Alex G Friedman

Riveting Library Routing Trivia, Today

September 5, 2023

This blog was assigned as a part of my Flatiron Full Stack Development boot camp program, but I am continuing it as my own project now. It is a record of my attempt to rapidly shift careers from an English Professor to a Software Developer. My plan is to share some of what I learn while documenting the challenges I experience for the next batch of displaced English Professors who need to jump ship.

While I was exploring

a few of my favorite websites, looking for some routing and file structure ideas I could steal, I discovered a cute bit of library / archive trivia.

Project Gutenberg is a free library of ebooks, primarily books whose copyrights have expired and are now considered public property in The United States. This amounts to a massive collection, despite the fact that the books are individually transcribed and rendered in simple, accessible formats. Anyone who composes prose, verse, or code should look to it as an enormously important resource.

screenshot of author id zero, unassigned

Its URLs are routed

both by individual ebook and by author, with each having a unique id. If you sort by id, you'll discover that Project Gutenberg hosts many founding documents and the writings and propaganda of The United States. This occupies the first id. Of the first 4 ids, two are blank and the remaining id is assigned to the writings and speeches of Abraham Lincoln.

The rest of the ids seem to have been assigned in batches. But upon navigating to '/ebooks/authors/5', I discovered the first book sorted by author id is Practical Bookbinding by Paul Adam.

I suppose that book will come in handy for anyone who'd like to create a physical backup of Project Gutenberg the punk zine way.

a printer printing like brrrr

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