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Michael Hart, Inventor of the E-book, Dead At 64
FeatherBoa writes "Michael Hart, the founder and long time driving force behind Project Gutenberg and 1971 inventor of the electronic book has died at his home in Urbana Ill, on Sept. 6th 2011. Project Gutenberg is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects, has spawned sister projects in Australia, Canada, Germany and other locations to transcribe public domain literature and make it available via the Internet."
no link to Project Gutenberg?
Let me just say that I admire the man for all that he has done. For his vision, and efforts to push us all to bigger and better things.
Project Gutenberg will be a lasting legacy.
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Inventor of the text file?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
I wrote a short obituary for him.
Link to Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://transformativeworks.org/
My webbrowser (Chrome, Win7) makes it looks like Urbana III. I was wondering if he had lived on a planet ...
Project Gutenberg is some major shit. kudos.
Read radical news here
I volunteered with Project Gutenberg for about 5 years in the1990s. Michael was something of an iconoclast, and had his hand in all sorts of things. I had the pleasure of meeting Michael at his home once, and last was in contact with him two years ago.
In a number of conversations with Michael (mostly online) our opinions on methods often clashed, but I have no doubt that he sought to serve humanity to the best of his ability, and especially to bring knowledge and opportunity to everyone in the world - without exception. He strove mightily to break down the barriers to knowledge, and to dethrone the gatekeepers who seek to prevent ordinary people from joining the company of the elite. I used to doubt his assertion that such gatekeepers exist, or that anyone would be so vile as to purposely prevent meritorious students from gaining an education - but I have come to realize that he was mostly correct. When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act came before Congress, Michael was the chief voice speaking out against it - but sadly, few people listened, or even understood why it was important. Michael's work has done a great deal to break down the barriers to knowledge that he despised, and for this we should all be thankful.
Rest in Peace, Michael. You did well.
To do it right they should slashdot it forever and put a link on the slashdot footer to Project Gutenberg.
The guy did more for the preservation of knowledge than you or I could ever hope to do. Even Richard Stallman owes him a debt that can't be repaid - for the idea that we own the knowledge that we share, and its value increases with its commonality. His ideas are the inspiration for the free software movement, Google Books, and many other things.
The first time I downloaded an eBook from Michael Hart, his site was on The List - and The List was under a meg. I read it a dozen times, and have gotten hundreds since. My Android tablet is now configured to search for books "Project Gutenberg first." Over the years I've given back what I could, when I could, but to be honest I got more than I gave. The man had Vision, with a capital V. I'll never forget the premise: that with digital technology replication is costless so if an ebook is worth $1 and distributed to all the people of the world, that work creates billions of dollars worth of knowledge.
Now's a good time to remember and give again what I can.
The passing of a dear friend is seldom more painful than when you owe them something you cannot repay. Farewell, Michael Hart. If the best I can do now is to do what I can to help push your vision forward, I owe you that.
Holy hell but it's dusty in here all of a sudden.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
WTF, I get a 403 "automated access" reply. I have a standard, run-of-the-mill residential internet connection in Canada. And I've accessed the site in the past. Maybe the traffic has sullied their filter to the point that even localhost is treated as a bot :P
LOL, shows my browser as "RockMelt". It's standard firefox...
Someone that changed the world for the better died. He had a vision of how he wanted books to move beyond dead trees and followed it with conviction. I've occasionally used the Gutenberg project ebooks and I was grateful that it was available. It's a great resource and I hope it continues to exist long into the future.
I only met him once, and he could be a little difficult at times - it took years to convince him to release titles in anything other than ASCII - and certainly he could be single-minded and met frequent disappointments - the latter being the curse of every person who is ahead of their time.
It seems a little early to make such a speculation, however.
For me he is more important for the project gutenberg than for the ebook.
... has written a heartfelt and thoughtful obituary:
http://www.gutenberg.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_S._Hart
If you want to honour Michael, go and proof a page at http://www.pgdp.net/ - the literary equivalent of pouring one out for this internet giant.
- He was abrasive, often to the point of rudeness --- esp. if he felt you were failing to give him his due for having typed the Declaration of Independence into the storage of a computer system when he was first given the chance to use one.
- Project Gutenberg has yet to recover from his decision to limit the original texts to just ASCII w/ no mark-up --- providing even the most minimal of text markup was verboten.
- The failure to provide an initial method for tracking which edition (or ideally copy) of a text was used, and the discarding of many of the original scans has resulted in a great deal of redundant work.
You know what you doing. For great justice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Project Gutenberg is indeed useful, but I too have bristled at the "inventor of the E-book" moniker. I too believe much of its implementation is incredibly short sighted. Inconsistent and poorly implemented metadata and calling the website "one of the simplest websites on earth" is a stretch and epitomizes the project's self focused viewpoint. This is not to say Hart did not contribute to mankind, I just personally think the Project leave a lot to be desired and I hope a fresh wind blows in with an eye toward the future not a 1990's viewpoint. It would make sense for the leadership to prescribe a "correct" way to do or phrase things and not let "just anything" be okay.
Am I the only one that's noticed that only the AC's seem to have a problem with Hart's death/title/contributions? Funny how no one's willing to put a name to the complaint.
That said, anyone who dies and leaves the tools to encourage people to peel themselves away from mindless entertainment and makes reading a bit more accessable, gets my respect.
Wikipedia-Editors be damned!
Consistency is only a virtue if you're not a screw-up.
Very sad to read this news. Michael was a visionary with a strong drive and passion. He wasn't always a fan of the latest technology, but digitizing books was always his top priority. I hope the project continues forward with renewed vigor, it is an incredibly important effort. Consider that without something like Project Gutenberg, digital libraries in the 21st century may not be free, open, and public.
My boss suggested that I attend a weekly "geek lunch" that a group of the older computer savvy fellows held at the U of I's Beckman Institute and met him there. I was aware of Project Gutenberg before that but hadn't used it much. Michael was a good advocate for ebooks before anyone got around to coining that particular terminology. The last few times we met, I remember him being very excited as he had samples of various new ebook readers to try out. He was testing them to see well they integrated the Gutenberg Project and was glad that more people would have easy access to it.
Over last fall, the group met weekly and I helped him with the process of making digital copies of the Gutenberg archive on different filesystems on individual drives. The entire Gutenberg archive is about 300GB with everything extracted and we could dual format a 750GB drive to fit a copy on NTFS and another one on ext3. That was a fun experience; most people don't get to play with a real life 300GB data set.
I hadn't been to a meeting in a while, darn it. I'll miss him.
The Internet has no garbage collection
I lived next to him while I was attending U of I as an undergrad. He was a great neighbor. The house I was in had five bedrooms, all occupied by male college students. He told us we could have parties and be loud, so long as we warned him, and gave him $20 to get a burger and see a movie.
Why not head over to Distributed Proofreaders and do a few pages in his memory: http://www.pgdp.net/
Michael Hart is bigger man than you know him. 40 years of contribution is not light! His works mean something to a lot of people, including myself. To me, he is not only Michael Hart but loudheart. Thank you Michael for your works.