Michael Hart, a Pioneer of E-Books
Rene Abad
fyi
one of the digital culture pioneers
and people-empowering tool inventor
regards
rene
Michael Hart, a Pioneer of E-Books, 64
By WILLIAM GRIMES
Michael Hart, who was widely credited with creating the first e-book
when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer on July
4, 1971, and in so doing laid the foundations for Project Gutenberg,
the oldest and largest digital library, was found dead on Tuesday at
his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64.
His death was confirmed by Gregory B. Newby, the chief executive and
director of Project Gutenberg, who said that the cause had not yet
been determined.
Mr. Hart found his life’s mission when the University of Illinois,
where he was a student, gave him a user’s account on a Xerox Sigma V
mainframe computer at the school’s Materials Research Lab.
Estimating that the computer time in his possession was worth $100
million, Mr. Hart began thinking of a project that might justify that
figure. Data processing, the principal application of computers at the
time, did not capture his imagination. Information sharing did.
After attending a July 4 fireworks display, he stopped in at a
grocery store and received, with his purchase, a copy of the
Declaration of Independence printed on parchment. He typed the text,
intending to send it as an e-mail to the users of Arpanet, the
government-sponsored precursor to today’s Internet, but was dissuaded
by a colleague who warned that the message would crash the system.
Instead, he posted a notice that the text could be downloaded, and
Project Gutenberg was born.
Its goal, formulated by Mr. Hart, was “to encourage the creation and
distribution of e-books” and, by making books available to computer
users at no cost, “to help break down the bars of ignorance and
illiteracy.”
Over the next decade, working alone, Mr. Hart typed the Bill of
Rights, the Constitution, the King James Bible and “Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland” into the project database, the first tentative steps in
a revolution that would usher in what he liked to call the fifth
information age, a world of e-books, hand-held electronic devices like
the Nook and Kindle, and unprecedented individual access to texts on a
vast array of Internet archives.
Today, Project Gutenberg lists more than 30,000 books in 60
languages, with the emphasis on titles of interest to the general
reader in three categories: “light literature,” “heavy literature” and
reference works. In a 2006 e-mail to the technology writer Glyn Moody,
he predicted that there would be a billion e-books in 2021, Project
Gutenberg’s 50th anniversary, and that, thanks to advances in memory
chips, “you will be able to carry all billion e-books in one hand.”
Nearly all the books are in the public domain, although a relatively
small number of copyrighted books are reproduced with the permission
of the copyright owner. The library includes two books by Mr. Hart: “A
Brief History of the Internet” and “Poems and Tales from Romania.”
“It’s a paradigm shift,” he told Searcher magazine in 2002. “It’s the
power of one person, alone in their basement, being able to type in
their favorite books and give it to millions or billions of people. It
just wasn’t even remotely possible before; not even the Gideons can
say they have given away a billion Bibles in the past year.”
Michael Stern Hart was born on March 8, 1947, in Tacoma, Wash. His
father was an accountant; his mother, a cryptanalyst during World War
II, was the business manager for a high-end women’s store. The couple
retrained to become university teachers and in 1958 found posts at the
University of Illinois, in Urbana, where his father taught Shakespeare
and his mother taught mathematics.
Michael began attending lectures at the university before entering
high school and, following a course of individual study on
human-machine interfaces, earned a bachelor of science degree in 1973.
Work on Project Gutenberg proceeded slowly at first. Adding perhaps a
book a month, Mr. Hart had created only 313 e-books by 1997. “I was
just waiting for the world to realize I’d knocked it over,” he told
Searcher. “You’ve heard of ‘cow-tipping’? The cow had been tipped
over, but it took it 17 years for it to wake up and say, ‘Moo.’ ”
The pace picked up when he and Mark Zinzow, a programmer at the
University of Illinois, recruited volunteers through the school’s PC
User Group and set up mirror sites to provide multiple sources for the
project.
Shrewdly, Mr. Hart included books like “Zen and the Art of the
Internet” and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet” to expand the
audience for the project’s books.
Today, relying on the work of volunteers who scan and proofread
without pay, the project adds to its list at the rate of hundreds of
books each month.
Even in the project’s early stages, Mr. Hart envisioned it in
revolutionary terms. Borrowing a term from “Star Wars,” he referred to
e-books as just one form of replicator technology that would, in the
future, allow for the infinite reproduction of things as well as
words, overturning all established power structures and ushering in an
age of universal abundance.
One hurdle on the road to the diffusion of knowledge was the
Copyright Term Extension Act, passed in 1998. The act, sponsored by
the California congressman and former pop singer Sonny Bono, removed a
million e-books from the public domain by extending the copyright by
20 years. Under United States law, the average copyright now lasts for
95.5 years.
Lawrence Lessig, then a law professor at Stanford University (and now
at Harvard), approached Mr. Hart to see if he would be interested in
taking part in a constitutional challenge to the law.
He met Mr. Hart in a pizza parlor in Urbana, where, Mr. Lessig
recalled in a telephone conversation on Thursday, Mr. Hart added a
thick layer of sugar to his pizza while explaining that he saw the
case as much more than a test of copyright law. It offered, as he saw
it, a way to challenge the entire social and economic system of the
United States.
Mr. Lessig, looking for a somewhat less visionary lead plaintiff,
eventually enlisted Eric Eldred, the owner of Eldritch Press, a Web
site that reprints work in the public domain. In 2003, in Eldred v.
Ashcroft, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the
copyright extension act.
Mr. Hart is survived by his mother, Alice, of Fort Belvoir, Va., and
a brother, Bennett, of Manassas, Va.