Website Review
Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, Last Updated: November 29, 2009
Founded by: Michael S Hart in 1971
Reviewed by: Tracy Goldberg on 3/31/10
Project Gutenberg (PG) is the largest and first collection of free electronic books. It was founded in 1971 by Michael Hart (who invented the eBook) and its mission is to “encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks.” The website that contains this mass digital book collection would fall under the archive category (a site that provides a body of primary documents) in website genre. Its collection holds mostly full texts that have fallen into the public domain. There are over 30,000 free eBooks that can be downloaded to a multitude of platforms, such as a PC, iPhone, Kindle, Sony Reader or other portable devices.
For the first part of the review, I will ignore the ascetics of the website and concentrate on the content alone. The main purpose of this archive is to preserve and make available digital books to the public and that is what they have accomplished.
The site starts with an introduction to the website and an explanation of what they provide. In the left hand corner, there is a search box where you can input the author or title words to find an eBook. They also have advanced search, browse catalog or bookshelf option. There is also a search box to look for a term within the catalog and the website itself. For an archive website, the search option is extremely vital for the functionality of the site. If a site bar was buried in links and pictures it would be difficult to use the archive to its full potential. PG also has ‘browse by topic’, ‘top downloads’ and ‘recently added’ to help make the search for the right eBook easier.
One of the downside of the search tool is that there is no fix to misspelled words. I did a search for “Sherlock Holmes” in the title words search and found 13 books with the word ‘Sherlock’ and 47 books with ‘Holmes” but when I searched the word “Sherlock Homes”, no books came back. It would have been a nice feature to correct spelling, as Google does with a, “Did you mean…?” I then tried to search Sherlock Holmes with quotations around the word and did not find any titles (despite one of the books in their collection being The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes). So for an archive website, despite the variety of options to search, and the ease of finding the search, the actual results could be finer tuned and other features could be included.
The actual display of books is very basic but easy to read. You can jump to a certain page and even bookmark it. And as stated earlier, you can download the file to whatever platform you choose, so you can read an eBook on the go. The portability and array of options make this a very good eBook archive and make it useful for people who might want to integrate it into teaching more make it available to students so they would not have to pay to buy the books. The only downside to the actual text online that is all very plain; you have the words on a screen and there is no resemblance to what it actually might have looked like when printed (unlike on Google Books that provides a scanned copy of the book online).
Expert from The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Left Project Gutenberg, Right Google Books
PG is a non-profit organization and its main purpose is to provide the public with an archive of digital books to download. There doesn’t seem to be any influence or biases involved with the process. The project is also done by volunteer work, so the project for the public is done by the public. There is also an extensive process to make sure all work is correct and links on every page to insure that the text is proof-read and not edited. However, some people have had issue with lack of scholarly information on the texts, such as the edition of the work, but PG offers link to report issues to correct those emissions.
The biggest downfall of the website is the visual website and presentation. Perhaps the de-emphasis of presentation is a strategy to highlight the pure archive aspect. It very simple and plain and looks to be the original site display that it might have been when it was first created. It does not have an original or innovative design and seems to have the overall layout of a Wikipedia entry. The creators of the website could have utilized the medium of the web to make a more visually attractive website that could entice the user to explore. Even the Google Books website uses pictures (book covers) to highlight books in certain sections. All of these aspects lead to a users experience and what PG has now does not encourage any type of experience outside of the actual contents of the archive.
All in all, I believe this is an effective web archive. It was established to provide the public with a large selection of eBooks, all in one place and as of now the number of eBooks is over 300,000 and growing. Even though the site itself is not pretty, and the presentation of books lacks pictures (even books covers) it accomplishes the goals it set out to do. Because it is a non for profit organization and works on donations and volunteer work it is acceptable that it ignored site design but I believe in order to engage a reader, especially younger readers, a more modern and unique site design could be very effective.
