Michael S. Hart (1947-2011)

Michael S. Hart, inventor of the electronic text or "etext" and founder of Project Gutenberg, passed away at his home in Urbana, Illinois on September 8 at the age of 64.

As a freshman at the University of Illinois, Hart entered the text of the US Declaration of Independence into the university's mainframe on the night of July 4, 1971, almost literally at a keystroke creating the first electronic text and inaugurating what was to become Project Gutenberg, the mission of which is to make electronic versions of as many literary works as possible available to anyone at no cost. He followed the Declaration of Independence a year later with the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights. A year later, a volunteer entered the entire text of the US Constitution.

For the first two decades of Project Gutenberg, Hart and a handful of volunteers worked at entering by hand works such as the King James Bible -- released as an ebook in 1989 -- and the collected works of William Shakespeare -- released in 1994. The development of hypertext and the World Wide Web in 1990, and the availability of the first public web browser, Mosaic, in 1993, facilitated the distribution of ebooks and the recruitment of volunteers, and from 1991 to 1996, the production of new ebooks doubled every year. Distributed digitization and proofreading led to further growth, and in August 1997, Project Gutenberg released its one-thousandth ebook, the original Italian text of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Other milestones in PG's growth included:

• #2000: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote (original Spanish text), May 1999
• #3000: Marcel Proust, Á L'ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (original French text), December 2000
• #5000: Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, April 2002
• #10000: The Magna Carta, October 2003
• #20000: Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, December 2006
• #30000: Chester Albert Reed, The Bird Book, October 2009.

By June 2011, the collection listed over 36,000 titles in sixty languages, available in formats capable of being read using computers, PDAs, smartphones and ebook readers, and all freely downloadable and redistributable. Affiliated projects exist in Europe, Australia and Canada, and tens of thousands of titles are downloaded every day from the main sites and from 40 mirror sites worldwide.

I don't know who coined the phrase "information wants to be free," but Michael Hart embodied the spirit of that slogan. For four decades, he worked to make the collected cultural legacy of humankind available to all. Our thoughts are with Hart's family and friends. Project Gutenberg continues, a living monument to one of the digital age's most important yet uncelebrated visionaries.

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