The Gutenberg Project

By Deane Barker • •
AI Summary

This post explores the author’s insights on the Gutenberg project, discussing its impact on digital publishing and accessibility. The author highlights the importance of open access to literature and examines how the project revolutionizes the ways in which we consume and share texts online.

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Note

This post has nothing to do with the content of this blog anymore. I was tempted to archive it when I purged thousands of other posts, but it’s the very first blog post I ever wrote, so I keep it out of pure sentimentality.

The Gutenberg Project has been around since the Internet was very, very young – the Web wasn’t even born yet. It’s an effort to catalog as many free books and texts as possible. Gutenberg has thousands of books from hundreds of authors; all in the public domain, all free. Download, print, and enjoy.

I’m reading “Collective Knowledge: Intranets, Productivity, and the Promise of the Knowledge Workplace” by Robert Marcus and Beverley Watters and I ran across the origin of the Gutenberg name:

Johannes Gutenberg is given the credit for […] the invention of printing with movable type and for the concept of unlimited reproduction. His first work, known as the Gutenberg Bible, was a 42-line […] bible that appeared about 1456.

Update

Added on

I’ve since read an entire book about Gutenberg: The Gutenberg Revolution. Reading the above post 24 years later, it amazes me a little that I once didn’t know who Gutenberg was.

Inbound link from this – Words, Links, and Centrality: Evaluating 17 Years of Gadgetopia Content April 1, 2019

What do you do when you have too much content to review?

Inbound link from this – Where’s the Line Between the Web and Your CMS? September 17, 2025

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a stupid thing I did with redirects once. My friend Andy Cohen reposted it on LinkedIn, and, among other things, said this : Redirects don’t belong in the CMS layer I’m inclined to agree. I think a CMS can be a source for redirect data , but I’m coming to believe…

Outbound link to this – The Gutenberg Revolution April 30, 2017

I love the subject but just couldn’t connect with the writing style. I found it confusing. Not an entirely bad book – it presents Gutenberg as a businessman (and not a very good one), and covers all the religious and political conflict in Mainz, Germany that helped the printing revolution along….