Why don't they explain why they have these restrictions? Their books are all in the public domain so what difference could it possibly make who downloads them?

The 24 hour download limit could possibly be defensible if they explained it -- for example they might encourage you to cache a copy of a book you'd like rather than refetch it every time. But they don't bother to explain.

I agree with coding4all: avoid this crap by simply going to the Internet Archive.

I suspect they just have a small amount of money and a large amount of load. You have to do something to try to keep load manageable while still serving the most users.

It's interesting to see one of my favorite sites doing this. There's always https://openlibrary.org/ which is ran by https://archive.org/ . I imagine Open Library has many of the same books.

Interestingly enough they have a link to Tor hidden service in their ToS: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Terms_of_Use

> If you think that TOR gives you the anonymity you want, go here for a hidden mirror of our text files: http://libraryhvopfiqnp.onion/gutenberg/

quote from the onion link :-DD At the moment this server only mirrors PoC||GTFO.

Project Gitenberg: http://gitenberg.github.io

Would be nice to see a decent webinterface hosted nowhere by zeronet [1] serving torrent magnet links of individual books or small collections.

That way a free library of public domain books could be hosted without server costs by the people for the people.

Thanks for the pointer to zeronet, https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroNet

Eric Schmidt said in an interview once that once you have access to entire worlds knowledge governments would like to know who you are

Interesting quote. Where can I find this interview (website/youtube/etc) ?

unfortunately I could not find it again it was newspaper like Atlantic or something like that maybe it was censorship.