Making the world safe for free ebooks.

Unglue.it launched in 2012 with a focus on sustainable funding models for freely-licensed ebooks. For the last two years, it has worked to improve the access and distribution of these books by building a database of over 1200 Creative Commons licensed ebooks. Unglue.it was been incubated by Gluejar, Inc., a privately held company founded by Eric Hellman

Free Programming Books is a collaboratively maintained list of courses, podcasts/screencasts and other free resources about programming and related topics. To date, over 950 different contributors have compiled over 3,000 links to free programming resources. The repo has been "starred" over 100,000 times, more than any other project on Github except Twitter Bootstrap.

GITenberg began in 2013 when Seth Woodworth wanted to improve some ebooks from Project Gutenberg. He decided to load the ebooks onto GitHub, a version control and collaborative software development platform. There are now 50,000 public domain ebooks in GITenberg, open to use and improvement by anyone. GITenberg received a prototype grant from the Knight Foundation. Many of the innovations pioneered by GITenberg are now being adapted for application to Project Gutenberg.

The Mellon Foundation has funded a project led by the University of Michigan, in which the Free Ebook Foundation, University of Michigan Press, and Open Book Publishers are "Mapping the Free Ebook Supply Chain". The goal is to better understand how free ebooks are being discovered, acquired, and used.

October 30, 2018. Montclair, NJ. The Free Ebook Foundation announced the official launch of its GITenberg prototype website.

GITenberg is an exploration of how Project Gutenberg might work if all the Gutenberg texts were on Github, so that tools like version control, continuous integration, and pull-request workflow could be employed. For forty years, Project Gutenberg has led the way in making public domain text live on the internet as ebooks. It is hoped that Project Gutenberg can take advantage of GITenberg's experience; work in that direction has begun but needs resources and volunteers.

Eric Hellman, President of the Free Ebook Foundation, said "It's hard to believe, but GITenberg started 6 years ago when Seth Woodworth started making Github repos for Gutenberg texts. I joined the project two years later when I started doing the same and discovered that Seth was 43,000 repos ahead of me. The project got a big boost when the Knight Foundation awarded us a Prototype Fund grant to 'explore the applicability of open-source methodologies to the maintenance of the cultural heritage' that is the Project Gutenberg collection. But there were big chunks of effort left to finish the work when that grant ended. Last year, six computer-science seniors from Stevens Institute of Technology took up the challenge and brought the project within sight of a major milestone (if not the finishing-line). There remained only the reprocessing of 58,000 ebooks (with more being created every day!). As of last week, we've finally done that!."

Readers can use the GITenberg website (https://www.GITenberg.org/) and Github repos to find, access and download text and ebook files, and to suggest corrections and improvements. The website also links back to Project Gutenberg and to related websites such as Librivox and Standard Ebooks. All the software used to build and serve GITenberg is Free Open-Source Software. For more details, see Hellman's blog post.

The Free Ebook Foundation (https://ebookfoundation.org)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.