Project Gutenberg News

March 2026

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Contents

Message from the Executive Director: Accessibility at Project Gutenberg
International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month
Christine de Pizan
100th Anniversary of “The Blue Castle”
Finances
New Releases for February 2026
Top 10 eBooks downloaded for the month of February
Links
Find Project Gutenberg on Social Media

Message from the Executive Director: Accessibility at Project Gutenberg

Both Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders have long worked to make our ebooks accessible to users with vision impairments. Our accessibility roadmap was launched over 15 years ago, when Distributed Proofreaders published these guidelines: https://www.pgdp.net/wiki/Accessibility_Recipes

In 2023 we completed a two-year-long effort to convert all 70,000 books in our collection to HTML5 and EPUB3. These formats allow for accessibility metadata, as found today in all our EPUB3 files. Last year we rolled out a refined website design with many attributes to improve accessibility and enable people to enjoy our books using screen readers or refreshable braille displays.

We still have a lot of work to do. In 2024 we took a census of the images in our books and found that our collection has more than 400,000 images without the appropriate “alt text” needed to make the books more accessible. Many technologists believe that machine vision systems will someday come to the rescue, but so far, even the most powerful AI systems produce descriptions that are often humorously mystifying or imaginative. Here’s an example image and the description returned by Anthropic’s Opus model. The image you see below is accurate, it is simply a black line, used as a section break in a book.

[picture]: —————————————————————————

[AI description]: “The image shows a close-up view of a grey wolf standing in a grassy field. The wolf has thick grey fur, pointed ears, and is looking directly at the camera with its golden eyes. A shallow depth of field keeps the background blurred while the wolf’s face is in sharp focus.”

[My description]: “A horizontal black line.”

But it’s not just images that can be a barrier to accessibility. With a little help from experts at the Library of Congress, I worked on Project Gutenberg’s version of “Winnie-the-Pooh”.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67098

I really enjoyed the process of describing each of the 116 drawings so that the description fit the narrative of the story. Each description was like solving a little puzzle. There was some inaccessible text in the scene where Kanga is jumping up and down, and the text jumps with her! But with the jumping text rendered as three separate lines with awkward spacing, a screen reader would make the text incomprehensible. It wasn’t hard to fix in the HTML.

This year, we have even more motivation to make our books verifiably accessible. April 2026 marks the start of the “Web and Mobile Application Accessibility Rule” which falls under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act. This rule requires any publicly funded school or library to have documentation that any digital resource they offer is either accessible or that there is a plan in place to make it accessible. (Wikipedia short link to “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines” / “WCAG referenced by law”)

https://w.wiki/7g3Z

In December, the PGLAF board approved an effort to take PG’s accessibility to a new level and start documenting books so that schools and libraries can use them without worries about legal compliance. I hope to be able to tell you more about that second part soon.

Before I took the Executive Director job at Project Gutenberg, I was leading the Free Ebook Foundation’s effort to develop a tool called “AltPoet” that will enable creation and editing of alt text for images in the Project Gutenberg catalog, with the help of AI systems. This effort is being moved into Project Gutenberg. Creating alt text requires some training and a different set of skills from the proofreading and HTML formatting work that Distributed Proofreaders and Project Gutenberg have done so well at. I’m hoping that people who care about accessibility and have a knack for describing things will try out AltPoet.

If you have any interest in helping with this project, I invite you to email me at eric@pglaf.org. Put the word “AltPoet” in the email subject line. Either way, thank you for supporting Project Gutenberg!

International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month

International Women’s Day is celebrated annually during the week of 8 March. It commemorates the fight for women’s equality and liberation along with the women’s rights movement. Women’s History Month is the annual celebration of the contributions and achievements that women have made. It is celebrated throughout the month of March each year.

To celebrate these observations, Project Gutenberg created a new bookshelf titled Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Some samples are given below.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/bookshelf/706

“Philosophical Letters: or, Modest Reflections Upon Some Opinions in Natural Philosophy” (1664) by Margaret Cavendish: she criticized Descartes, Hobbes, and mechanical philosophy and argued that Nature is organic, not mechanical.
“Eléments de la philosophie de Neuton: Mis à la portée de tout le monde” (1738) by Voltaire and Émilie du Châtelet: she translated into French, and wrote an extensive commentary on Isaac Newton’s “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”.
“Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal” and “Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France” are biographical encyclopedia series written by Mary Shelley for Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia in the 1830s. Shelley’s approach combined biographical narrative with literary criticism; emphasized personal lives and psychological portraits; explored how historical and social contexts shaped creativity; feminist perspective on women writers and the constraints they faced.
“The Mechanism of the Heavens” (1831) by Mary Sommerville: She translated Laplace’s work (Mécanique Céleste) from algebra into common language. “On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences” (1834): she employed an interdisciplinary approach to understanding nature.
“Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage”, Esq. by Menabrea, translated by Ada Lovelace (1843): her added notes are important in the early history of computers, especially since Note G described, in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine, which might have run correctly had it ever been built. Lovelace is often considered the first computer programmer.
“Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not” (1859) and are influential works by Florence Nightingale: it was written for ordinary women managing household health and aimed to educate the public about disease prevention and health maintenance. “Subsidiary Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military Hospitals in Peace and in War” (1858): she advocated systematic reform of military medical services.
“Recherches sur les substances radioactives” (1903) by Marie Curie: she described the discovery and isolation of radium and polonium. “La radiologie et la guerre” (1921): she showed an advanced field of medical imaging and proposed a model for future medical emergency response.
“The Desert and the Sown” (1907) by Gertrude Lowthian Bell: she provided detailed ethnographic and political information on the Arab world which was later used by the British government for Middle East policy.
“Stellar atmospheres: A contribution to the observational study of high temperature in the reversing layers of stars” (1925) by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: she demonstrated that spectral differences among stars result primarily from temperature differences, not compositional differences, and stars are composed overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium, contrary to prevailing belief that stars had Earth-like composition.

Christine de Pizan

An interesting article was published by Marie Lebert: Christine de Pizan, a medieval woman writer, was the first professional woman writer in Europe and the first feminist writer.

https://marielebert.wordpress.com/2025/09/09/women-writers-translators/

Christine de Pizan (1364–1430), an Italian-French court writer, was the first woman to make a living from her writing in a male-dominated world. Writing enabled her to provide for her family following the death of her husband and father. A prolific author of poetry, novels, and biographies in vernacular French, she is best known for The Book of the City of Ladies.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26608

Happy 100th Anniversary! of “The Blue Castle”, a novel by L. M. Montgomery

Almost all editions of The Blue Castle lack dust jackets, and the true first edition does not have any illustration at all on the front boards. It was added after Montgomery had commented, “Not so pretty. A plain cover.” We have added the beautiful castle illustration to the cover of the ebook in tribute to her.

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67979

Finances

January was an very good month for user donations to Project Gutenberg. Thank you to everyone who contributed. Those donations brought our fiscal year (July-June) deficit down to about $10,000, with a clear path to break-even by June.