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Two years ago today Michael S. Hart – the founder of Project Gutenberg – died. I wrote this remembrance a few days after his death for another website, but it never got published. I am putting it here now, with a few updates.
Before you read that, however, I wanted to note that I once had the privilege of hearing Michael speak at the keynote session of the HOPE 6 convention in New York in 2006. (Audio here.) It was a great talk, but then I was already one of the converted. My only regret is that I didn’t go up to him afterward and introduce myself.
Now, on to the remembrance.
* * *
In an age of Kindles and Nooks and iPads with iBooks, it’s easy to take for granted the point, click and read nature of ebooks. But Michael S. Hart who died last Tuesday at the age of 64, predicted it all forty years ago.
In 1971, Hart received a gift $100 million worth of computer time on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois. He spent the first hour and forty-seven minutes trying to decide what to do with the rest of the time, and decided there was only one thing to do:
Type something.
So he grabbed a free copy of the Declaration of Independence and typed it up. Then, in what is arguably the first incident of commercial spam, he emailed everyone he knew and told him where they could find the new file (hypertext and links were yet to be developed). Thus was born the e-text — the not-so-distant ancestor of the millions of ebooks that are downloaded each day from every corner of the Internet.
That the first electronic book on the Internet was the Declaration of Independence is appropriate. In a single, short text, Hart defined what would come to be the philosophy behind the volunteer effort he led for nearly four decades.
A New Printing Press
Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century led to a written revolution that allowed people across Europe — and eventually the world — to share facts and ideas in ways they never could before. Hart prophesied the same potential with ebooks, and so he named his effort “Project Gutenberg.”
“When I chose the name,” Hart said in a 2002 interview, “the major factor in mind was that publishing ebooks would change the map of literacy and education as much as did the Gutenberg Press…. From the equivalent of the cost of an average family farm, books became so inexpensive that you could see a wagonload of them in the weekend marketplace in small villages at prices that even these people could afford.”
The change Hart saw was not immediate. After the Declaration of Independence, he spent the next eight years typing up the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, and famous addresses by U.S. presidents (not necessarily in that order). During this time he also started on Shakespeare’s corpus as well as the King James Bible The Bible was released in 1989; however, due to changes in copyright laws in the 1970s, Project Gutenberg was unable to release the version of Shakespeare that Hart transcribed.1
Slow growth and copyright issues did not deter Hart from his mission to provide free ebooks, however. In the early 1990s, Hart began to organize volunteers to help him accelerate the ebook development process. With the advent of the World Wide Web, it took only five years to grow exponentially from 10 ebooks to 100 ebooks, at which point Project Gutenberg was finally able to release The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Since then, the number of volunteers creating ebooks has steadily increased, and so has their output. In October 2000, a man named Charles Franks created a site called Distributed Proofreaders (DP) to help spread out the tedium of converting “dead-tree” books to their electronic equivalents. Today, DP boasts more than 25,000 titles that it has contributed to the Project Gutenberg library. While DP is by far the largest concerted effort, many other groups and individuals across the world continue to make contributions to Project Gutenberg as well.
Going Global and Fighting Copyright
Hart’s goal, as enshrined in Project Gutenberg’s mission statement, was “to encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks.” With that goal in mind, he was always ready to accept new ideas about how to build his growing collection.
One of the ways Project Gutenberg has provided more books to people is by setting up shop (or servers) outside the U.S. Thus, people in other countries have gained legal access to some books that are still under copyright in the U.S.
For example, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece The Great Gatsby still retains it’s copyright in the U.S., but is considered public domain in Australia, where copyrights expire fifty years after the author’s death (Fitzgerald died in 1940). At Project Gutenberg Australia readers will find Gatsby along with other similar works by authors who died more than half a century ago, such as George Orwell’s 1984.
Because Project Gutenberg efforts outside the U.S. are run by volunteers in those countries, this is completely legal. More importantly, it highlights one of Hart’s primary gripes about how government has continually prevented the free-flow of ideas to among people through copyright law. In a 2005 interview Hart described how every major extension of U.S. copyright law came at a time when books were set to become easier to obtain.
- The Copyright Act of 1831 — strongly supported by lexicographer Noah Webster — was passed shortly after the first high-speed steam printing press was developed in 1830
- The Copyright Act of 1909 was passed shortly after the development of electric presses
- The Copyright Act of 1976 was passed shortly after the development of Xerox copiers
- The Copyright Act of 1998 was passed to prevent digital copying and distribution
“We have been capable of bringing every word ever written to a wider audience than ever before,” Hart said, “but the truth is a movement to deny access to this information has been underway for even longer in the form of continuous copyright extensions.”
But this fact did not deter Hart from finding ways to continue making ebooks freely available to people. In addition to developing electronic versions of public domain books — that is, books whose copyrights had expired — other projects such as the Creative Commons provided ways for contemporary authors (like speculative-fiction writer Cory Doctorow) to bring their books into the Project Gutenberg fold.
Even more recently, Hart began working with the World Public Library, a consortium that claims to make more than 2 million ebooks available in more than 100 languages. For the last several years, Hart has provided his thoughts about every aspect ebooks, from their use in schools to using solid state drives to build personal libraries equivalent to the Library of Alexandria.
The Revolution Has Been Digitized
Barely two weeks before his own death, Hart wrote a moving ode to Steve Jobs [ed. whose death came a day shy of a month after Hart’s], lauding the efficacy of the Apple founder’s vision.
“We live in an age where the media are controlled by mega-corporations…who deny the importance of the individual hero….” Hart wrote. “Those people, the inventors, creators, and makers of our products are a now lost species in the eyes and ears of our media’s corporate control.”
More than 43,000 ebooks and forty years after pecking out the Declaration of Independence, it’s hard to read those words now without recognizing the echo of Hart’s own revolutionary ideas and accomplishments in them.
Perhaps it’s not even much of a stretch to think that someday, someone might suggest “Project Hart” as a better name for the legacy he created.
Footnotes
1. In the massive Project Gutenberg text catalog known as GUTINDEX.ALL, Hart provides the following explanation in a note: “…it was originally considered that we would do one eBook 1971, another in 1972, and then on to Shakespeare and the Bible, with each play or book counting as one title, and thus our numbering system for a while included about 40 files of an eBook collection of Shakespeare that never appeared due to changes in the copyright laws that were not completed when Project Gutenberg went into action in 1971, and left us up in the air for quite some time.”
