It's too bad that PG is totally reader hostile. :-P It could be a great source for the readers of the world. Instead it's a bunch of unreadable text files that give "entrepreneurs" the raw material they need to put out a bunch of $1 ebooks.
PG's goal is the digitization and long-term storage of public-domain written materials, and I'm glad that's all they're doing.
I think you're looking for Standard Ebooks [0][1], which utilizes (usually) Project Gutenberg-sourced text, original-edition illustrations, and volunteer editors to create professional, free-as-in-beer ebooks.
[1] I tend to write, or only ever see, "eBooks", but Standard Ebooks styles it "Ebooks". That's the only thing I don't like about them, and I really really don't like it. Given my uncontroversial acceptance of the capitalization used when starting a sentence with the word "Email", I imagine I'll live.
First: Browsing around the website, all books I could reach from the homepage or by searching for titles I could think of are available in multiple digital formats.
Second: PG is older than PDF, EPUB, MOBI, and even HTML. It isn't too surprising to me that there are works there that are text only.
I remember reading plain text books from PG at work ~20 years ago. The network was monitored so I had to bring them in on a 3.5" floppy. Having probably read thousands of pages that way, it's a bit odd to see plain text described as "unreadable".
Lots of bizarre defenses of PG here. Look at it this way: every single person you meet has heard the phrase “Wikipedia” and probably all but the least curious have used it. How many have heard of Project Gutenberg? And why not? Are public domain books unpopular? (No, schools assign tons of public domain books in English class.) Okay, so what’s going on? Answer: Project Gutenberg has decided that making the books readable is not their job. Well okay whatever, it’s their project, but the result is a total failure to be what it could and should be: a peer to Wikipedia and a household name.
Why would you say so? I think it is really good that they offer to view the book lots of formats. And they haven't came up with their own scrolling solution, still scrolling the full book HTML is faster than any modern site.
Also, if I wanted to read a book to the full, I wouldn't have read it in their interface no matter how better they would be. So I like to quickly view text then download epub.
