Subject: the man behind project gutenberg

an interesting article, despite the author's attempts to sound like holden
caufield on speed...
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from Wired magazine, Issue 5.02 - February 1997

 Hart of the Gutenberg Galaxy

    What kind of a man wants to put the 10,000 most important books online
    by 2002 and make them available for free? (Hint: the kind of man who
    puts sugar on his pizza.)

      By Denise Hamilton

     I am sitting with Michael Hart at Garcia's, a pizza place near the
     University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where we are having a
     perfectly normal conversation about digital libraries and are
     preparing to tuck into our dinners. Hart is an e-text visionary and
     cofounder of Project Gutenberg, whose aim is to put copies of the
     world's greatest books on the Net for free. Hart is also a
     world-class eccentric with the social skills of a cranky 2-year-old.
     As I look up from my glistening pepperoni, Hart, who is 50, does the
     damnedest thing I've seen done to a pizza. Tearing open two dozen
     sugar packets, he sprinkles them methodically over his deep-dish pie
     until it is layered with white crystals. Then he digs in.

     "This may seem weird to you," he confides between mouthfuls, "but
     it's the only way I can get enough fuel to keep working. This right
     here is 2,000 calories, and it should keep me going for a while."

     Then the sugar begins coursing through his system, and Hart takes on
     the bug-eyed look of someone who has just hoovered up a few fat
     lines of Peruvian flake. The words tumble out. Sweat beads his upper
     lip. "Aaaah," he says, leaning back in the wooden booth. "I love
     working till I drop. I love looking back on the day and knowing I
     put another book online. That's what I'm here for. If I feel like
     I'm crashing, I eat. If that doesn't work, I sleep. I live by the
     nanosecond and burn the candle at both ends. With a blowtorch."

     For more than a quarter century - eons, in Net time - Hart has made
     Project Gutenberg his mission in life. Or, more accurately, his
     fervid, manic obsession. While other geeks have grown rich mining
     the silicon motherlode, he's been sitting like a troglodyte in his
     Urbana basement, tending a utopian vision named for the 15th-century
     German printer whose amazing invention first made books accessible
     to the masses. As the 20th century wanes, Hart is using the Internet
     to try to finish what Johann Gutenberg started, pumping into
     cyberspace digitized copies of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Moby
     Dick, and Orlando Furioso and the works of Henry James, Plutarch,
     and Dostoyevsky - basically, any and everything that's ever been
     published between hard covers. It's one of civilization's oldest
     dreams: the universal library. And in an era of ever slicker Web
     graphics, blinking GIFs, and Java-powered billboards, he's doing it
     with militantly plain ASCII text files - just the words, please -
     downloadable anytime anywhere in the world by anyone with a
     functioning computer, a phone line, and a modem. No ads, no credit
     card numbers, no charge.

     Even by the Net's generous standards, Hart is a wild romantic. He
     refuses to keep usage logs. He's not a big fan of copyright
     extension laws. He considers the Web an appalling waste of bandwidth
     - Gutenberg's main files reside on an FTP site. What passes for
     organization is a loose network of volunteer typists, scanners,
     editors, and proofreaders, plus a couple of pro bono attorneys, all
     held together by email. Other than that, Hart operates with
     something pretty close to no strings attached - political,
     institutional, or otherwise. Not that a lot of the groups that share
     his aims would have him.

     Since Hart first typed the American Declaration of Independence into
     a U of I mainframe 26 years ago, Gutenberg has put about 1,000
     titles online, on a budget smaller than some big-time electronic
     publishers allocate for market research. His self-imposed goal is to
     reach 10,000 books by the end of 2001, Gutenberg's 30th anniversary.
     And with 9,000 to go, the questions rise like the greasy steam from
     our pizzas: Is Hart a deluded crackpot, a high tech saint, or just
     another Net eccentric? And what is a project with seriously historic
     ramifications doing in the hands of someone who puts sugar on his
     pizza?

