- December 13, 2005: Robert Sheckley, one of the few authors represented with copyrighted works at Project Gutenberg, died December 9 at age 77 in Poughkeepsie. According to a New York times obituary, Sheckley “is considered one of science fiction’s seminal humorists, and a precursor to Douglas Adams“; but “a better comparison might be to Kafka, a fabulist who could never understand why his friends didn’t laugh when he read his stories to them”. (We don’t actually have Adams; but the link is to a free online text adventure game by him.)
- November 01, 2005: Sony CD installs “rootkit”. If you stay away from file sharing networks because you fear virus infections, you’ll also have to stay away from copy-protected CDs from now on. At least one commercially distributed Sony CD has been found to install a “rootkit” software which should prevent user from making copies of the CD. A naive removal of the “rootkit” files will make the system CD drive unusable. For more details see: The Register or Slashdot.
- October 22, 2005: This month marks the fifth anniversary of Distributed Proofreaders, a website designed to make helping Project Gutenberg easy by breaking up the tedious work of checking our etexts for errors in small, manageable chunks.
- October 2, 2005: Apart from War of the Worlds, three more films will have been based on public domain books at the end of 2005, according to the Based on the Book website: Pride and Prejudice, Dorian Gray (English, Dutch and French), and Oliver Twist (English and French).
- August 31, 2005: Project Gutenberg has all the light classics for your summer reading needs: the works of Frank L. Baum (“Oz”), Edgar Rice Burroughs (“Tarzan”), Victor Appleton (“Tom Swift”, remastered in glorious HTML), et cetera. Are there any missing? Please tell us about them.
- July 9, 2005: A grocery store in Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada accidentally sold several copies of the sixth Harry Potter book before the authorised release date. The Canadian publisher, Raincoast Books, obtained an injunction from the Supreme Court of British Columbia prohibiting the purchasers from reading the books in their possession. See the Wikipedia article.
- July 6, 2005: The European Parliament rejects the proposed Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions by a 648-14 vote with 18 abstentions, ending four years of intense debate and lobbying.
- July 4, 2005: Project Gutenberg’s 34th Anniversary greetings.
- July 1, 2005: Yes, we have War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. We have an audio eBook, too.
- June 17, 2005: Read our ebooks on Apple’s iPod. Recent iPods have an application called Notes that can be used to read with: Daniel Duris has a free conversion service, and Make Magazine explains how it works.
- May 9, 2005: Bicentenary of Friedrich Schiller’s death. We have many works by Schiller both in English and in German.
- April 23, 2005: We have Shakespeare in German, French, English and even Finnish. Also check out the works attributed to Shakespeare.
This page has been created as an archive of the 2003 news from the gutenberg.org website.
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