From: [h--re--b] at [math.cornell.edu]
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Date: 17 Jun 93 18:01 PDT
Subject: Project Gutenburg
From: [h--re--b] at [math.cornell.edu] (misc.activism.progressive co-moderator)
Subject: Project Gutenburg
[From Wall Street Journal, 10/29/91]
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"His freedom of information campaign inspires a fair amount of
criticism. At a recent speech in New Haven, Conn., he was asked: "Are
you a Communist, or are you just generous?"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Not surprisingly, book publishers aren't eager to identify which
books have entered the public domain. "They do everything to make
it hard for me," Mr. Hart says.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
He also has tangled with academics. Some, he says, decline to donate
electronic texts to Gutenberg because of its policy of unlimited
distribution. "A lot of people don't want to teach you what they know," he
sputters. "How can you have an electronic text of Plato and want to keep
it away from everybody? It's feudalism!"
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
"He has kept it going on a shoestring ever since, wheedling free
equipment and computer time, building his own hardware, and living
frugally by choice. He doesn't own a car, and rides a bicycle
hitched to a cart to tow computers.
##################################################################
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From the Wall Street Journal, October 29, 1991:
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Plug In, Sign On And Read Milton,
An Electronic Classic
By Ellen Graham
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Project Gutenberg Is Sending Good Books
To Computers Everywhere - For Free
***************************************
If he can keep to his self-imposed schedule, Michael Hart intends to
give away a trillion books by 2001. Just call him the Johnny
Appleseed of the electronic frontier.
The Urbana, Ill., systems analyst is the father of Project Gutenberg,
an ambitious and possibly quixotic scheme to copy the text of 10,000
books into electronic form and distribute them at next to no cost.
His target: the 100 million computers he believes will be out there
waiting by the turn of the century.
In 44-year-old Mr. Hart's utopia, the classics should be accessible to
anyone at the stroke of a computer key. "I want a world where this
stuff is available," he says. "Where you can walk into a public
library and get 90% of the information you need copied on a disk that
you don't have to return."
His freedom of information campaign inspires a fair amount of
criticism. At a recent speech in New Haven, Conn., he was asked: "Are
you a Communist, or are you just generous?"
=============================
A C r i t i c a l M a s s
=============================
For 20 years, Mr. Hart has been typing away in solitary obscurity,
stockpiling books on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, optical disks and the hard
drives of the 30-or-so computers that clutter his 100-year-old brick
home in Urbana.
"Until three years ago, you couldn't pay people to take these books,"
he says. "People looked at me like I was crazy." At that time, there
wasn't a critical mass of potential readers connected to his main
avenue of distribution: Internet, the electronic highway linking
computers at universities, government agencies and other big
institutions around the globe. And downloading something like the
Bible, he explains, chewed up too much disk space.
But as networking and computer memories have mushroomed - more than
500,000 computers are now tied to the Internet - Mr. Hart's idea has
drawn fewer hoots of derision. His monthly Project Gutenberg
newsletter - with items on new releases, the codes for obtaining
texts, and the like - goes out to about 10,000 computer addresses, and
from there, into the electronic ether. Unlike most commercial
electronic texts on the market, he explains, Gutenberg's aren't tied
to specific hardware or software. So besides being free, they can be
read by any machine.
He now has about 1,000 texts in various stages of planning, typing,
proofing and copyright analysis. So far, two dozen titles - including
"Moby Dick" and "The Song of Hiawatha" - have been released, at a
current rate of one per month. He plans to double the output every
year to meet his 2001 goal of 10,000 books.
===========================
P a r a d i s e F o u n d
===========================
Production is picking up, thanks to electronic text-scanning devices
and a worldwide cadre of about 40 volunteers - mostly scholars,
librarians and other professionals - who help turn printed matter into
digital text.
Judith Boss, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska in
Omaha, learned of Gutenberg through her regular on-line discussions
with other academics. (She belongs to electronic forums on
Shakespeare, on writing, and one linking some 2,000 humanists.) Dr.
Boss spent several days keyboarding in the 1667 edition of John
Milton's "Paradise Lost" for Project Gutenberg.
