search or browse the collection. It appears that a search of the collection is a full text search. However, it's impossible to find your search terms in each title where they are found. We hope this feature will be added soon. There is also no advanced interface. Again, it would be great if it also became available soon.
As we mentioned earlier, the Project Gutenberg site is home to more than 33,000 titles. They do offer an advanced interface and you can limit to specific fields. However, when we tried to search using several of the fields, the database did not work properly. We will check again over the next few days to see of this is a glitch or the search facility has problems.
Finally, two more Gutenberg notes.
1) Project Gutenberg is constantly adding new material in many languages. This page allows you to browse the latest additions. It will be interesting to see how often the OverDrive database is updated with "quality" new titles from the Project Gutenberg collection.
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