[IIAB] Fwd: [KIWIX][GUTENBERG] 50.000 public domain books available to everybody, everywhere, offline

[Emmanuel Engelhart]

Might be interesting.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [KIWIX][GUTENBERG] 50.000 public domain books available to 
everybody, everywhere, offline
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 13:18:52 +0100
From: Emmanuel Engelhart <kelson at kiwix.org>
To: Using Wikimedia projects and MediaWiki offline 
<offline-l at lists.wikimedia.org>, gutvol-d at lists.pglaf.org, 
wikisource-l at lists.wikimedia.org
CC: kiwix-developer at lists.sourceforge.net 
<kiwix-developer at lists.sourceforge.net>, 
kiwix-testing at lists.sourceforge.net <kiwix-testing at lists.sourceforge.net>

Hi,

The Kiwix team is happy to release the whole Project Gutenberg
(http://www.gutenberg.org/) library in a ZIM format:
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/gutenberg/gutenberg_mul_all_2014-11.zim.torrent. 

We also provide a few language specific versions here
http://download.kiwix.org/zim/gutenberg.

This file is dedicated to an offline usage (no connection to Internet)
and it readable with Kiwix (http://www.kiwix.org). This allows anybody
with a computer or a smartphone to own his own copy of this 50.000 books
big library. You can also make it available for read to other people on
your network, they only need a web browser.

In this ZIM file, you will find all the books available in HTML
(directly readable), but also in EPUB (and time to time in PDF). We have
created a custom user interface which is really simple to use: in a few
clicks you can find your book, read it or download it. What is also
unique is that Kiwix proposes a fulltext search engine over all books
content. You can see by yourself using this demonstration web site:
http://library.kiwix.org/gutenberg_mul_all_2014-11/

Most of the work was done during a week long hackathon in Lyon, France
by four Kiwix volunteer developers. This hackathon was funded by the
Fondation Orange with the administrative help of Framasoft and Wikimedia
CH. The Fondation Orange is the first beneficiary of this work and use
it already for its own deployments in Africa.

The solution to build this ZIM file is 100% free software and is
available here https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg. This solution allows
to release easily new up2date versions. This is not a "one shot" project
and we will release periodically new version of this offline version of
the Project Gutenberg.

We also plan to use this code base to aggregate other online PD/free
books libraries. Wikisource is one of the first we would love to add,
this might be done pretty easily as soon as an OPDS feed is available.

We hope to see this work deployed by other third part organisation which
are on place where Internet is not available, expensive or censored. We
also need more developer (mostly Python) workforce for the next steps, a
hackathon with this purpose will hopefully be organised in 2015 (sponsor
needed). Last but not least: users, please report any problem here:
https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg/issues

Regards
Emmanuel
-- 
Kiwix - Wikipedia Offline & more
* Web: http://www.kiwix.org
* Twitter: https://twitter.com/KiwixOffline
* more: http://www.kiwix.org/wiki/Communication