Public Domain

Project Gutenberg is run by volunteers whose mission is to make written ebooks available to the world, either those in the public domain, or copyrighted works with explicit permission, mostly by scanning them in.

It was started in 1971 by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois (my alma mater!) who was given unlimited access to one of the early supercomputers there. (The U of I was one of the first computers on the network that became the Internet in the US). He used some of the spare cycles to enter in public domain works like the Bible and Shakespeare.

With changing copyright laws in this country, it can be hard to keep track of what is and isn't in the public domain, but that's a story for another day.