— Project Gutenberg News - October 2026 —

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Contents

ISBNs!

An ISBN (International Standard Book Number) is issued to almost every published book or ebook in the world. Traditionally, ISBNs have identified things sold in stores, and they double as UPC codes with attached prices and are used to ring up your bookstore purchases. It’s not supposed to be allowed, but there are plushie toys with ISBNs! (Try 9781579824549.)

Since Project Gutenberg doesn’t sell its ebooks, ISBNs have never really been needed. But over the years, ebook cataloging and distribution systems have come to depend on ISBNs to identify books for purposes other than selling. For example, a distributor of ebooks for the reading-disabled has run into difficulties loading our ebooks into their system because they lacked ISBNs. Libraries use ISBNs to group multiple versions of a book together in their catalogs, so readers miss out on our free editions. It seemed time to make the change.

You can see the ISBNs right now on our web site. Over the next month they’ll get added to the ebooks themselves. Note that our ISBNs, which are 13 digits starting with the prefix 979-8-238, formally identify the HTML manifestations of our books. We don’t have separate ISBNs for the various ebook files which are all derived from the HTML versions… and the price is the same, $0!

Working as a cataloger at PG - Notes by Joyce Wilson

Thousands of books are added to Project Gutenberg each year. The PG cataloging team works to ensure that readers can access those books by doing our best to make sure each one has an accurate and useful catalog record.

A brief catalog record is automatically created for each new item added to Project Gutenberg’s collection. Then a member of the PG cataloging team goes over the new record, ideally within a few days. They fix problems such as similarly named authors incorrectly linked to the work, or duplicate authors created when a record for the correct author already existed but wasn’t automatically matched on. Title typos are sometimes found and fixed.

Additional information is added: subject headings to help readers find books in an area of interest; content notes for collections of stories. When present, contributors such as translators and illustrators are added.

For authors and other contributors who are new to the catalog, we follow the example of the U.S. Library of Congress for the “main form” of the name where that’s possible (“Twain, Mark,1835-1910” for “Samuel Clemens”. Having one preferred source minimizes the chance of duplicate authors in our catalog. If the Library of Congress record doesn’t include life-dates for the person, we still try to find that information, since in much of the world, year of death determines public domain status.

If you notice an error in the PG catalog, please send a correction to the cataloging team; our email address is on PG’s “Contact Us” page.

PG Behind Bars

We get a surprising number of letters from readers in prisons:

“First and foremost, I want to thank you for providing the online catalog of publications on your website. As an incarcerated individual, I have utilized your database on countless occasions. To find technical information or historical data for college projects, or just to read some great original SciFi stories.

We also get reports from folks whose loved ones are forced to pay five cents a minute to read Project Gutenberg on prison provided tablets. That’s outrageous! To be clear, Project Gutenberg wants its ebooks to be free everywhere that there are readers.

Ada Lovelace Day

Celebrated the second Tuesday of October, Ada Lovelace Day shines a light on women’s achievements in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It encourages women in STEM by inviting people globally to share stories of the women who inspire them.

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

First of all, who was Ada Lovelace? A British mathematician and translator as well.

Ada was the only child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke. Their short-lived marriage dissolved when Ada was five weeks old, leaving Ada with no future contact with her father.

At age eleven, a European tour sparked Ada’s interest in aviation, leading her to study flight and design steam-driven flying machines. A severe illness (measles and perhaps encephalitis) subsequently confined her to bed for three years.

After recovering, 17-year-old Ada debuted in London society. On June 5, 1833, she met 41-year-old Charles Babbage at a social gathering. Impressed by her intellect, Babbage invited Ada to view his newly built Difference Engine—a 2,000-piece mechanical calculator. (It is preserved today in London’s Science Museum!)

Ada was mentored and encouraged by Mary Somerville (in her own right a famed science communicator and translator of works by the French scholar Pierre-Simon Laplace). Ada was soon eagerly diving into the study of Euclid.

At Turin in 1840, Charles Babbage presented his subsequent and unpublished Analytical Engine, earning honors from the Italian government. Luigi Menabrea, a 30-year-old army engineer, took notes of the lectures and published a paper in French in October 1842.

Upon reading Menabrea’s paper, Ada Lovelace decided to translate it into English. By February 1843, she resolved to expand the translation with extensive original notes of her own. These notes detailed an algorithm for generating Bernoulli numbers, widely considered the earliest published computer program.

In an 1843 letter to Ada, Babbage expressed his deep admiration for her, calling her the “Enchantress of Numbers.”

Stephen Wolfram has published an exceptionally detailed and engaging article about Ada Lovelace:

< https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/>

“Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq., by Luigi Federico Menabrea and translated by Countess Ada Lovelace” is available at PG:

< https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75107>

New Releases at Gutenberg.org - September 2026

In the last month PGLAF added another 210 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 134 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/202609.md>

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

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