     To find out, I'm pulling up outside the big, century-old,
     ivy-covered brick house that Hart bought years ago with a modest
     inheritance. In my honor, he's wearing slacks but quickly changes
     into the uniform he will sport for the rest of my three-day visit:
     black bicycle shorts that emphasize his pot belly, a red T-shirt, a
     baseball cap, and Nike Air Jordans two sizes too big that cost US$1
     at a garage sale. Beneath the cap is short, thinning hair. He has a
     booming laugh and a large, clean-shaven fleshy face with graying
     sideburns. When I ask to use the bathroom, Hart gestures into the
     basement, past peeling plaster and ancient caulking. "Don't bother
     flushing," he hollers down. "I've got a garden hose, and I'll just
     run some water through it."

     I begin to realize that this is a man with clearly defined
     priorities. "Other than to redesign democracy, I can't think of
     anything more important than Gutenberg," Hart tells me when I
     return. "It's the Archimedes lever: Give me a place to stand, and
     I'll move the world. Well, that's what I'm doing. Our goal is to
     give away 1 trillion e-text files by December 31, 2001. That is
     10,000 titles each to 100 million readers, which is only 10 percent
     of the present number of computer users. Since that number will
     double by 2001, we will meet our goal if only 5 percent of all users
     download a file." Easy as that.

     Hart calls himself an electronic Johnny Appleseed, sowing the
     Internet with books for the global proletariat. He foresees the day
     when, armed with the trashiest laptop and a modem, tribesmen in
     Borneo's rain forest will be able to click onto Gutenberg and
     download texts. But why would anyone want to read a book on a
     computer when they can hold a bound copy in their hands, I ask.
     Because it's fast, convenient, and free, Hart shoots back, along
     with a list of the people who are using Project Gutenberg already:
     Kids doing research for classes. People in foreign countries who
     want to practice English. Grandmothers turning their computer-savvy
     grandkids on to The Jungle Book. Folks looking for rare Robert Louis
     Stevenson volumes - Gutenberg has the author's entire 30-plus volume
     oeuvre - not carried by their local library or bookstore. And people
     like Jo Churcher of Toronto, who is blind. She downloads Gutenberg
     texts and runs them through a speech synthesizer that reads them out
     loud, like books-on-tape, only free. "Gutenberg has finally allowed
     blind people to begin building up libraries of their own," says
     Churcher, who likes the project so much she has helped scan in 12
     books, including The Pickwick Papers, for Gutenberg's files.

     We move into Hart's living room, a dimly lit cavern piled with
     modems, computer cards, hard drives, videocards, and power supplies,
     all leaning drunkenly against each other. There are hundreds of
     boxes of software; thousands of records; CD-ROMs and CDs;
     moth-bitten beaver, mink, and monkey coats; hippie op art; what Hart
     says is an original Modigliani; a gaily painted child's hobbyhorse;
     a Cable piano from the 1910s; a Thomas Edison Dictaphone from the
     '30s; and rooms filled with books, including 50 complete
     dictionaries, three copies of Chaos by James Gleick, and nine of
     Mistral's Daughter by Judith Krantz. "She's usually a ditz," he
     explains, "but this was a good book."

     Hart is a garage sale fanatic, hitting up to 100 each weekend as he
     criss-crosses the leafy suburbs of Champaign-Urbana on a bicycle (he
     doesn't have a car). He also forages daily among neighborhood
     dumpsters, where U of I students routinely discard stereo components
     and new floppy disks. But his favorite dumpster is located behind
     the U of I computer lab. We drive there, and Hart hops right in,
     wallowing thigh-deep amid pizza cartons and plastic milk bottles
     because he knows the school often throws out old equipment, stuff he
     can use for Gutenberg or trade at the weekly "geek lunch" he attends
     with other tech-heads in the U of I orbit. Today, he fishes out a
     set of Unix manuals, an 8mm tape cartridge, and two copies of
     Mathematica, for Sun's Solaris operating system. Slim pickings.
     Nothing like the time he scored an entire ATT 7300 minicomputer.

