Named for the inventor of the first printing press, the Project Gutenberg website hosts and distributes over 20,000 eBooks drawn from the public domain -— books whose copyrights have expired, or which never had one. What’s more, Project Gutenberg’s entire library is downloadable for free.

Even better, you’re allowed to do just about anything with a Project Gutenberg eBook. As long as you remove the header and its references to the Project, you’re free to copy, reuse, and redistribute any eBook in the Project Gutenberg digital library. Granted, their library holds nothing new, for the most part: it’s limited to books without copyrights. But it is gigantic —- and, don’t forget, it’s free.

So how can you use it? Aside from filling your leisure hours on the Web (not that you need any help with that), you can pull text from Gutenberg eBooks—which are all accessible in simple plain-text ASCII—to do research from the comfort of your desk.

1. If you’re a documentalist or a designer, you can use Project Gutenberg as a source of large blocks of natural text to explore layouts, font designs, and color schemes without having to rely on the same old “Lorem ipsum” again and again
2. If you’re a software developer or QA tester for an application that deals with words and text, then here’s your test data.
3. Puzzled over a vocabulary word? Is the Webster’s definition clear as mud? Try searching your favorite ebooks for occurrences of the word, to see how it is used in context.
4. If you’ve got spare drive time, you could give a listen to one of the hundreds of audio books on file at Project Gutenberg. Some of them were recorded as read by a human, and some as read by machine. You could also use a text-to-speech tool to “read aloud” any of the 20 thousand other ebooks, recording it as an MP3 yourself. (See related link, below.)
5. Mix and match. What if every day for the next month you read (just) the opening chapter a different classic? How much more literate would that make you?
6. Raw data. Project Gutenberg isn’t just old fiction. The non-fiction collection include such items as “United States Census Figures Back to 1630″ and “The Square Root of 4 to a Million Places”

You can check out Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org, or look over their Top 100 lists of popular eBooks and authors at www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top.

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