Project Gutenberg of the Philippines is happy to announce the release of the first Cebuano Ebook, Larawan: Mga Sugilanon ug Dinalídalí, a collection of short stories by Vicente Rama (1887-1956). Originally, these stories where published in Cebu in 1921. The stories give a humorous glimpse back into the life in Cebu in the early twenties of the last century, and, besides that provide a nice reader for students of the Cebuano language.
The book can be downloaded from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/20820.
Due to their age, the copyright on these stories has expired, which means that Project Gutenberg can make them available for free, and with hardly any restrictions on their use and re-use.
This addition also marks the addition of a third Philippine language to Project Gutenberg (next to Tagalog and Iloko) and the 51st language to Project Gutenberg.
eBooks or “electronic books” are books in computer readable format designed for maximum accessibility and ease of use. They can be read on a wide range of devices, are full-text searchable, fully proofread, easy to print or re-use otherwise. Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971 by Michael Hart is currently the largest free source of ebooks. It aims to make as many ebooks as possible available to as many readers as possible. Project Gutenberg of the Philippines, founded in 2005, is a Philippine sister project, with the same objectives, but with a special focus on Philippines related works.
To date, Project Gutenberg of the Philippines has published, in close cooperation with its parent Project Gutenberg in the US, over 100 eBooks on the Philippines, including over 50 works in Tagalog. Included in the collection are several works of José Rizal, including the Noli and Fili, the first 25 volumes of the Blair and Robertson’s monumental 55-volume work, The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, with the remaining volumes forthcoming. Important anthropological studies on the Bontoc Igorot and other indigenous peoples of the Philippines, an English-Spanish-Tagalog dictionary, and rare 19th century first hand travelogues covering the islands.
Many more historic and rare Philippine books are in preparation, using the concept of Distributed Proofreading. On the Distributed Proofreaders website volunteers can help to preserve historic works, by proofreading one or more pages and fixing mistakes left by automatic OCR software. With a community of over 30,000 volunteers world-wide, this website converts more than 5 books per day from scanned images to fully proofread texts. You too are invited to help preserve our cultural heritage, one page at a time.