Gutenfetch is a small command-line tool which is designed to query and fetch electronic texts from Project Gutenberg. The utility is designed to be small, fast and minimal it requires few libraries to compile and can give quick access to the majority of the archives at Project Gutenberg with a few key-strokes. Currently, there are around 9,000 free electronic texts available with more being added every day. The books range from classics such as Jane Erye, Tartuffe and Hamlet to historical documents like the Declaration of Independance, Communist Manifesto and the Constitution of the United States.

Gutenfetch, when combined with other commonly available tools such as less and grep can make a powerful but minimalist solution for reading or searching through literally thousands of books. If you or a friend happen to be visually impaired, consider using gutenfetch with Festival. Despite it's power, there are some things which gutenfetch cannot do. It cannot fetch audio files, html files, pdf files or tex files. Although this may change in the future, currently gutenfetch can only fetch .txt files which make up the majority of texts available online.

Happy Reading!