I’m so pleased to see Gutenberg Canada getting a mention. It’s way smaller than Gutenberg Project actual, and in *DIRE* need of cleanup and organization (and it’s ugly as sin to look at), but it has things that are simply not available on Gutenberg actual because that site uses US copyright law… which is much nastier than Canadian copyright law. Gutenberg Canada actually has stuff that wouldn’t be allowed on Gutenberg actual, plus a lot of specifically Canadian stuff.
The biggest complaint I have about most public domain ebooks is that they’re of such poor quality. Both the Gutenberg Project and Gutenberg Canada insist on plain text versions… which is fine for simple books, but pretty much pointless for texts with tables, diagrams, figures, or equations. And both focus on simply reproducing the text, with no concern whatsoever for the semantics (for example, they mark all italics up with [i] (or worse, just uppercase), whether they’re just italics for display purposes or for actual emphasis), which makes them hard to use for people who have accessibility issues (people who need to use a screen reader, for example).
For years, one of my hobbies has been taking public domain works and making *quality* ebooks out of them – and by quality I don’t just mean they look good (I try to make them look as much like the originals as practical), I mean they are coded with semantic markup technologies, so they are accessible even to readers who can’t read plain text without assistance. I actually have *dozens* of books done, but the vast majority are still under copyright. (Originally I just did this for myself, to create nice digital editions for physical books I own that are falling apart.) One of my resolutions this year was to get a little more organized about that, to focus on public domain texts, and to actually publish them online for others to use too, so I actually put together a simple site listing them at http://indi.frih.net/books/ – there are only three books there so far (though I’ll probably finish Kant’s “Perpetual Peace” this week), but as I go through all my old stuff, pick out the public domain works, and update them, it should expand quite a bit.
Of course, every ebook I make is released back into the public domain – DRM-free – even including anything I added (like cover images, for example).
The focus is on philosophical and scientific texts, and maybe I’ll do some science fiction and mystery works, too… basically anything that catches my fancy, I suppose (it is a hobby after all). I suppose they’re rather niche interests, but they’re my interests, so, so it goes. But if there’s anything you’re really hankering for – or anything you know someone else is really hankering for – feel free to mention it to me; I might put it on the list. (I would suppose the easiest way for you to get in touch with me is via Status.Net/GNU Social – I’m @indi on quitter.se – but there’s also a contact page on the site that I’m probably going to add a contact/request form to… someday.)