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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."
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.
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 ...
No, but he was one who envisioned a future of knowledge delivery for all people with electronic files on the Internet, and alas, the one who *actually did it*.
RIP Mr. Hart.
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.
Please, let me be the first among us to say "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on too."
AC's are what they are, and slashdot is engineered to accept them so that no voice is silenced. I'm OK with that. But to come in here, on this day, and piss on the memory of a man who never did harm and blessed us all with the wealth of ages because you couldn't figure out one of the simplest websites on earth? Fuck you. I mean that sincerely. Die in a fire, please.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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.
... 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.
You know what you doing. For great justice.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
For a while I tried to read Proj. Gutenberg books in e-readers (both using the Hanlin v3, and a Kindle DX). The lack of any kind of formatting or typesetting information other than line breaks hurts a lot. Specially with poetry.
The formatting of text in a page influences the reading experience a lot, and in all Gutenberg project books I tried to read, the on-screen result was always a mess. On non-English books things are even worse. I tried using some Perl scripts hacked by some people, and also wrote my own code to create epub or mobi files. At some point I just gave up on reading material from the Guttenberg project.
Copyright law is a tricky thing, and Michael Hart had to navigate through that maze all while trying to preserve books which were in theory part of the public domain in spite of the best efforts of many people to assert copyright on these older works and somehow getting away with it. In as litigious of a society that the United States of America has become, legal disclaimers are not just useful but necessary.
If you read the fine print, you could take Gutenberg texts and send them into "every possible nook and cranny", but you merely had to remove anything which mentioned the Gutenberg Project by doing so. Copyright was never asserted, and what you are quoting here is one of but many paragraphs like this.
What you are complaining about here is the need for lawyers because other lawyers want to screw you over and grind you to dust. Michael Hart lived in the real world, unlike some people. That he also had to pay rent, buy food, and do a few other things all the while trying to promote the archiving of the world's historical literature into electronic form is just more proof that sometimes people just don't get it. Michael Hart certainly didn't die a very wealthy man in terms of Wall Street recognizable assets, but he certainly left the world as a whole much richer as a result of his living on this planet and and certainly left a legacy that will live on for generations to come. That is a hell of a lot more than I can say about you (whoever you are AC) or even myself.
Then it is likely you know nothing about the history of e-books. Study up on the topic before you spout off other nonsense like this.
I got the same error. I got around it by navigating to the main home page and clicking through to the article I was looking for (in this case his obituary). Now I want to check with my ISP to see if I'm being proxied (as was suggested in another reply).
Try the Calibre eBook managing / creating software.
I converted some text/pdf texts very nicely for my nook with it.
http://calibre-ebook.com/
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Never had a problem with the EPUB's on the Sony PRS-650 formatting-wise.
If you see a problem... fix it. Either you are a blowhard and just like to criticize, or you have the technological capability to be able to improve all of the things you are complaining about. Michael Hart started the process, and he knew it was going to take more than a lifetime to be able to get it all put together with the vision he had. These texts are in the public domain, so there is absolutely no excuse for you to sit back and complain if you haven't at least made a reasonable effort to improve upon these texts and tried to make the improvements you are suggesting are necessary.
Go, spend your own money, set up a website, and show us how to do it right. I dare you! Seriously! If you want to tell other people how to do something they are doing as best as they can, you won't get any sympathy from me.
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.
I prefer to see a cause of death in obituaries, especially when the age of death is relatively young.
The more I learn about different ways to die, the more I hope to avoid them.
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/
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.
At the time he made that decision, there was no other markup language which was available to use on the texts, at least one which was available under a public specification that also wasn't encumbered by proprietary restrictions like a patent, trade secret, or copyright. That there were other problems along the way only emphasizes more that he was a pioneer who sort of stumbled along the way and had to discover all of these things that you obviously know with perfect 20/20 hindsight.
Considering he started this before HTML or even SGML, I think Michael Hart did a pretty good job of anticipating future technologies. Every single one of these criticisms can be accounted for in terms of the history of computing and the fact that storage technology has changed dramatically since he entered Gutenberg Text #1. In terms of storage costs, the entire current Gutenberg archive including "original scans", markup, illustrations, and even fonts can be stored on a device that costs less today in even raw dollars (ignoring inflation adjustment) than it cost to store that original Declaration of Independence. Posts of this nature show sheer ignorance to me. It only goes to show to me that pioneers have arrows in their backs from people like this.
I like the way he did it better than the way you are not doing it.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!