Oh, so Project Gutenberg is still a thing? I used to use it until they blocked German users (context: they were asked to prevent access to certain pieces for German users but they decided to go nuclear instead).
Nowadays I just go to LibGen when I want to have a look into a book.
That LibGen doesn’t limit itself to works in the public domain is rather a feature ;)
Work that’s PD in the US but not in Germany. German rights-holders took PG to court (or rather, a poor German sysadmin for PG), court demanded PG pull the titles for Germany, PG refused saying that it was down to the users to determine PD status for their home country, and because of HTTPS the German court’s only option was to block PG at the domain level.
Project Gutenberg themselves decided to block all access from Germany instead of just the items in question.
„On February 9 2018, the Court issued a judgment granting essentially most of the Plaintiff's demands. The Court did not order that the 18 items no longer be made available by Project Gutenberg, and instead wrote that it is sufficient to instead make them no longer accessible to German Internet (IP) addresses.
PGLAF complied with the Court's order on February 28, 2018 by blocking all access to www.gutenberg.org and sub-pages to all of Germany.“, from https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
Nowadays I just go to LibGen when I want to have a look into a book. That LibGen doesn’t limit itself to works in the public domain is rather a feature ;)