– Project Gutenberg News – November 2026 –

—Enjoy these eBooks. Share them. Celebrate them.—

Contents

We have stickers!

It’s time to start thinking about year end donations to charities. To help you in your thought process, we’re giving away free Project Gutenberg Logo stickers! You can put one on your ebook reading device, your laptop, maybe even use one as a bumper sticker. We’ll even send you a second sticker to give to a friend. All you need to do is send us a self-addressed stamped envelope. Adding a check is optional, but appreciated, of course. If you’ve donated more than $100 in 2026, (and we have your mailing address) you’ll get one in the mail in January with our tax-year donation acknowledgement. If your address is outside the US, we’ll figure something out, but send us the self-addressed envelope anyway.

Our mailing address is:
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
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Montclair NJ 07042

We have errata.

Do you know the difference between a “hand gallop” and a “hard gallop”? (Answer below.)

Believe it or not, there are occasionally mistakes in our ebooks. But when you have 80,000 titles on offer, even if they’ve been proof-read multiple times, an error rate of 1% is still 800 problems. That’s why we have a special email address for errata submissions, errata2026@pglaf.org and an issue tracking system to handle the errata reports that folks like you send in. The result of this is an overworked volunteer errata team.

If you’re somebody who spots things that are “wrong on the internet” and want to do something about it, please consider volunteering to join our errata team (you can use the errata mail - it gets answered by the errata team.) But it’s not always an easy job. You might think “hand gallop” is a misspelling, typo, or “scanno” for the term “hard gallop”, and should be reported to the errata team, but it’s not! It’s a 3-beat canter, while the hard gallop is a 4-beat canter, much faster! (and definitely not a “3-beat cantor” which is probably not a thing.)

Project Gutenberg wants its books to be faithful to an original printed edition. We don’t usually modernize spellings or language; there are other websites that do that. This makes it a bit more work to deal with errata reports, but preservation is part of our mission.

Nobel Prize in Literature, a timeline

What percentage of women have won the Nobel Prize in Literature? Only about 15.4%! But there is hope that the prize winner gender distribution will someday better match that of readers. The 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature is being awarded to the Canadian author Anne Carson.

Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, receiving it in 1909. Other early female laureates include Italian author Grazia Deledda (1926) and Norwegian writer Sigrid Undset (1928). After another lengthy gap of 10 years, American author Pearl S. Buck was awarded in 1938. Gabriela Mistral became the first Latin American writer honored in 1945. Nelly Sachs shared the prize with Shmuel Yosef Agnon in 1966. Subsequent female laureates include Nadine Gordimer (1991), Toni Morrison (1993), Wisława Szymborska (1996), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), Doris Lessing (2007), Herta Müller (2009), Alice Munro (2013), Svetlana Alexievich (2015), Olga Tokarczuk (2018), Louise Glück (2020), Annie Ernaux (2022), and Han Kang (2024). We hope the gap will narrow and that women will be recognized in other fields as well.

The eReading Rainbow

For decades Reading Rainbow transformed US public television into a gateway for young readers. The series bridged television and the printed page. It instilled a love of literature in generations of children. Host LeVar Burton’s empathetic delivery and his signature sign-off, “…you don’t have to take my word for it!”, invited kids to explore books. Burton explores that impact in his memoir, “Take My Word for It”, recently released.

While the show focused on contemporary titles, thousands of classic texts sit in the public domain, and we think they could have been included in the TV series. Dozens of children’s books hosted on Project Gutenberg deserved the Reading Rainbow treatment.

Each work offers rich worlds and unexpected characters. They are world-class examples of storytelling and exploration.

The core mission of Reading Rainbow continues with each of us: connecting kids with literature. Adults must share books with children. Reading together builds imagination, empathy and curiosity. Download a book today and read it alongside a young person!

A Fan Letter

Dear Project Gutenberg team and volunteers,

Please accept my heartfelt thanks. For more than fifty years, you have  
been quietly doing something wonderful: bringing tens of thousands of  
the world's greatest books to anyone who wants to read them,  
completely free.

I think often of the thousands of volunteers who scan, type, and  
proofread page after page so that a reader anywhere in the world can  
open a classic with a single click. That is love for literature in its  
purest form.

Thank you for keeping these treasures alive and within everyone's  
reach. You have given the world an endless library, and I am deeply  
grateful.

With sincere appreciation,  
mrsp20

New Releases at Gutenberg.org - October 2026

In the last month PGLAF added another 191 new public domain eBooks to the PG catalog. Of these 136 were produced 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/202610.md

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

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