(Un)limited editions

What’s your favourite book?

Chances are it’ll be one you’ve already read. But how do you know? There are millions out there waiting for you to pick up, read and fall in love with. A good book – including non-fiction – can make your brain tick over and your heart flutter like nothing else.

But so many around the world aren’t able to discover the joy of reading for a number of factors that seem to be colliding at once. Chief among them are poor literacy rates and rising book costs.

You won’t be surprised either to hear studies show clear links between illiteracy and poverty. The need to read is an essential factor in improving one’s social mobility. But what can be done?

UNESCO Institute for Statistics data, published in February 2025, suggests 750 million adults have no basic literacy skills. Approximately two-thirds are women and 250 million are children. A whole generation of people who can’t, or are barely able, to read. Poor education systems, poverty and conflict play a big part; the five lowest-rated countries by literacy rates are in Africa (Chad, the lowest at 27%) with Afghanistan the one geographical outlier, according to World Population Review.

But it would be easy to brush off low literacy levels as a ‘third-world problem’. Recent studies suggest that, closer to home, poor literacy among adults and children has been a growing problem for some time.

OECD (the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)’s 2024 Survey of Adult Skills report found that 18% of adults in England had low proficiency in literacy or ‘very poor literacy skills’ – up from 16.4% in 2015.

That’s below or equivalent to the UK Government’s 2011 ‘Level 1’ definition which says: ‘Adults with skills below Level 1 may not be able to read bus or train timetables or understand their pay slip’.

“Read more, then,” we hear you shout. And yes, if you’re low on confidence, reading more can be like riding a bike with stabilisers until you feel ready to take them off and explore without them. But is reading becoming something of a luxury pursuit?

Gilded edges

It’s not uncommon now to nip into a book shop and see a paperback bordering on the £12 mark. GfK Entertainment and NielsenIQ BookData’s International Book Markets 2024 report, released in March 2025, indicate book prices have been increasing for a long time.

Inflation – alongside rising publishing costs for raw materials, supply chain issues, shipping and more – are contributing. The UK alone saw book prices go up by 6.6% in 2023 and again by 1.1% in 2024. And though a global boom in the fantasy and romance genres is helping boost fiction sales, non-fiction book sales have been poor across many territories.

And, of course, time to sit down and read is a luxury, especially during cost-of-living crises. If only there was some kind of magical bookshop somewhere. A bookshop without walls packed with history’s greatest titles that you could keep for free and read, wherever and whenever you wanted…

A novel idea

Enter Project Gutenberg. You can visit its website and download to keep (or read online through a web browser) a seminal piece of literature on your phone, tablet, eReader or computer, right now, for free.

It’s all thanks to the inventor of the eBook – as we know it today.

Michael Hart is widely credited with creating the eBook in 1971 when he was able to access University of Illinois’s Xerox Sigma V mainframe. He used his computer time to type up the US Declaration of Independence in ‘e-text’ format that could then be downloaded.

Shortly after, Michael launched Project Gutenberg, to create and distribute more electronic copies of public domain works where U.S. copyright had expired. Over the following years, copies of the Bible and authors from Shakespeare, Homer, Mark Twain and others joined the Declaration of Independence on Project Gutenberg.

Michael passed away, aged 64, in September 2011, but Project Gutenberg still thrives more than 50 years later.

Today, Project Gutenberg’s online library teems with more than 75,000 free eBooks in a number of formats; history’s greatest classics mixed with other more contemporary titles that you only need a web browser, Kindle or ePub app to read.

Dedicated to…

Five decades of Project Gutenberg wouldn’t be possible without the efforts of its vast network of volunteers who freely digitise and proofread the eBooks that Project Gutenberg hosts.

Even Dr. Gregory Newby is a volunteer. “I’ve been the CEO of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF) since it was formed. Originally that meant I worked closely with Michael on all aspects of guiding Project Gutenberg. Since he died, I’m the main central person. A sort of benevolent dictator,” Greg tells us.

