Project Gutenberg Thailand is a sister project of Project Gutenberg. It is a community for digitizing public domain books about Thailand and Southeast Asia, in both Thai and English, by converting them into e-books. This is done through collaborative proofreading and transcription.
Beginnings of PGT
In 2007, I corresponded with the founder of the original Project Gutenberg and inventor of the e-book, Michael Hart. He always encouraged spin-off projects to Project Gutenberg, and was enthusiastic when I asked about starting PGT. However, it wasn’t until Michael’s untimely death in 2011 that I got serious about moving forward.
PGT was active from 2011-2014, and more than 10,000 book pages were digitized by PGT volunteers. Completed books can be found on the Available Books page. Emil Kloeden served as co-lead on the released projects of that period. Most PGT books were digitized using Unbindery, a web-app built by Ben Crowder for PGT and later publicly released. My sole contribution to Unbindery was the name! Note: Our PGT installation of Unbindery is currently offline, but I expect it to be brought back online on a new server at a future time.
Future of PGT
The project has been mostly dormant since 2014, but many more books were partially digitized, with plans to eventually be completed. These can be found at the Books in Progress page. I have compiled a very large collection of scanned books in Thai or about Thailand and Southeast Asia whose copyrights have expired, and I maintain a list of notable Thai authors whose works have entered the public domain in Thailand and/or the United States.
If you have questions or would like to help reactivate PGT, feel free to get in touch with me at gutenbergthai@gmail.com. Happy reading!
– Rikker Dockum