There are still parts of the world where access to the global internet is limited. Rural parts of world from Alaska to Africa to Asia have bandwidth to that is unevenly distributed. Governments regularly cut off website and apps access to their residents, with education often a collateral damage.
There is and will always be a need for offline access to online resources.
Project Gutenberg is a 48 year old organization whose mission is to make public domain works available for free on the internet. For the past two years, the Free Ebook Foundation has been working with Project Gutenberg to improve their website and ebook-building infrastructure. Kiwix has been developing content modules for some time now to facilitate their distribution effort. It was only a matter of time for these two orgs to meet and plan mischief together.
Together with a team of computer-science seniors from Steven Institute of Technology, and building on our development work with Project Gutenberg, the Free Ebook Foundation undertook to improve the usability and currency of Kiwix-developed Gutenberg content modules. The students added bookshelf functionality to the modules, and helped to streamline the process of module creation. These enhanced content modules are available today on the Kiwix website – a list is available on the Free Ebook Foundation website, along with links to a demo site and the software used to create the content modules.
USB flash drives that can store 128GB of data are can be found for as low as $20 on most online stores – that’s more than enough storage for all 60,000+ books.
About the Free Ebook Foundation
The Free Ebook Foundation is a 501(c)3 New Jersey non-profit corporation. The Free Ebook Foundation envisions a world where ebooks will be funded, distributed and maintained for the benefit of all, by coordinating the efforts and resources of many.
About Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books. Its mission is to encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. Thousands of volunteers digitized and diligently proofread the eBooks, for enjoyment and education.
About Kiwix
Kiwix is an offline reader for online content like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, or TED Talks. It makes knowledge available to people with no or limited internet access. The software as well as the content is free to use for anyone. Kiwix is a non-profit organisation and is based in Switzerland. Our software is open-source available for free. The work we do is partially provided by volunteers, partially funded by individual donations, and grants from foundations.