“It’s taken decades to build solid, scalable, usable platforms for digitising and distributing eBooks. We have many dedicated volunteers – numerically mostly from Distributed Proofreaders, but Project Gutenberg has plenty as well. The volunteer base is perhaps our most valuable asset, and it’s important to me that they get all the support needed,” Greg adds.

Distributed Proofreaders is just one of Project Gutenberg’s many partners; a team of volunteers designed to ease the conversion of public domain books into eBooks. Volunteers around the world help with sister projects like Project Gutenberg of Australia/ Canada/ DE and others too, to digitise public domain works from those regions into free eBooks.

More than 10,000 volunteers have helped Project Gutenberg over the decades. “A phrase Michael liked to use is that ‘there are no limits to what we can do together, as long as we don’t argue about who gets the credit’. This philosophy results in a lot of volunteers, including me, who are self-motivated,” Greg explains.

An open (source) book

Arguably the most important and inspiring sentence of all the texts on Project Gutenberg lies in its set of principles, which closely follow the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read Statement (FTR):

‘Project Gutenberg was founded on the idea that free, unlimited access to the world’s literature is a pathway to literacy, education, opportunity, and enlightenment. It is inimical to these principles that the collection, or access to it, be restricted due to content.’

It’s a fine statement and one that’s been exacted to the letter since the site’s existence. So much so that organisations can make use of Project Gutenberg’s resources whenever they wish.

For instance, libraries are often under threat due to funding issues, or a lack of other resources. “The cool part is that the Project Gutenberg collection is intended to be easily copyable into a local library,” Greg explains.

“Our metadata is provided in a standard way (something called MARC, which the librarians use) and libraries can link directly to the book [from the website], make copies locally, provide them on thumb drives, help readers to load the materials… It’s unlimited free redistribution in whatever way the librarian or the reader thinks is best.

“Even with shrinking or stagnant collection development budgets, physical libraries remain the nexus for literacy in many communities,” Greg adds. “It’s their role. What a resource like Project Gutenberg does is grow the collection, especially for digital access, by letting our collection augment the library’s holdings.”

Leave it to the prose

Some works are also available as free audiobooks – a great way for those with low confidence in their literacy skills to start their journey into reading as they learn. A 2023 partnership with Microsoft and MIT has helped Greg and the team to create audiobooks at scale with AI, producing around 5,000 new titles, while a partnership with volunteer community LibriVox also helps to provide high-quality free audiobooks.

But Greg has some sobering thoughts. “It’s critically important to literacy that there is access to the written word. Project Gutenberg provides that. That doesn’t give an instant solution to literacy and poverty. Access to the written word is necessary but not sufficient.

“It’s up to other organisations to leverage Project Gutenberg’s and others’ resources to really improve literacy.”

All too true. Only we have the power to help by giving up our time, like Greg and Project Gutenberg’s volunteers, to help others improve their literacy skills.

We can help by letting local libraries know about Project Gutenberg. Donate books that are gathering dust to friends, shops, the National Trust. Sell your second-hand collection to services like ‘Sell Your Books’. Recommend to others to visit Project Gutenberg and other free online libraries instead of spending the afternoon doomscrolling.

And help yourself, too. If you’re looking for a free, easy way to blow off the cobwebs and get back into reading, or to discover a classic piece of literature, then there’s nowhere better to start than Project Gutenberg.

Spreading Good Scribes

Last August alone, nearly 30 million eBooks were downloaded from Project Gutenberg. Here are the five most downloaded eBooks between 1 – 30 August 2025:

1. Moby Dick; Or, The Whale by Herman Melville (109,357)
2. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (79,901)
3. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (78,777)
4. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster (63,493)
5. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare by William Shakespeare (59,579)

Project Gutenberg’s Mission Statement

• Encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks
• Help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy
• Give as many eBooks to as many people as possible

Visit the Project Gutenberg website to find out more about the project: https://www.gutenberg.org/

Image credits: Michael Hart, courtesy of Doug Bowman on Flickr, CC BY 2.0 licence.