alt Hacker NewsProject Gutenberg had (has?) a tendency toward plaintext that always put me off. (And it has been over a decade I'm sure since I explored the site—so I am no doubt now misinformed.)
I like a styled formatted book—would prefer PDFs. (I know, not a popular format apparently.)
I like the idea of Project Gutenberg but guess I found book scans on archive.org my preference.
My go-to example is Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" with the fantastic art of John Tenniel and Carroll's sometimes creative formatting of the prose…
I see they (Project Gutenberg) have ePub now, which can be good if well done.
(If not well done it can be a kind of mess. Re-flowable "HTML", paginated… Anyone ever try to print a long web page and did you enjoy the result? Perhaps that is as much on the ePub reader though.)
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As others here have mentioned, https://standardebooks.org/ is excellent and my understanding is that they use Gutenberg books as a source for theirs but done up much nicer.
Check out Standard eBooks. They take the text from Gutenberg and add a level of polish to the ePubs.
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. I use the browser's inbuilt capability extensively to enhance my reading experience (fonts, backgrounds, text to speech, print formatting, share snippets). None of this is a good experience with pdf, epub or any other format.
I've read more (meaningful) text on PG than any other digital platform. Huge fan. Thanks for all the work and for keeping it clean and free
I on the other hand prefer epubs for fiction. I mostly read on the phone.
The common issue with PDFs is that e-readers generally have terrible support for them.
PDF coming this year.
check it again. most books have epub avalible
I have got quite a few books over the years from Gutenberg, and the epubs have been fine 0 even of illustrated ones.
I like plain text. You can always post process it into any other format you prefer.
We're supporting EPUB3 for the vast majority of books! At the same time we also have a "Plain Text" version for each as in a sense it's the most robust. PdFs are in the works!