Project Gutenberg will be giving away e-books for a month this summer -- some of the great classics of world literature.

For much of the past decade, the publishing world has been trying to figure out how to make money selling books in electronic form. Now a private project wants to give e-books away for free.

Project Gutenberg, a 35-year-old nonprofit based in Urbana, Ill., announced yesterday it is putting as many as 300,000 books online, where they will be available for free download. Called the World eBook Fair (worldbookfair.com), the program will last a month -- July 4 to Aug. 4 -- and will be repeated annually.

The catalog of available works will include fiction, nonfiction, and reference books, mostly those that are no longer protected by copyright. ``It will include the oldest books in the world, including every author you have heard of in your life, other than current ones," said Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg's founder. The fair also will offer classical music files, both scores and recordings, as well as films.

About 95 percent of the books are in the public domain and not subject to copyright law, Hart said. The copyright holders of the remaining 5 percent have given permission for use of their works. Copyright law generally protects a work for 70 years beyond the death of its creator.

Roughly 20,000 of the books have been scanned by thousands of Gutenberg volunteers -- and are already available at gutenberg.org -- but the majority will be loaned to Gutenberg for the month by more than 100 e-book libraries, including the World eBook Library, which normally charges a fee for temporary access. As many as 100,000 of the 300,000 books will remain available permanently. Gutenberg plans to offer 500,000 books in next year's fair, 750,000 in 2008, and 1 million in 2009. Still, even these numbers are a fraction of the tens of millions of books that have been published throughout history.

``Our stuff is all free," Hart said. ``We want people to take these books and use them, to keep them in their PDAs. Our mission is to help break down the walls of ignorance and illiteracy."

A bibliophile's dream, and a scholar's fantasy!

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