📚 Who are we?

The Free Ebook Foundation is a charitable non-profit that uses technology to help make free ebooks succeed in their missions. Yes, free ebooks are free because they have missions! Educators make their textbooks free because their mission is to help students learn. Academics make their books free to advance knowledge (and to get tenure!). Programmers make their books free to pay it forward for their open-source software. Authors make their books free to build their audiences. Organizations have their own missions to advance. Some books, those that have ascended into the public domain, belong to ALL of us. We have a responsibility to care for these.

We're a small organization, but it seems we're one of Github's most prolific users. Our list of free programming books is one of the top-ten repos on all of Github, with over a thousand contributors and over 100,000 stars. It helps programmers from around the globe develop their programming skills and knowledge.

✨ Our work

We've been supporting public domain books by putting Project Gutenberg on Github. Yep, over 60,000 repos in "GITenberg". This program has been a sort of prototype lab for Project Gutenberg; In the coming year(s?), you'll be seeing many features prototyped in GITenberg implemented in Project Gutenberg.

One reason free ebooks don't work so well in commercial channels is that ebook providers (I'm looking at you, Kindle) live on a cut of the purchase price, so things fail when the ebooks are free. That's why we've build up a datastore of over 70,000 free-licensed and public-domain ebooks and distribute them on unglue.it.

That's quite a lot to do, but we'd love to have the resources to do more. We're currently working on projects to distribute ebook archives on flash drives and to make it easy to figure out if a book has entered into the public domain.

💖 Thank you

We'd be honored to have your help, via code contributions or sponsorships. We can do this, together, by coordinating our efforts and resources.