ZWIBook

ZWIBook is a project by Larry Sanger, with help from many (not least of which ChatGPT), to put all of Project Gutenberg books (as of December 2023), in ZWI format, on a flash drive with a bespoke reader (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). The project is available for purchase for $50, or $100 for the numbered and signed drives. We thank Henry Sanger for help with CSS and design, and we also thank Project DARA's Louie and Dorian for creating and making available the ZWI files of Project Gutenberg books, which they prepared and which are available here.

Known issues with version 1.0

1. Several issues with the original collection ZWI book files in the /book_zwis directory came to light near the beginning of October 2024. Most users will not encounter these issues, as they affect fewer than 0.2% of the files. Certain files should be removed or repaired (details below) from ZWIBook flash drives from October 7, 2024 and onward; the original version of ZWIBook drives is hereby dubbed version 1.0, and the new version will be called version 1.1. When our work on this is done (as it should be by approximately October 10), then we will make a ZIP file containing all changed files, with instructions, available; this will let users update their copies of the ZWIBook files, making their local copies equivalent to version 1.1. Here are the issues:
   • At the beginning of August about 85 titles were deleted from the PG database for potential copyright reasons. This announcement was made on a small Project Gutenberg mailing list, but as soon as we became aware of the issue, we put a temporary pause in our marketing and distribution. These ~85 files should be removed from version 1.1.
   • Something like 10-20 ZWI files are completely missing either the HTML or the TXT file for the book. These files will be added to the ZWI files in version 1.1.
   • A small number of files (to be determined, but probably less than ten) are "RTF-only", i.e., they do not have HTML or TXT files, but only RTF files; moreover, the RTF files are not part of the ZWI files. In version 1.1, we intend to add the missing RTF files and possibly construct a new HTML versions by hand.
   • There are 34 titles found in "/book_zwis" but which are not contained in the ZWIBook search database; therefore, while the earlier versions of ZWIBook do have a copy, such copies are not accessible from ZWIBook. This is a known bug. The following Project Gutenberg IDs are not included as of October 7: 8776, 13395, 7366, 7766, 7844, 8555, 9304, 13320, 14398, 15083, 15258, 15891, 16187, 16188, 16189, 16190, 16883, 17073, 20144, 22662, 23057, 23063, 23326, 25105, 25107, 25109, 25726, 28876, 2953, 44800, 4978, 54963, 6036, 6672 We apologize for the issue and will supply new builds of the ZWIBook software (with installation instructions) below soon.
   • The Gutenberg Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, for complicated reasons, causes the software to appear to hang, i.e., to freeze and become inaccessible. (In fact, it will eventually load, but only a blank page, and only after several minutes.) Worse, the software's internal data file recording the latest-viewed book is stays on that page. This appears to render the software unusable. The issue can be fixed as follows: (1) Go to your home directory, or wherever the software data is standardly saved in your system. (2) Look (if necessary showing "hidden files") for .zwibook. (3) Inside that directory you will find latest.txt: simply delete that file and the problem will be fixed. Drives distributed after October 7, 2024 should omit the offending title.
2. Highlighting and bookmarking does not work in the table of contents and other front matter of some books. This is a known limitation, due to the complexity of assigning IDs to complex and unpredictable HTML. Most of the body of the text in all books is, as far as we know, bookmarkable and highlightable. There may be a few exceptions.
3. There are some minor styling issues (imperfectly centered text, for example). If you want to collect those issues, we might fix them in a later version.
4. There might still be a few books that are essentially unreadable because of styling issues. We do not currently know of any such books. We went through hundreds of books and resolved all issues we saw, but we did not test all the files in the /zwi_books folder. For such books, you can still read the HTML by exporting the ZWI (see under File), unzipping the ZWI file, and clicking on the HTML (or, if text-only, TXT) file.

Downloads

This is a placeholder. Version 1.1 executables and data updates will be downloadable in this space.