At Reading Cloud we believe in widening students’ reading horizons and enabling all children access to quality reading materials. To that end we are providing free access to Project Gutenberg, an incredible resource offering over 70,000 free eBooks, including classics such as Agatha Christy, Shakespeare, Charles Dickins and Jules Verne.
With seamless integration into Reading Cloud, it’s easier than ever for students to explore a world of literature at no extra cost to your school.
Project Gutenberg has been dedicated to digitising culture works of literature for over 50 years. With seamless integration into Reading Cloud, your library offering will now include these 70,000+titles, meaning it's now easier than ever for young readers to explore a world of literature at no extra cost to your school.
Note that this feature is only available to Reading cloud customers, Project Gutenberg resources will not be available to Junior Classic customers.
Finding Project Gutenberg Resources
Load up your library system's home page and carry out a search from the search bar at the top.
When the results load, you will see a 'Project Gutenberg' option in the list on the left.
Select this option and you will see all Project Gutenberg resources that are linked to your search criteria. When you have found the resource you are looking for, select it to open the resource record.
Resources
Once the record has loaded, all the resource information will be provided on the screen.
The published date is the date the resource was added to Project Gutenberg's database, not the date the resource was first published, or the date the current version was published.
The number of downloads is the total number of times this resource has been downloaded from Project Gutenberg, not your library system specifically.
If Project Gutenberg has multiple versions of one resource, they will be listed at the top, you can click the links on the numbers to navigate between versions.
To read the book, select either the 'EPUB' or 'EPUB3' options at the bottom. EPUB3 is used for more up-to-date readers such as kindle, while EPUB is a more generic format that can be used on most devices.
Once downloaded, the resource will be added to the library system's catalogue and a loan will be created against the borrower. This will allow you to include them in your reports.
There is no way to browse all resources available through Project Gutenberg, the only way to see all resources would be to go directly to their website.
Disabling Project Gutenberg
Should you wish to turn Project Gutenberg off and remove these resources from displaying, you can turn it off from within Management.
Load the Management page as an administrator user then select 'Settings' from the menu bar at the top of the page, then select 'External Sources' from the list.
You will see a 'Project Gutenberg' option in the list, select it and click the 'Edit' button.
On the next box, untick the 'Enabled' tick box and then click the 'OK' button to save the changes.