     Hart doesn't need high-end stuff to run Gutenberg - it's just nice
     to have around. Every few years, he gets a computer from Apple,
     NeXt, IBM, or Hewlett-Packard. Bell &AMP Howell once donated a
     $50,000 scanner, to help volunteers input books quickly. And he's
     thinking about setting up an email server, so he can offer free
     accounts to Gutenberg volunteers. Just talking about the idea gets
     him giggling with glee.

     As a child, Hart's idols were Peter Pan and Albert Einstein. In
     adulthood, the two have twined like a double helix to define his
     personality so that within one conversation, he can go from
     visionary brilliance to bluster to bumble. "Michael is one of the
     smartest guys I've met in my years," says Greg Newby, an assistant
     professor and assistant dean at the School of Library and
     Information Science at the U of I and a senior research scientist at
     the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. "He's also one
     of the least mature. That makes for an interesting combination."

     Hart grew up in Tacoma, Washington, where his parents worked as
     government codebreakers during World War II. In peacetime, his
     father was a Shakespeare professor and a CPA. His mother was a math
     and education professor and ran a women's clothing store. Dyslexic
     but precocious, Hart was messing with algorithms while other kids
     were fumbling with Lego. He plowed through the U of I in two years,
     graduating first in his class with a self-created major in
     man-machine interfaces. Hanging around the university's computer lab
     after graduation, he dreamed of a universal digital library and
     posted an e-text manifesto that grew into Project Gutenberg. With
     the US bicentennial looming, he chose the Declaration of
     Independence as his inaugural text - he also happened to have a copy
     of the text in his backpack. Next he did the Bill of Rights, then
     the Gettysburg Address. But the project moved sluggishly because
     Hart inputted everything manually after his day job of selling
     stereos.

     In those early mainframe days, Hart had to operate within the
     impracticable bounds of a 10-Kbyte donated storage space. But as
     computers got faster and smaller, Gutenberg began to look more like
     a real possibility. Things really broke loose in 1988, when Hart
     typed in his first full novel, Alice in Wonderland. Mark Zinzow, a
     senior research programmer at the U of I who met Hart that year,
     remembers thinking that the project - which at the time had 10 books
     online and a 1200-baud connection - was completely harebrained. "But
     it was also a noble goal," says Zinzow, "and I thought, If he wants
     to tilt at windmills, I'll help him get on his horse."

     Although Hart no longer had a formal affiliation with the
     university, Zinzow gave him access to email and mailing lists, and
     more important, an FTP server. Soon, he was watching in amazement as
     Gutenberg pumped out a gig of data each day. Around the same time,
     Hart was invited to place his digital collection under the official
     auspices of the Benedictine University, a tiny Roman Catholic
     seminary in nearby Lisle, Illinois. The symbolism did not escape
     Hart: monasteries had once been repositories of knowledge in the
     Dark Ages, copying and preserving books for posterity. Wasn't
     Gutenberg doing the same thing electronically, preserving e-texts
     long after paper and microfilm would crumble into dust?

     The monks went even further, naming Hart an adjunct professor of
     electronic text and giving him a $12,000 annual salary. They kicked
     in some extra money for living expenses, most of which eventually
     came from sales of a Gutenberg CD-ROM that has hit 100,000 copies.
     (Regularly updated, the current edition boasts more than 500 titles,
     on a single disc.)

     As the project grew, Hart's management style stayed laid-back. He
     refused to draw up a master list of books for the Gutenberg
     pantheon, preferring to let volunteers input their favorite tomes.
     Initially, Gutenberg got the usual suspects - the Bible, Virgil's
     Aeneid (in English and Latin), and Hamlet. Then came more unusual
     fare: The Book of Mormon, Herland (a 19th-century feminist novel),
     and Flatland (science fiction, about 4-D travel). Deadlines were
     flexible. There was no follow-up. Sometimes the e-texts arrived
     months or even years late. Other times, they just dropped into
     limbo.

