Michael S. Hart

Founder of Project Gutenberg

• Born: March 8, 1947
• Place of Birth: Tacoma, Washington
• Died: September 6, 2011
• Place of Death: Urbana, Illinois

Primary Company/Organization: Project Gutenberg

Introduction

Michael S. Hart is best known for his invention of electronic books and for founding Project Gutenberg. With access to substantial computing power at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and inspired by a free printed copy of the US Declaration of Independence, he began typing the text of the declaration into a computer and transmitting it to other users on July 4, 1971. He added many other public-domain texts to that first one over the next forty years. Project Gutenberg, named for the fifteenth-century German printer Johannes Gutenberg, whose movable-type printing press is considered to have inaugurated the age of print, was the first and largest single collection of free electronic books available on the Internet. Hart also devoted four decades to championing the open source movement, which he helped to start. In 2006, he cofounded the World eBook Fair.

Early Life

Michael Stern Hart was born on March 8, 1947, in Tacoma, Washington. His father was an accountant, and his mother, who had been a cryptanalyst during World War II, worked as a business manager for an upscale women's store. The family lived in Tacoma until Hart was eleven, when they moved to Urbana, Illinois, where both his parents pursued advanced degrees. In 1958, they found jobs at the University of Illinois in Urbana, where his father taught Shakespeare and his mother taught mathematics. Hart, an Eagle Scout, was interested in intellectual pursuits from an early age. He began attending lectures at the university while he was still a high school student. When he officially enrolled in college, he studied chemical engineering but dropped out because he did not like his classes. He was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. After he completed his military service, he returned to school and completed a course of individual study on human-machine interfaces. He earned a bachelor of science degree in 1973.

Hart was a street musician in San Francisco for a time. Operating under the same philosophy that later guided his most famous project, he gave his music away, believing that it should be free to all who could appreciate it. He was also an inveterate tinkerer, acquiring hands-on experience with radio, stereo, and video equipment, as well as computers.

Life's Work

Hart was still a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he spent much of his time with the engineers in charge of the university's mainframe computer, when he began the project with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. The engineers gave him a nearly inexhaustible amount of computer time. Reckoning its worth at $100 million, Hart felt duty-bound to do something significant with that gift. On July 4, 1971, on the occasion of the nation's Independence Day, he had been handed a free copy of the Declaration of Independence at his local grocery store. When he was searching for something to do with his computer time, he found in his backpack that copy printed on imitation parchment. Inspired, he began typing the words into a fifty-year-old teletype machine.

Warned that sending his text via e-mail could crash the system, he sent a message to approximately one hundred people on the network informing them that they could download the text of more than 1,300 words. Six of them did. Hart was encouraged, and over the following years he added the Gettysburg Address, the Constitution, and the individual books of the King James version of the Bible, all of them laboriously typed by Hart himself. Not many people noticed, but he was excited by the accessibility and permanence of these digital texts. Once he had typed the text into the computer, it was available from then on to anyone with a computer and modem who wanted to read it. An unlikely revolutionary, a guerrilla fighter with books as his weapons and a vision of world changes in his head, Hart called his work Project Gutenberg. Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press in the fifteenth century had put books in the hands of those who could not previously afford them and exposed them to ideas that shifted their worldview, Hart hoped to see his project cause book prices to fall and literacy and education rates to increase. His stated mission was “to break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.”

Only twenty-three computers in the United States were online in 1971, and computer memory was small by modern standards. However, Hart, who had seen radios go from the size of a large piece of furniture to handheld devices running on transistors, believed that computers would similarly shrink in size over the coming years. He also thought that the greatest value created by computers would be the storage and retrieval of library materials. At the end of the first decade, Project Gutenberg had 100 books in its collection. By 1997, Hart had personally typed in 313 books. That year, a colleague at the University of Illinois PC user group, Mark Zinzow, helped him set up a mailing list to publicize his project and ask for volunteers. By the end of the year, the archive held about 1,600 titles.

As it became possible to scan rather than type the texts, the number of volunteers assisting in the project increased. By the mid-1990s, when the Internet grew substantially in popularity, hundreds of volunteers in many countries were working on the project. Although Hart was still adding books himself, more and more of his time was consumed in coordinating the project. In August 1997, Project Gutenberg released its thousandth book, Dante's Divine Comedy (in Italian, its original language). Less than two years later, the number of books had doubled. By 2011, Project Gutenberg could boast 33,000 books, accumulating at a rate of 200 per month, with translations into sixty languages—all made available for free.

