— Project Gutenberg News - July 2026 —

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Contents

Happy 55th Birthday, Project Gutenberg!

Project Gutenberg marks its date of birth as July 4th, 1971. On that day Michael E. Hart got an account on a computer connected to arpa-net and decided to type into it the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. He messaged some friends about it, and the rest is history, or so the story goes. We record e-text #1 as having a “posted” date of December 1, 1971. (And happy 250th, USA.)

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

PG at ALA Annual Meeting

Report from the Executive Director:

This past weekend, I attended the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Meeting in Chicago. I’m pretty sure it was the first time in 56 years that Project Gutenberg has been represented at ALA. When I mentioned that in one session, the room broke out in spontaneous applause!

So many times I would mention PG and folks would tell me how much they used Project Gutenberg, and how much they appreciated the work we do. I would tell them it wasn’t me; it was all the volunteers and the supporters that made it work. If you’re reading this, you’re one of those people!

At the ebook sessions, there was much discussion about ebook pricing and ownership models. I had it easy: our pricing model is free, and our ownership model is that the books we preserve and distribute belong to all of us. I went to sessions where I learned how libraries were approaching accessibility issues and in another session I learned about conditions in prison libraries, where somehow we serve many readers.

I met with many people to explore how PG books can integrate with and support the systems that deliver ebooks to libraries. This will be an important direction for us in the coming year!

— Eric Hellman, Executive Director, Project Gutenberg

100th Anniversary of The Hungry Tiger of Oz

As the twentieth book in the Oz series, the 1926 novel The Hungry Tiger of Oz represents the sixth story penned by Ruth Plumly Thompson. The book, which contains illustrations by John R. Neill, precedes the 1927 release, The Gnome King of Oz.

The book elevated the Hungry Tiger from L. Frank Baum’s background comic relief into a central protagonist, deeply exploring his moral dilemma and setting a precedent for giving side characters their own adventures.

Written by Ruth Plumly Thompson, the novel highlights the structural shift from Baum’s style. Thompson introduced fast-paced, pun-heavy, and episodic quest narratives, though critics note her female characters (like Princess Ozma and Betsy Bobbin) lacked the fierce independence of Baum’s original leads.

The book permanently relaxed the rules of Oz’s geography by allowing characters to easily cross the “Deadly Desert,” a barrier previously established as insurmountable.

Publisher Reilly & Lee used an inventive marketing campaign by distributing real-world promotional materials disguised as The Ozmapolitan, the fictional Emerald City newspaper.

More information:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hungry_Tiger_of_Oz>

<https://newwwoz.blogspot.com/2010/09/hungry-tiger-of-oz.html#:~:text=Hey…,reader%20is%20a%20little%20irritated.>

<https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/70152>

100th Anniversary of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Agatha Christie’s mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd—her third featuring detective Hercule Poirot—was initially serialized as Who Killed Ackroyd? in the London Evening News from July to September 1925.

In her 1977 autobiography, Christie credited her brother-in-law, James Watts, with the “remarkably original thought” of making a Dr. Watson-style character the criminal. In March 1924, Lord Louis Mountbatten also sent her a letter with a similar premise. While Christie acknowledged his input, she developed her own plot line, drawing additional inspiration from the unsolved death of Charles Bravo, whom she believed was killed by Dr. James Manby Gully.

Since its publication, the novel has been adapted numerous times across various media, including theater, film, radio, television, and graphic novels.

More information:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd>

<https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/69087>

Do we still need 2 kinds of MOBI?

Project Gutenberg currently produces 7 flavors of most of our ebooks: HTML, EPUB3, EPUB2, EPUB2 (no images), MOBI (“Kindle”), MOBI (“Older Kindles”), Zipped HTML, and Plain Text (Unicode). We’re planning to add PDF and KEPUB (for Kobo) later this year.

MOBI (Mobipocket, labelled as “older Kindles” on our download pages) is the format that was required for Kindle ebook readers when the Kindle was introduced in 2007. It was a proprietary format that had been acquired by Amazon. A couple of years later, Amazon launched an advanced version of MOBI and called it KF8 (it’s the download file we label as “Kindle”); the version with digital rights management was called AZW3. The publishing industry developed a non-proprietary ebook format - EPUB, which Amazon would accept and convert to MOBI for Kindle users.

Today, the only way to load third party ebooks onto a newly purchased Kindle or Kindle App is to use the “Send-to-Kindle” service which accepts EPUB3 files and loads them into your Kindle Library. We know that MOBI files are being used less and less, but we want to continue to support our readers who still use their old Kindles! So we’d love to hear from you about whether you still use MOBI files. Here’s a 2-question survey form you can use to tell us your opinion:

<https://forms.gle/nU4cREmuxdHAHEQc6>

New Releases at Gutenberg.org - June 2026

In the last month PGLAF added another 194 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 117 were added by Distributed Proofreaders. 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://www.gutenberg.org/newsletter/202606.html>

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

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