ZWIBook

ZWIBook is a project by Larry Sanger to put all of Project Gutenberg books, in ZWI format, on a flash drive with a bespoke reader (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). The project will be available as a thank-you gift for those who donate $50 or more to the KSF. As of the end of July, the project is essentially ready to launch.

Known issues

1. The Gutenberg Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, which appears to be broken in the original, causes the software to hang. Worse, the software's data about what the latest-viewed book is gets stuck, which renders the software unusable. This can be fixed: (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. Versions distributed after October 6, 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.
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 went through hundreds of books to resolve all issues we saw, but we did not test all 69,020 files in the "/zwi_books" folder.

Downloads

This is a placeholder. Any future updates will be downloadable in this space.