Linking to Project Gutenberg

If you want to do mass downloads, robot our site, learn about terms of use, or find out more about permissions, please see the specific help pages for those topics.

More Information About Linking

This page contains information for webmasters who want to link to our site. If you just want to browse our site, you don't need to read this page.

The Project Gutenberg website terms of use, and Project Gutenberg trademark, forbid certain uses. These especially include commercial uses (any non-free for for-profit), and redistribution using the “Project Gutenberg” name. It is expressly forbidden to make our contents look like it came from your website, irrespective of the method used (frames, image inlining, roboting, rewriting, etc.). Just use plain links.

Direct links to files will be redirected to the appropriate catalog page. Direct links to files are bad because:

But if you run an independent search site for our books read the independent search site section below.

Canonical URLs to Books and Authors

If you want to link to one of our books or authors please use only the URL formats described here. Either http:// or https:// is supported.

This URL will always lead to the catalog page of the ebook with the number 12345 (replace 12345 with the ebook number you are interested in).

This URL will always lead to a list of all books by the author “Mark Twain”. (Replace Mark_Twain with the author you are interested in. Use an underscore or a plus sign in place of spaces.)

Image Inlining

You may use all images from our ebooks not protected by U.S. copyright law on your site. If the book is not protected by U.S. copyright law, the images in the book are also not protected by U.S. copyright law. Read the license inside the book to find out if the book is protected by U.S. copyright law. However you must copy the image and host it on your site, not link to the image hosted on our site.

Our servers are configured not to serve images to third-party websites. Therefore your users may only see a warning notice instead of the intended picture.

Independent Project Gutenberg Search Sites

Some sites provide their own search engine for Project Gutenberg eBooks. Some of them are dedicated to Project Gutenberg only, other include books from a variety of free collections in their database.

Note that the Project Gutenberg Catalog is now available in machine-readable format. Please use one of those files to feed your database instead of roboting our site.