Project Gutenberg

What hackers pick instead

• Anna's ArchiveA huge free, DRM-free archive of books and research papers that people praise for opening up and preserving knowledge, though critics dislike its paid memberships and messy duplicate listings.134recommend
• Standard EbooksFree, carefully typeset and proofread EPUBs of public domain classics, with git-tracked source for every book. Common caveat: some critics dislike its editorial changes to the original texts.34recommend
• Library GenesisRecommended as a free source of books and textbooks, often DRM-free. The most common caveat is that Meta scraped it for AI training.15recommend
• LibGenFree shadow library of books and textbooks, valued for easy downloads and access to old and hard-to-find titles. Critics point to knockoff sites under the LibGen name stuffed with ads.12recommend
• SourceLibraryA free, open source collection of historical texts, including thousands of Renaissance books, with a research agent for answering questions about them. Some texts are machine translated.11recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 90 comments. Each links to the original.

1. You can download books directly from the Project Gutenberg website using the web browser on most eBook readers

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

2. I’ve found plenty of interesting things by randomly wandering around on Gutenberg.org, completely undirected.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Quality non-fiction books are the antithesis of AI slop”

3. Project Gutenberg is a treasure trove, though many technical details defy automatic typesetting of its books.

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

4. the old one was simple enough to load and directly download books on the device's built-in browser

   Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

5. free and legal access to all the ebooks I could ever want from Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “A dumpster arrived behind my university's library”

6. it was fast to load, had all the data I needed and I was downloading the ePub within 5 seconds

   Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”

7. I loved when I found StandardEbooks.org and Gutenberg - all these classic books for free.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?”

8. it is actually quite a clean layout, easy to use, doesn't waste screen space

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”

9. I absolutely love how 'no-frills' PG is compared to so much of the bloated

   Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

10. has more books than you will be able to read in your lifetime for no cost

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “KOReader”

11. have a bunch of books you can read for free on your phone or web browser

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Publishers Killed the Paperback, Then Blamed Readers”

12. You can use free books like the ones from the Gutenberg project for this

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Ask HN: Working in a language that isn't your native one. How hard was it?”

13. the amount of weird/interesting stuff that one would find nowhere else

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

14. Library of 75k books seems pretty valuable to have direct access to.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

15. downloads from places like "Project Gutenberg" are a breeze

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “KOReader”

16. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

17. I love how usable the site is even with JS disabled!

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

18. sometimes the formatting leaves a lot to be desired

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

19. I love PG... but the covers stink.

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

20. my biggest complaint about Gutenberg is that a lot of books had images added back when low resolution images were the standard

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

21. Project Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off.

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

22. No to minimal styling would be great!

    Criticizes · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

23. I love, love, looove the fact that I can have a book's html version on project gutenberg bookmarked and continue to read across devices without ever having to login

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

24. From Gutenberg, PD comics from the golden era -and pulp scifi-, noir movies, old weird science/fantasy series in B/W and whatnot, I'm pretty much covered.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “US Bill Mandates On-Device Age Verification”

25. Public domain catalogs are huge now. Standard Ebooks, Internet Archive, Gutenberg - tens of thousands of well-formatted free EPUBs.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “I'm never buying another Kindle, and neither should you”

26. the good thing is that you have the option of Gutenberg, Faded Page, and a bunch of other archival sites, also for free

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

27. For public domain books, I use Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive, generally in that order.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Kindle to end store downloads and registering for 1st-5th gen kindles in May”

28. Gutenberg is awesome. Maybe a matter of taste but I like it much better than modern English.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Show HN: NanoEuler – GPT-2 scale model in pure C/CUDA from scratch”

29. I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

30. PG is perhaps still important as an archive of proofread OCRed public-domain material

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

31. I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

32. Don't hit the site with agent. The section furtherst bottom machine readable.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

33. discover the treasure troves of standardebooks.org and the gutenberg.org

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Kindle loyalists scramble as Amazon turns page on old e-readers”

34. If you haven't visited the page recently, it's worth checking out again

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

35. Project Gutenberg is great. They don't just steal every book they can.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Backing up Spotify”

36. Project Gutenberg up to the 1920's seems to be the safest bet on that.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “TimeCapsuleLLM: LLM trained only on data from 1800-1875”

37. I don't see any of these as reason to hide information from mankind.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”

38. thank you Project Gutenberg for making plain text available

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Little Magazines Are Back”

39. Since most pre-1925 books are out of copyright and free on

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “The Feynman Lectures on Physics (online edition)”

40. Thank you for being one of the best places on the internet

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better”