     What keeps things going is Hart's fanaticism. A DOS man and a
     neo-Luddite when it comes to GUI interfaces, he says he's never even
     used the World Wide Web - he doesn't like the graphics. But the five
     machines that make up Gutenberg Central boot so fast you can barely
     see the start-up box flash by. And when a fresh new book from a
     volunteer comes in on a winter night, he'll wake at 3 a.m. and sit
     before the glowing screens in a sweatshirt resembling a hooded
     monk's cowl he got from the Benedictines. In summer, he works in
     nothing but biker shorts, blasting classical music or classic rock.
     To get his Vitamin D and avoid rickets, Hart relies on a
     full-spectrum lamp that mimics the sun's rays. Nearby is a rumpled
     mattress where he sleeps when felled by exhaustion.

     When I visited, he was proofing The Violet Fairy Book - a 1901
     collection of stories edited by Andrew Lang - and checking that the
     format, spacing, and margins conform to official Gutenberg style.
     After scanning for errors, he adds a header - "Welcome to the World
     of Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts. Readable By Both Humans and
     Computers, Since 1971" - includes some boilerplate legal
     information, and updates his directory. Then he hits Enter. Bing -
     the book is in an FTP site on PrairieNet, a community access
     computer system in the Midwest. From there, it will ripple around
     the world, to interested individuals, literary Web sites, and other
     digital libraries.

     Hart has to keep working, or he'll drown in data. Each day, he
     receives up to 400 pieces of email, chats with dozens of volunteers,
     and works on upcoming books. Besides running Gutenberg, he's also
     the central figure behind "Ask Dr. Internet," a free service run by
     a Gutenberg-like group of tech-heads that has evolved into its own
     full-time job. Even the most clueless AOL newbie gets an answer -
     often with a liberal icing of Hart's own curious views about things
     like the Web and graphical interfaces.

     With Gutenberg, he gets help from 750 volunteers around the world.
     Lawyers work pro bono, researching a book's copyright to ensure it
     has entered the public domain. Tech-heads like Zinzow provide
     sysadmin consulting and tend computers held together with gum and
     baling wire. Scholars input and proofread e-texts. A group of 50
     Russian academics, for instance, recently did Webster's Unabridged
     Dictionary by hand. The 45 million keystrokes took them six months,
     for which they were paid $5,000 by one of Hart's financial
     supporters.

     Some texts are labors of love, by volunteers who tap along for years
     to finish one title. But most of the heavy lifting is done by a
     hardcore group - mainly academics - with access to state-of-the-art
     laser scanners. Geoffrey Pawlicki, a longtime supporter who put
     Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra online, recalls meeting Hart in
     1980: "He had files in a backpack and was always running around
     hooking people up with modems. Initially he was dismissed as a
     crackpot, but the same could be said of Ted Turner."

     Not that Project Gutenberg's founder and a media mogul are likely to
     ever be confused - for starters, Hart's totally uninterested in
     tracking Gutenberg usage. "I don't care where a book goes," he says,
     "I just want it to sprout legs and run." He knows that 10,000 files
     are downloaded daily on the U of I server, but that doesn't give the
     whole picture since the archives are mirrored on hundreds of sites
     the world over and heavily redistributed. (The New Zealand Digital
     Library, for instance, boasts 492 Gutenberg titles in easy-to-use
     HTML.) Many users post Gutenberg texts on their own Web sites, so
     Hart's work can be found on Tarzan sites, Shakespeare sites, and The
     Jungle Book sites, to name just a few.

