Lady, EVOLVED 
do kids these days even know what project gutenberg is??
oh wait, it’s a website not an app, so of course they don’t
😩
the kind of idle linkfollowing which people now see as relegated to sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes was once how the entire internet operated
@Lady ok but all of project gutenberg is on ibooks
@Lady you're joking but that was legit how i found out about them in the first place, when i got an ipod touch and i was like 'hey ibooks has all this free stuff, neat'
@Satsuma i’m kind of not joking lmao
Apple TV+ did a reboot of Ghostwriter which from what i saw was mostly bad, but one good thing it did have was it used entirely public domain works and the kids in the show just went to the books store and downloaded it for free and basically were like “hey, kids, watching this, yes you, did you know you could get this book for free, it’s public domain”
i’m certain kids are finding project gutenberg books still and they all carry the disclaimer in the front but it’s a VERY different vibe compared to back in the day
@Lady oh yeah i’m just saying there is a path from there to understanding public domain
Like i’ll grant i’m not a typical subject but
@Satsuma definitely and i’m not sure public domain in general is that much more obtuse now than it used to be; it might even be less considering the discoverability of like, searching for a book for your high school lit class and seeing a free copy in the books store
but it’s more faceless; the specifics of project gutenberg with their specific catalogue is a lot easier to miss out on when you’re just downloading from the app store
it’s easier not to get that this is a volunteer project that has been running for decades, not to understand the mission and principles of it, etc
and just say “oh hey someone put it up here for free”
@Lady :(
I think there IS an app, but it kinda sucks
@witchfynder_finder project gutenberg texts are available in e.g. the apple books store and i’m guessing that’s how most people encounter them these days
but the experience just isn’t the same as going to the actual website and browsing the library
@Lady Yeah for sure. Lots of time spent just scrolling and seeing what they had
@witchfynder_finder in my AP US History class whenever it had its little asides about literary movements or whatever i would just go into Project Gutenberg and look up all of the authors it mentioned, like that was how i was first exposed to Virginia Woolf
@aescling *zoomer voice* hyperpop you can read
@Lady hey zoomers......... you know how that “Hyper Pop” you listen to likes to mishmash genres all the time ............. well uhhhhhhhhhh idk, imagine if all the genres it was influenced by it somehow could, explicitly tell you exactly what genre it was using, and then pointed you to something that maybe then pointed you to examples of that genre............. uhhhhhhj sounds cool, right? uhh. yeah. so uh. have you heard of hyper*text*.............................
@Lady we found hundreds of webcomics to read that way
- a Packbat 🎒
i miss clicking through webrings and top 100 virtual pet website lists and using stumbleupon....
having bookmarks full of different cat blogs instead of them all just being on twitter
when i was in high school most of the art i was exposed to was from browsing e.g. Category:Romanticism on Wikimedia Commons, and maybe part of this is the blame of Wikimedia Foundation for not prioritizing that kind of discovery in their apps, but it just seems to me like that kind of web browsing has died a slow, gothic death over the past decade