The Mormon Texts Project aims to make early Mormon texts that are in the public domain freely and conveniently available by producing electronic versions for Project Gutenberg. I (Tom) believe that early Mormon texts are faith-promoting, deserve broader readership, and should be made as freely available as possible. I like PG specifically because it’s well-established, future-proof, widely mirrored, and has good lawyers, among other reasons.
The “Available Texts” list is an index of what early church books are up on Project Gutenberg, and our archives contain a bunch of commentary on the books. Here are a few of my favorite posts.
MTP’s e-books are available thanks to great work by volunteers, interns, and research assistants; past interns and research assistants are listed here and volunteers (with perhaps a few anonymous exceptions) are generally credited in the books they worked on.
At this point, pretty much every clearly out-of-copyright church book that I would personally be likely to read (or have a desire to post-process) has been done, so I am not currently soliciting help with proofreading. However, if your view of what early Church stuff ought to be up on PG is more expansive than mine and you have an out-of-copyright book you’d like to produce, I would be happy to get you started. I have some decent training materials on everything from proofreading to PG processes to HTML. For your first 300-page book project, you should plan to invest perhaps 30-50 hours of work. If you knock out a couple books and get the hang of post-production, I might even be able to recruit you a proofreader or two.
You can get a sense of our history by looking at past project updates. This has been the official website of the Mormon Texts Project since February 2014; the previous incarnation of the project, managed by Ben Crowder, lived here.
The Mormon Texts Project is not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or Brigham Young University. Views expressed on this site are mine alone.
You’re welcome to get in touch with me through the form below or at mormontextsproject at gmail dot com.