     The only thing Hart asks is that anyone who uses a Gutenberg text
     tack on a "small print" header that says in part: "Why is this
     'Small Print!' statement here? You know: lawyers. They tell us you
     might sue us if there is something wrong with your copy of this
     e-text, even if you got it for free from someone other than us, and
     even if what's wrong is not our fault. So, among other things, this
     "Small Print!" statement disclaims most of our liability to you. It
     also tells you how you can distribute copies of this e-text if you
     want to."

     One result is that Gutenberg texts reach people who have no idea
     what an FTP server is, let alone how to use one. Hart gets a lot of
     email from the United States, Britain, Canada, Singapore, and
     Germany, so he assumes those are big markets. Many people comment on
     the CIA World Facts Book, so he thinks that's his most popular book.
     (It's updated annually, and he can put it online immediately because
     government publications are public domain.) Other favorites seem to
     be the Bible, Alice in Wonderland, and the collected works of
     Shakespeare.

     But even broaching the idea of doing more to find out what people
     might want from Project Gutenberg makes Hart see red. He imagines
     the sinister implications of tracking folks who want to download,
     say, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in a country like Iran. And
     besides, any effort to "steer'' the project misses an essential
     point. "Once we put a book out," he says, "it goes everywhere there
     are computers and readers. That's unlimited distribution. And in a
     world based on competition for everything, that's the biggest
     threat."

     So in one sense, Hart is an electronic David, striking a literary
     blow against an establishment Goliath that tries to control
     information through restrictive copyright law, downloading fees, and
     red tape. And for that, he has a lot of fans. "Michael's one of the
     few people I know who's not motivated by greed," says Zinzow. "He's
     trying real hard to do a good deed for the world, and he's really
     underappreciated. If Michael wasn't here, access to books on the
     Internet would be only for the rich. He's an electronic Robin Hood,
     keeping the Sheriff of Nottingham from creating a monopoly." Newby
     agrees. "When you have Microsoft buying up the right to thousands of
     art images, and the federal government taking away copyright, going
     backward and copyrighting things that weren't copyrighted before,
     it's not just paranoia; he's trying to fight the evil forces."

     Hart is happy to agree. "Some people say, 'I am the most powerful
     because I have the most power.' I say, 'I am the most powerful
     because I give the most power away.'" And there's no reason to doubt
     that his dogged pursuit of that ideal is one of the things that has
     enabled Gutenberg to survive all these years. The project has
     doubled each year since 1991, when he had 12 books online, and the
     way Hart sees it, Gutenberg should continue to do so. That means
     1,600 books for 1997, 3,200 for 1998, and so on.

     But there are limits to what he can do without institutional backing
     and only a handful of hardcore volunteers. Even supporters like
     Newby say the man can barely handle his current workload and will be
     hard-pressed to take on more unless he delegates authority. Lately
     Hart's been trolling the Internet for someone to pass the torch to.
     But it's hard to imagine him letting go. "No one wants to be a
     supervisor, so I have to do it all myself," he says plaintively.

     Hart also refuses to waver from his initial vision, and this has
     limited his scope. If he made some concessions, it's possible
     Gutenberg might have 100,000 books online today - a respectable
     library - instead of 1,000. Indeed, Hart says, various academic
     institutions and even some Texas oil interests have offered to
     bankroll Gutenberg over the years, in exchange for control. One
     university offered him a six-figure salary, he says, to bring the
     project to their campus. He turned them all down flat. "Almost
     everybody out there wants to charge for books, and they want real
     control over which books we do and which edition comes out," Hart
     grouses. "They want a bit in my mouth. I don't trust them."

     He's right to worry. In recent months, complaints about Gutenberg's
     use of over-taxed U of I computing resources led to an ultimatum
     from school officials: find a formal university sponsor or get off.
     Hart tried the library, the School of Library and Information
     Science, and a computer network run jointly by the Big 10 football
     schools. No luck. "The library, which would be the logical place,
     wasn't interested in sponsoring it - they might have been concerned
     about the project's academic credentials," says Bob Penka, an
     associate director at the U of I's Computing and Communication
     Services office. "Whether that's snootiness or what, I don't know."
     Hart has lost his U of I email account, but so far the project is
     getting a stay of execution - at least until the next round of
     complaints.

