[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by l_macd

I tried one of the other 'free library' sites, American Libraries @ Internet Archive and managed to download a .mobi book from there without any problems . . .

Me too. I just downloaded Little Women in .mobi from archive.org, without using a computer. So you can get a lot of what is in Project Gutenberg there, which isn't surprising because of what Project Gutenberg says here:

. . . the Posting Team upload our texts when they're ready to two main FTP servers, ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org and ftp://ftp.archive.org, which serve as our master copies

And, yet, there are books at gutenberg.org that (like ones by William Dampiers, mentioned in #8 above) I can find at gutenberg.org but not at archive.org. And other books are both places in .txt, but only in .mobi at gutenberg.org. I guess that's because I'm just looking at http, not ftp -- but, AFAIK, you can't download from an ftp site to an unrooted eInk Kindle.

Originally Posted by ixtab

You may want to contact Project Gutenberg about the issue.

Eventually, yes.

Here's another web page that I think is consistent with there being a Project Gutenberg bug:

http://www.gutenberg.org/error403.php

AFAIK, I'm human, and yet, per the above, I am being treated like a robot

However -- I don't want to write to Project Gutenberg too quickly. They are volunteers, and probably deluged with mostly-invalid problem reports. And they do say:

If at first you don't succeed, don't tell us, just try, try again.

And I'm not giving up on the idea that there is a workaround. As a programmer, it feels to me that there must be one, and probably one that is simple. But as I'm not a web programmer, I can't quite imagine what it is.