A National Treasure

Project Gutenberg Canada officially launched on July 1, Canada's birthday (Fête du Canada). Although the project started with a baker's dozen, there are already a couple of hundred texts available for download in various formats from plain vanilla ASCII to HTML.

The two missions of Project Gutenberg Canada are to promote and make available, free of charge

• Canadian Books
• Canadian literature (in both of Canada's official languages)
• non-fiction books on Canadian history, politics, and culture
• International Books
• fiction and non-fiction (from all countries) which are in the Canadian public domain
• in any language, as is appropriate for a country with Canada's multicultural makeup

Since Canadian Copyright Law is life-plus-50 (versus life-plus-70 in the U.S.), the site is careful to warn, “If you live outside Canada, download an ebook only if you are certain that the book is in your country's public domain.”

Their blog added this pat on the back to the people and government of Canada for their critical support of the public domain.

“Finally, we would like to thank the people of Canada and the Government of Canada. There is a strong political consensus in Canada in favour of a healthy and vigorous public domain. Successive Canadian governments of all parties have consistently protected and indeed strengthened the Canadian public domain: it connects all of us to our cultural heritage.

We can say without hesitation that every single one of the thirteen titles we are presenting is an outstanding work of art. And yet every one of these fine titles has been out of print for many years. Had Canada followed the unfortunate example of some other countries by extending the duration of copyrights, twenty more years would have passed before we could have presented these free ebooks, which, being out of print, cannot be purchased in a bookstore.”