2,000 world classics on line

UNESCO Courier, June, 1999 by Sam T. Weller

Relying on the sole efforts of volunteers, Project Gutenberg has been launching the world's literary heritage into cyberspace for nearly 30 years while conducting a crusade against copyright restrictions

When Michael Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, was given a free Internet account, he spent an hour pondering the potential of the gift, then typed in the American Declaration of Independence and sent it to everyone on the networks. Project Gutenberg had just been born.

That was back in 1971, when only 23 computers in the U.S. were online and computer memories were small. Believing that the greatest value created by computers would be the storage and retrieval of library materials, Hart continued his project with the U.S. Constitution, the books of the Bible and Shakespeare's plays. As computer power increased, he launched into book-length manuscripts, beginning with a popular classic, Alice in Wonderland. Today, there are 160 million Internet accounts globally and Michael Hart's free cyber-library just posted its 2,000th title: Cervantes' Don Quixote, in Spanish. While the majority of titles are in English, the library also comprises a handful in French, Italian and Latin.

Idealistic and utilitarian

Although he claims he's never read a computer manual, Hart, the son of a professor specializing in Shakespeare and a mathematician, is a child of the information age, a recluse who prefers to communicate via e-mail from his home in Urbana, Illinois. "I started the project because I am idealistic and utilitarian," says Hart, a self-described blue-collar rebel.

"Michael Hart should be as famous as Bill Gates," asserts Chicago Tribune computer columnist Jim Coates. But Hart has never truly reaped the material reward from being the first to post texts on the net. Project Gutenberg is a non-profit enterprise, entirely funded through donations. Its first grant came from Apple, and others followed from such outfits as Hewlett Packard, IBM and Microsoft, whether in the form of super scanners or dollars.

"We don't have a budget of any kind," asserts Hart flatly. The project, which averages 36 new books a year, relies on some 1,000 volunteers. Nor is there an editorial committee. Volunteers are encouraged to choose books they'd like to add to the library, as long as they fall into the public domain, which restricts the selection to pre-1923 works. They scan and proof the books before sending them to Hart, who puts them online in Plain Vanilla ASCII, the most widespread code for information interchange.

Hart's technique has its critics. In England, the Oxford Text Archive comprises over 2,500 online titles specifically geared to the academic community. Hence the importance of enriching the raw text with footnotes and choosing the most widely respected edition of a work. Such details are far from Hart's chief concern. In his wish to make classics available to the masses, his greatest crusade is against copyright law. Since the launching of Project Gutenberg, the time period of copyright in the U.S. has been extended twice, which according to Hart, "eliminated two million books from lists we could be using." Hart has been threatened by dozens of lawsuits, reportedly for digitalizing editions of books that are still covered by copyright.

Many publishers claim that the Gutenberg project is no threat to business. Northwestern University Press, for example, recently published the complete works of Herman Melville, which are also available free of charge from Project Gutenberg. "This is public domain material," says Nicholas Weir-Williams, director of Northwestern University Press. "The Melville material on the web doesn't damage our sales." "You could put full texts of every book you publish on the net," adds Walter Lippincott, director of Princeton University Press, "and it wouldn't hurt sales. I don't think anybody wants to read very much online. And who wants to sit there and print out hundreds of pages?"

On the contrary, Hart predicts a bright future for e-texts, if only for very simple reasons. "Most people don't have 2,000 books in their entire home," he says. "You can now fit that many books on one disk, for free." But peering into his crystal ball, he also foresees public domain copyright laws extending on. "If this is, indeed, the information age, I ask: 'the information age . . . for whom'?"

* Project Gutenberg: www.gutenberg,net.

* The Oxford Text Archive: ota.ox.ac.uk/index2.html