Scope of Collection
As of November 2011, Project Gutenberg claimed over 40,000 items in its collection, with an average of over fifty new e-books being added each week. These are primarily works of literature from the Western cultural tradition. In addition to literature such as novels, poetry, short stories and drama, Project Gutenberg also has cookbooks, reference works and issues of periodicals. The Project Gutenberg collection also has a few non-text items such as audio files and music notation files.
Most releases are in English, but there are also significant numbers in many other languages. As of November 2010, the non-English languages most represented are: French, German, Finnish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese.
Whenever possible, Gutenberg releases are available in plain text, mainly using US-ASCII character encoding but frequently extended to ISO-8859-1 (needed to represent accented characters in French and Scharfes s in German, for example). Besides being copyright-free, the requirement for a Latin (character set) text version of the release has been a criterion of Michael Hart's since the founding of Project Gutenberg, as he believes this is the format most likely to be readable in the extended future. Out of necessity, this criterion has had to be extended further for the sizable collection of texts in East Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese now in the collection, where UTF-8 is used instead.
Other formats may be released as well when submitted by volunteers. The most common non-ASCII format is HTML, which allows markup and illustrations to be included. Some project members and users have requested more advanced formats, believing them to be much easier to read. But some formats that are not easily editable, such as PDF, are generally not considered to fit in with the goals of Project Gutenberg, although many are being introduced to the collection in PDF format so that illustrations can be added to downloadable documents. For years, there has been discussion of using some type of XML, although progress on that has been slow.
Beginning in 2009 the Project Gutenberg catalog began offering auto-generated alternate file formats, including html, EPUB and plucker.
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