Produced by Al Haines
NEF, University of Toronto, 2009
Copyright © 2009 Marie Lebert
The first ebook was available in July 1971, as eText #1 of ProjectGutenberg, a visionary project launched by Michael Hart to createelectronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide.In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for asmall cost. In the 21st century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyoneto have a digital library at no cost. Its critics long consideredProject Gutenberg as impossible on a large scale. But Michael went onkeying book after book during many years, with the occasional help ofsome volunteers. Project Gutenberg got its first boost with theinvention of the web in 1990 and its second boost with the creation ofDistributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help digitizing books from publicdomain. In 2008, Project Gutenberg had a production rate of 340 newbooks each month, 40 mirror sites worldwide, and books being downloadedby the tens of thousands every day. There have been Project Gutenbergwebsites in the U.S, in Australia, in Europe and in Canada, with morewebsites to come in other countries.
# Beginning
As recalled by Michael Hart in January 2009 in an email interview: "OnJuly 4, 1971, while still a freshman at the University of Illinois(UI), I decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe atthe UI Materials Research Lab, rather than walk miles home in thesummer heat, only to come back hours later to start another day ofschool. I stopped on the way to do a little grocery shopping to getthrough the night, and day, and along with the groceries they put inthe faux parchment copy of 'The U.S. Declaration of Independence' thatbecame quite literally the cornerstone of Project Gutenberg. Thatnight, as it turned out, I received my first computer account—I hadbeen hitchhiking on my brother's best friend's name, who ran thecomputer on the night shift. When I got a first look at the hugeamount of computer money I was given, I decided I had to do somethingextremely worthwhile to do justice to what I had been given. This wassuch a serious, and intense thought process for a college freshman, myfirst thought was that I had better eat something to get up enoughenergy to think of something worthwhile enough to repay the cost of allthat computer time. As I emptied out groceries, the faux parchmentDeclaration of Independence fell out, and the light literally went onover my head like in the cartoons and comics… I knew what the futureof computing, and the internet, was going to be… 'The InformationAge.' The rest, as they say, is history."
Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in ourlibraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books(ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII—called PlainVanilla ASCII—for them to be read on any hardware and software. Abook would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages,with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the printversion. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed,searched, analyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searchesis much harder in various markup formats.)
Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put ateveryone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary worksfrom public domain as possible for free. Years l