Project Gutenberg

The oldest library in the world is thought to be the Library of Ashurbanipal in modern day Iraq. When it was founded in the 7th century BC it was in Assyria, a city-state in Mesopotamia. The oldest continuously working library may be the Al-Qarawiyyin library in Fez, Morocco, dating from 859 AD (a suspiciously precise date). Another contender is the library at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, founded circa 550 AD.

This is terrifically interesting if you are into pub quizzes or like me can be a bit nerdy. What is for sure is the oldest digital library in the world was founded in 1971 by American geek, Michael Hart. His mission was to “encourage the creation and distribution of e-books; help break down the bars (sic) of ignorance and illiteracy and give as many e-books to as many people as possible”. The first thing Hart put on a computer network at the University of Illinois was the US Declaration of Independence. Project Gutenberg was born.

Everything published by PG is out of copyright in the US and, as Hamlet said, there’s the rub. Copyright laws vary and in Italy and Germany for example there have been attempts and legal action to get books removed that are still in copyright in those countries. In America books come out of copyright ninety-five years after publication; in the UK seventy years after the death of the author. So I was able to post recently Reginald in Russia by Saki published in 1910 and anyway HH Munro (Saki) died in 1916. Damon Runyon’s stories, published in the 1930s, are on PG because Runyon died in 1946.

But PG doesn’t just mean Project Gutenberg, it means Pelham Grenville (Wodehouse). A lot of his early writing is out of copyright in the US under the ninety-five years after publication rule but in the UK all his work is in copyright until 2045, seventy years after his death. As far as I know the Wodehouse Estate are being magnanimous to Project Gutenberg, possibly because they have no objection to the accurate reproduction of his work, provided on a non-profit basis, as Michael Hart conceived in 1971.

 

 

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