The Hindu : Putting the Gutenberg Bible online

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Friday, Jul 25, 2003

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Putting the Gutenberg Bible online

By Anand Parthasarathy

Pages from the digitised Gutenberg Bible at the University of Texas website.

BANGALORE JULY 24. The exact digital facsimile of the Gutenberg Bible — one of the less than 50 precious copies that exist today of this 15th landmark century publication — is available on the Internet for anyone to view.

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (HRC) of Texas University has digitised all 1,268 pages of the two-volume Bible that it acquired in 1978 — a copy that is now worth $20 million.

On Wednesday, the Centre announced that 7,000 images from the publication have been placed online and can be accessed from its website www.hrc.utexas.edu. It will shortly be released on a CD.

One of the world's most treasured books and a landmark in printing technology, the Gutenberg Bible was produced in Germany between 1454 and 1455 by Johann Gutenberg. Only 200 copies were printed and most copies have now been lost.

Meanwhile, the Gutenberg Project, the Internet pioneer in making electronic copies of the world's literary treasures freely available, is 32 years old this month. Interestingly, the resource that now numbers over 6,000 e-books for free download from www.gutenberg.net had its origins at the University of Illinois in 1971 — long before the Internet was born.

Today, this is one of the most accessed web resources for people who want to download a `plain vanilla' version of a Shakespeare play or a chapter from the Iliad or a verse by Wordsworth in the quickest way.

The books are stored in plain text version so that even those with very slow connections to the Net can profit from the resource.

The project tries to include all known works of literature that are copyright-free.

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