Hi,
The Kiwix team is happy to release the whole Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/) library in a ZIM format: http://download.kiwix.org/zim/gutenberg/gutenberg_mul_all_2014-11.zim.torren.... We also provide a few language specific versions here http://download.kiwix.org/zim/gutenberg.
This file is dedicated to an offline usage (no connection to Internet) and it readable with Kiwix (http://www.kiwix.org). This allows anybody with a computer or a smartphone to own his own copy of this 50.000 books big library. You can also make it available for read to other people on your network, they only need a web browser.
In this ZIM file, you will find all the books available in HTML (directly readable), but also in EPUB (and time to time in PDF). We have created a custom user interface which is really simple to use: in a few clicks you can find your book, read it or download it. What is also unique is that Kiwix proposes a fulltext search engine over all books content. You can see by yourself using this demonstration web site: http://library.kiwix.org/gutenberg_mul_all_2014-11/
Most of the work was done during a week long hackathon in Lyon, France by four Kiwix volunteer developers. This hackathon was funded by the Fondation Orange with the administrative help of Framasoft and Wikimedia CH. The Fondation Orange is the first beneficiary of this work and use it already for its own deployments in Africa.
The solution to build this ZIM file is 100% free software and is available here https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg. This solution allows to release easily new up2date versions. This is not a "one shot" project and we will release periodically new version of this offline version of the Project Gutenberg.
We also plan to use this code base to aggregate other online PD/free books libraries. Wikisource is one of the first we would love to add, this might be done pretty easily as soon as an OPDS feed is available.
We hope to see this work deployed by other third part organisation which are on place where Internet is not available, expensive or censored. We also need more developer (mostly Python) workforce for the next steps, a hackathon with this purpose will hopefully be organised in 2015 (sponsor needed). Last but not least: users, please report any problem here: https://github.com/kiwix/gutenberg/issues
Regards Emmanuel