Despite the advances in technology, Hart insisted on using the original 7-bit ASCII for all the e-texts generated by Project Gutenberg. He was determined that Project Gutenberg's offerings be readable on the systems of any era. A change in file format would have provided more attractive formatting features (such as italics, boldfacing, tab stops, font selections, extracts, and page representations), but Hart's concern was ensuring the broadest possible readership. Project Gutenberg texts can be read easily by any machine, operating system, or software, including on mobile phones and e-book readers.

Hart was also a fierce champion of open access programs, and he objected to proprietary displays, the requirement of special software, and anything but the simplest connections. He also thought existing copyright laws were an unnecessary obstacle to open access. He vehemently opposed the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act. The act, sponsored by the California congressman and former pop singer Sonny Bono, removed one million e-books from the public domain by extending their copyrights by twenty years. Under US law, the average copyright lasts for 95.5 years. Lawrence Lessig, then a law professor at Stanford University (later at Harvard), talked with Hart about participating in a constitutional challenge to the law, but the conversation convinced Lessig that Hart was too much of a visionary for such an effort. In 2003, in a decision handed down in the case of Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Copyright Term Extension Act.

Project Gutenberg's original audience of six people who had read Hart's copy of the Declaration of Independence in 1971 expanded beyond even his expectations. Gutenberg Australia, Canada, Europe, and others were adding to the corpus. In 2007, Project Gutenberg's e-texts were included (with multilingual versions) on the platform for One Laptop Per Child (a nonprofit program offering inexpensive laptops to children in developing countries), as well as in hundreds of other free e-book collections worldwide. The works fall into three basic categories: light literature such as James Barrie's Peter Pan (one of the earliest works added to the list), “heavy” literature such as Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and reference works such as dictionaries. Most of these works are in the public domain. A few are still under copyright protection, but the authors or their estates have granted similar unrestricted rights of use.

In 2006, Hart cofounded the World eBook Fair. Project Gutenberg and the World eBook Library collaborated in a monthlong celebration of the e-book. Beginning July 4, the day Hart generated the first e-book, free public access was provided to a growing number of e-books. In the first year, about three hundred thousand e-books, including light and heavy reading and reference works, were available. The project later added other media, such as music, movies, and artwork, with more than one hundred libraries participating worldwide. In 2024, Project Gutenberg added its seventy-thousandth free ebook. An average of fifty new books were added weekly. The website offered many books in multiple formats, including plain text, HTML, PDF, EPUB, and MOBI. Most were in English, but books in other languages, including French, German, and Italian, were added as well.

Personal Life

Hart lived a frugal life. He supported himself in the early years by repairing high-fidelity stereos. He worked as an adjunct professor. In later years, he often did not bother to pick up his monthly salary. He lived without a cell phone, and the computer hardware he used to oversee the project to which he devoted his life was a decade old. He used home remedies rather than seeking professional medical care. When home repairs or automobile malfunctions occurred, he did the repairs himself. He was married briefly, but he lived alone for most of his life, surrounded by pillars of books, from which he frequently selected tomes to send home with friends who visited. He particularly liked Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and he had a fondness for Romanian poetry.

He died on September 6, 2011, in his home in Urbana, Illinois. He was survived by his mother, Alice Hart, of Belvoir, Virginia, and a brother, Bennett Hart, of Manassas, Virginia. His legacy survives as Project Gutenberg continues to add to its archives.

Bibliography

Grimes, William. “Michael Hart, a Pioneer of E-Books, Dies at 64.” New York Times 9 Sept. 2011: A21. Print.

Jensen, Michael Jon. “For 40 Years, Michael Hart Defined the Landscape of Digital Publishing.” Chronicle of Higher Education 23 Sept. 2011: A27. Print.

Lake, Susan E. L. “Electronic Books for the 21st century.” Library Media Connection 21.6 (2003): 53–55. Print.

Quint, Barbara. “O! Pioneers!” Searcher 19.9 (2011): 4–6. Print.

Weller, Sam T. “2,000 World Classics on Line.” UNESCO Courier 52.6 (1999): 45. Print.

"Welcome to Project Gutenberg." Project Gutenberg, 2024, www.gutenberg.org/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2024.