— Project Gutenberg News - September 2026 —

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Contents

Usage of Project Gutenberg Offline

Occasionally, we get fan letters. Here’s one from a reader in “hurricane alley” in Missouri:

Subject: Thank you for 55 years — from a house with your whole library

Dear Project Gutenberg volunteers,

This week I finished something no other century could offer: a complete  
offline copy of your English collection now lives in my house in Missouri.  
Every book, including the 1,713 you've released just since November — the  
1930 wave alone, the Christies and the Wodehouse and Principia Mathematica,  
felt like watching a library grow in real time.

Two kids live here. The read-aloud years are underway, and the deep end of  
that pool is fifty years of your volunteers' work sitting on a local drive,  
free, forever.

Since 1971 you've been proving the quiet version of the future — volunteers  
typing books — outlasts every flashy one. Thank you.

Our Missouri reader wants to be prepared with plenty of reading material in case severe weather knocks his home off the grid, Project Gutenberg supports this sort of offline usage in a number of ways. Even in 2026, not everybody has good internet access, even when the weather is good. In many parts of the world, especially rural areas in less-developed countries, connections are at best a mobile phone signal. But people are clever. They journey to cities and download content, store it on USB sticks, and bring it back to a village wifi hub. Often, they bring back resources like Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. These resources are distributed in specially formatted packages that don’t require the Internet. One popular format is distributed by Kiwix.org, a non-profit based in Europe. Project Gutenberg facilitates Kiwix packaging by making sure the Kiwix developers have good access to our material. We use “mirroring” for this, and we have “official” mirrors (there are also unofficial mirrors). You can read about mirroring at the link below. We support libraries that want to add access to our books to their collections by publishing metadata for our catalog in formats such as MARC, RDF, and CSV. Often they link to our website, but they are welcome to host the books themselves. Though we distribute 3-5 million books a day through our website (~80% to bots, unfortunately) many more make it to readers in other ways.

We are able to do this because of support from readers. We don’t need advertising and we hope we never do! We spend less than a tenth of a cent per book, but it adds up.

As a volunteer-driven organization, even more important are words of encouragement such as those from our reader in Missouri.

So here are some more comments from our social media:

“Thank you for all the good work you do.”

“Project Gutenberg is a place we cherish.”

“Thank you so much for letting me read Heart of Darkness again. You are doing beautiful work. “

"Hi, volunteers of Project Gutenberg\!  
I'm sure that you already receive a lot of messages like this-but I just want to acknowledge and thank you for the work that you do in maintaining this project. I have learned more than I ever thought I would be able to, such as the firsthand accounts of Westerners who travelled to China during the late 18th- early 19th centuries to literary classics.

I just wanted to let you know that your efforts to promote knowledge and literacy are greatly appreciated."

“Your website is fantastic\!  
I spent whole nights reading lyric of well-known and lesser known poets there.”

Kiwix: <https://kiwix.org/en/>
Kiwix catalog: <https://browse.library.kiwix.org/#lang=eng>
Mirroring PG: <https://www.gutenberg.org/help/mirroring.html>
PG Offline Catalogs: <https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/offline_catalogs.html>

Cover Images

The cover images for books at PG are a microcosm of the history of online electronic texts. Over decades the covers have evolved from non-existent to important parts of the experience of modern ebooks. They are created and added today to support a balance of historical authenticity, digital accessibility, legal flexibility, and user interest.

Project Gutenberg’s collection started off as plain text files; images of covers were not part of the original mission. Remember that Michael Hart and volunteers had already digitized thousands of pages of text before ‘multimedia’ and ‘graphical user interfaces’ things. Their covers were their filenames. It was only after the PG web site was established that the idea of graphics to represent the books came to be possible.

Today, new books are submitted along with a cover image most of the time. And now volunteers are contributing and adding appropriate cover images for the oldest ebooks. Those newly added covers are created and customized based on the following criteria:

Historical authenticity- The best case is to have the cover from the same original physical sources that gave us the texts. The effort to find images of original covers from first editions is the focus. “The Hunting of the Snark” is a great example:

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13>

Of course, some items, like the Mayflower Compact, don’t have covers at all. Those require ‘constructed’ covers. Here an appropriate chief element is placed on a simple background.

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7>

Digital accessibility- The simple ability to see the title of the book is a key element in selecting the cover image to use. Without access to the title of the book in the user interface (as in Apple’s Books.app) the cover image should display a title that is legible in a thumbnail. Here we made a fun cover for Paradise Lost, made large enough to read in a thumbnail:

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26>

Legal flexibility- A cover image should not be a copyrighted work. The entire idea of the library is to have public domain works available as widely as possible. Here, the play Romeo & Juliet is given a large title, but with the classic portrait of William Shakespeare providing the visual interest:

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1513>

User interest- A cover should help the user find books they want to read. Having a cover that is clear, informative, and inviting are all key criteria for applying the visuals of a cover to the text. Here one of the sources for the text (from the famous Everyman’s Library series) is given the place of honor:

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/831>

In the effort to wrap covers around these earliest files, we have been approaching the problem from multiple directions. Two of them are most significant:

One approach is to work from the earliest books, and simply progress chronologically. Today the first 28 books of the library all have custom covers that are either authentic, or at least accurate in describing the contents of the work. The range from #29 to #100 has 32 books without covers. While thousands of “under-covered” works still remain, this process will eventually catch up to the modern era.

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1>

A second approach has been to follow the popularity. The most popular books are shown here:

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?sort_order=downloads>

Over the course of the last year, as books enter into the top 25 and top 50 ‘most downloaded’ over 30 days, they are given a high priority, leading to a large up-tick in the number of covers being downloaded with the books. Sense and Sensibility, Moby Dick, The Blue Castle, Carmen, and The King in Yellow are all recipients of new covers thanks to this effort.

100th Anniversary of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway’s cleverness was on full display when he submitted The Torrents of Spring (1925) to Boni & Liveright. Knowing the satire mocked their own star author, Sherwood Anderson, he anticipated their rejection—which cleanly triggered his contract’s escape clause. He immediately jumped to Scribner’s, who launched The Sun Also Rises on October 22, 1926, with an initial run of 5,090 copies at $2.00 each. It became a steady hit, reaching its eighth printing by 1928. Retitled Fiesta and stripped of its epigraphs for the 1927 UK release, the novel has remained continuously in print ever since, standing as one of the most translated books in history.

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/67138>

100th Anniversary of Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

Before he was Pooh, Christopher Robin’s famous teddy bear was named “Edward,” debuting in A.A. Milne’s poem “Teddy Bear” (Punch, February 1924; later collected in When We Were Very Young). Re-imagined as “Winnie-the-Pooh” in a 1925 Evening News Christmas story with illustrations by J.H. Dowd it officially captured the world’s heart in October 1926 with the release of Winnie-the-Pooh. The novel revealed that Edward received his new name from Winnie, a female American black bear residing at the London Zoo whose owner hailed from Winnipeg, Canada. Special effort has been made to make this edition to be fully accessible.

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

New Releases at Gutenberg.org - August 2026

In the last month PGLAF added another 240 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 145 were added by PGDP. Thank you to all the volunteers who have helped to make these new titles freely available to the world.

The month’s eBooks are listed here (the list was getting too long for the newsletter!):

<https://gutenberg.org/newsletter/202608.md>

A selection of this month’s notable and interesting titles:

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