I'm surprised no eBook Reader vendor has a Project Gutenberg "Store." Where you can just browse Gutenberg, find a book, and just grab it down to the reader. Instead, they either are actively hostile (Kindle), or require the use of Calibre (which itself is good, it is just the friction).
I am actually working on this right now. If you would like to test it, you may download Thorium reader and add the catalog http://pgnew.pglaf.org:8000/opds/
We also have an older OPDS 1.0 (the one I sent is the newer, 2.0 standard) catalog but it isn’t the best to use. It’s still a WIP, but very close to being finished.
To be precise, the vast majority of SE is from Gutenberg, but we also source from Faded Page, Gutenberg Australia, Wikisource and occasionally do our own transcriptions.
Personally I find the formatting used by the Gutenberg one to be a lot nicer/easier to read, despite (or perhaps because of) being simpler, more plain.
At least for the first few pages of content that I looked at on both versions.
If you don’t strip the Project Gutenberg license from the book text (leaving only the book text, which no-one disputes is public domain and freely distributable), you are required to give “pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method you already use to calculate your applicable taxes”
[Way back in the early days of the iPhone, I sold a book reading app which was backed directly by Project Gutenberg texts, called “Eucalyptus”. I sent 20% of the gross profits to PG - which was never less than very supportive of the app - and felt good about doing so.]
e-book app Gutebooks (in addition to their audio app), but it seems to have been deprecated (I'm no longer able to connect to the server on my copy (which I only got 'cause there was an in-app purchase to fund Project Librivox).
FWIW, Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores --- Amazon apparently has a similar setup for the Kindle Store:
>Barnes & Noble has been plundering the public domain using a book composition/keying house in the Philippines to make their public domain books which they make available in their stores
Why is it 'plundering' for B&N to print physical books, transport them to their brick-and-mortar stores to sell? There are real costs associated to doing so. It would not have zero cost for me to print and bind a copy myself at home.
In a similar vein to cobbzilla, I have a couple of family members (and to a lesser extent myself too) who would be keen on such an app for their iOS devices if you ever need some testers for that :)
(iPhones 15 Pro, 11 Pro, SE-2nd; and an iPad of some kind)
the way I see it PG is a labor of love. Bit odd if Barnes & Noble or whoever piggyback off it. But in the end - the more people read the books, the better.
It is a public good, and it would be appropos if corporations would support it directly rather than work at cross-purposes to it.
If Amazon is going to sell public domain texts, then it would make sense to source them from PG, and fund some money from those sales to the non-profit, similarly, they could then funnel reports of typos to PG for review and correction (it was a bit of a struggle the last time I tried to get a text corrected, and the project founder/director actually stepped in on my behalf).
