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Terms of Use

From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free ebooks.

Terms of use for the Project Gutenberg website as of January 1, 2014 (updated April 17, 2016). Applies to all sites in the gutenberg.org domain.

Audience

This website is intended for human users only. Any perceived use of automated tools to access this website will result in a temporary or permanent block of your IP address.

  • If you want to download many books[1] manually or using an automated download software, download them from one of our mirrors, not from the main site. See the list of PG mirrors and the roboting guidelines.
  • If you want a list of all our books, download and save the Gutenberg index file It can be opened with any browser or word processor.
  • If you want a machine-readable database of all our books, read the Feeds page and the [Offline Catalogs] (/wiki/Gutenberg:Offline_Catalogs) page.
  • If you are behind a proxy or VPN because you want anonymity or because of company or school policy, you may be blocked because other users of the same address are misbehaving. Try turning the proxy or VPN off.
  • If you are using a commercial product that channels requests through a proxy (such as Amazon Kindle), your address may be blocked due to too much use from that shared proxy address. Instead, see our Mobile Reader How-To for guidance on how to download items to your own system, prior to transferring to the other device.

License

What you are allowed to do with our books once you download them: See: the Project Gutenberg License and the Permision How-To

Deep Linking

When linking to a Project Gutenberg item, link to the main landing page such as www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11. Do not link to specific files or anchors, such as http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm. Technical measures (i.e., cookies, captchas and similar) are utilized to ensure that links come from the landing page or elsewhere within www.gutenberg.org. If you need to link to a specific file or passage, please make your own copy of that file and host it on your own server. This measure is a protection against possible renaming or reorganizing the back end file structure, which has happened several times over the years. We intend the landing page to be permanent.

Embedding or Wrapping our Site or Contents

Applies mainly to website owners. We do not allow large-scale deep-linking to eBook files hosted on our servers. We reserve the right to take legal and technical measures against this.

While the books we host are free, our server infrastructure and bandwidth is not. It is paid with money generously made available by our donors and partners. We will not tolerate mock Gutenberg front-ends that pocket advertising revenues while leaving the cost of actually serving the files to us.

OPDS Feed

Applies to OPDS application developers. Every application that uses our OPDS feed must:

  • Use a proper user-agent, like: calibre/1.1.0 (+http://www.calibre.org). Always include a contact address like a web page or email, so we can reach you. Applications without contact address and application developers that do not respond to our inquiries will be blocked from using our OPDS feed.
  • Make no more requests to our servers than a user with a browser typically would make (eg. for every search, request only one page of results, and automatically request the next page only if the users scrolls to the bottom of the previous page). If your application makes lots of requests, your users will be blocked at the IP level. For high-volume OPDS applications consider downloading our [catalog database] (/wiki/Gutenberg:Feeds#The_Complete_Project_Gutenberg_Catalog) and hosting your own OPDS feed. If you have special needs, contact us, don't try to `hack around´.

Automated Blocks

Blocks to Internet addresses (IP addresses) are applied automatically based on the volume of traffic and related factors. Such blocks automatically expire after a few days.

Footnotes