Much academic scut work would become immeasurably easier for those
with access to his texts, Mr. Hart says. Texts could bew_4% searched
to find quotations or key words in, say, "Hamlet." Special computer
programs can analyze and compare electronic texts to determine, for
example, who the author of an anonymous work might be.
Mr. Hart's gateway to the Internet is a mainframe computer at the
University of Illinois campus in Urbana-Champaign. (Although Mr. Hart
has no official connection to the school, a professor gives him access
to the computer.)
Mr. Hart is an adjunct professor at Illinois Benedictine College in
Lisle, where his sole responsibility is building electronic libraries.
Its campus library is the forerunner of what he'd like to see
everywhere: It stores full electronic texts of books that students can
download onto disks and keep.
Often, Mr. Hart's volunteers type up their favorite book and send it
in over the electronic transom. "I got the 'Book of Mormon' just
yesterday," Mr. Hart says. "Somebody sent us 'A Comedy of Errors'
last year, and now he's doing 'The Federalist Papers' for us."
Some people, Michael Hart being one of them, "live" on the computer
network, joining a sub-culture where time and space have little
meaning. At 2 a.m. he may pad down to his basement and the bank of
six computers that serve as Gutenberg Central. Donning headphones and
sinking into an ergonomic chair, he begins his daily grind:
text-scanning, proofreading and monitoring electronic communiques.
"I get a quarter of a megabyte of e-mail a day," he says. "Here's one
from the guy looking for 'King Arthur,'" a volume that has disappeared
into the bowels of a mainframe somewhere. There are also
proofreader's corrections on 'Alice in Wonderland,' and a couple of
messages for Mary Brandt Jensen, who heads the law library at the
University of South Dakota and conducts most of his copyright
searches.
Mr. Hart, who restricts himself to works in the public domain, is a
stickler about copyright. A 1976 change in the law extended copyright
protection to many books that otherwise would have entered the public
domain. This forced Mr. Hart to abandon some nearly-completed
projects, like a 40-volume edition of Shakespeare. Not surprisingly,
book publishers aren't eager to identify which books have entered the
public domain. "They do everything to make it hard for me," Mr. Hart
says.
He also has tangled with academics. Some, he says, decline to donate
electronic texts to Gutenberg because of its policy of unlimited
distribution. "A lot of people don't want to teach you what they
know," he sputters. "How can you have an electronic text of Plato and
want to keep it away from everybody? It's feudalism!"
But a scholar who works with electronic text complains of Project
Gutenberg's "aimless" quality. He scoffs at "all the good boys and
girls each typing in a poem," and asks: "Is anybody controlling the
quality of the text from a scholarly point of view?"
Some librarians, too, have been cool to Gutenberg, arguing that
electronic text is user-unfriendly and subject to tampering. Yet Tom
Abbott, who manages off-campus library services for the statewide
Community College of Maine, sees databases like Gutenberg's as the
only solution to the information deluge: "We're up to a couple of
thousand original books being published each day world-wide, and no
library can conceivably collect everything."
In describing the genesis of Project Gutenberg, Mr. Hart waxes
lyrical. It was 1971, he was a student at the University of Illinois,
and through computer-operator friends, gained access to its mainframe
from midnight to 8 a.m. "The old computer rooms had an aura of
mystery, church and magic," he recalls. "You were a computer god."
But what to do with all those millions of microseconds ticking away?
Fishing around in his backpack, he found a copy of the Declaration of
Independence, began typing, and Project Gutenberg was born.
He has kept it going on a shoestring ever since, wheedling free
equipment and computer time, building his own hardware, and living
frugally by choice. He doesn't own a car, and rides a bicycle hitched
to a cart to tow computers. Recently, he abandoned his torn sweats
for coat and tie, though he still wears sneakers.
Though he has worked at Illinois Benedictine for two years, he hasn't
yet presented a bill for his time. "I will when I need the money," he
says. Consulting work - building computers or retrieving clients'
lost data from damaged disks - pays the bills. "I live very low on
the hog," he says.
One day, however, Mr. Hart intends to cash in. "Ten years from now if
I sent out a note asking for $10 from everybody who has gotten books
from Gutenberg," he says, "I'd like to think I'd have a big enough
pile to go off and do something new."
[What a RELIEF to the WSJ who can now (tell themselves that) this
guy isnot some ALIEN but that Money is, for Hart, too, #1 --HB]
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