     Is Gutenberg too important to be left to a solitary eccentric? Maybe
     it should be organized by the Library of Congress, the National
     Endowment for the Humanities, or some such organization. But herein
     lies another problem. Hart isn't the only one staking out literary
     dibs in cyberspace. The Georgetown Center for Text and Technology
     counts more than 300 online library projects in nearly 30 countries,
     including the Dartmouth Dante Proj-ect, with 600 years of commentary
     on Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Oxford Text Initiative, which
     charges users to download its scholarly publications.

     And for all its high-minded goals, Gutenberg's simplicity works
     against it. It lacks the bells and whistles, the flashy graphics and
     sophistication that grant-givers love. Instead, Hart plods along in
     ASCII, doesn't give a hoot about market research, and wants to give
     his product away.

     The lack of recognition rankles. "There are literally a billion
     dollars of grant money out there, and I'm never going to get any of
     it," he says. And those 300 competitors? "All those projects will
     never produce even one mainstream book that you or I will ever see."


     Digital library experts say he's got a point. "Funders tend to be
     interested in projects that use state-of-the-art technology or
     advance knowledge, or that create something new and exciting," says
     Ann Bishop,a coprincipal investigator with the U of I's Digital
     Library Initiative project, which is working with commercial
     publishers to put academic journals online. "Projects that aren't
     high tech tend to get lost in the shuffle. Perhaps if he played it
     up as something vital to national education, he would get more
     funding. But I don't know if he's interested in twisting it that
     way."

     Ultimately, Hart's biggest impediment may be US copyright law, which
     pretty much prohibits Gutenberg from publishing anything written
     after 1920. The law now protects a work for 50 years after the
     author's death, which means that Hemingway, Genet, and Garcia
     Marquez won't be online anytime soon. Even The Odyssey and Plato's
     Republic are off-limits if Gutenberg wants to post a translation
     published after 1920. One exception is when an author gives special
     permission, such as cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling, who approached
     Hart to release an e-text of his novel Hacker Crackdown.

     The copyright problem isn't getting any easier. The first US
     copyright law covered 14 years, with a possible 14-year extension. A
     1909 amendment doubled that to 28 years, and in 1976, the law was
     extended again. Now Congress is considering going to life plus 70
     years. "Do you realize that under the proposed law, the blueprint
     for the Wright Brothers' airplane would still be under patent?" asks
     an incensed Hart, who has testified in Washington against the new
     bill's passage. "If they win, we'll have to get a certain number of
     titles and then quit. Unless we want to do the Robin Hood thing. And
     I'm too old to be a revolutionary." A glint appears in his eye. "But
     I'll do Gone with the Wind on my deathbed," he vows. "The book and
     the movie. It should be out there."

     I leave Urbana feeling that Hart just might meet his short-term
     goal. If he were any less obsessed, he would have given up a long
     time ago. Instead, he is doubling each year. But I also wonder how
     long the project can keep expanding exponentially. Unless Hart can
     draft reinforcements or hook up with a sponsor, eventually it
     probably will stall, and that's a shame.

     As the plane takes off, I recall Hart's description of the mad rush
     that comes from sitting in his basement, watching the newly
     transcribed titles come in, working on them, and then launching books
     into cyberspace. His words echo in my head: "Bennett Cerf never
     published a book a day, but I'm doing it. Do you have any idea of
     how powerful that makes me feel? But sometimes I go to bed at night,
     and I don't know what I'm going to do in the morning because no
     one's sent me anything. That's kind of scary." Denise Hamilton is an
     obsessive reader who writes regularly about business and culture for
     the Los Angeles Times, New Times, and other publications.Michael
     Hart and Project Gutenberg can be reached at hart@pobox.com.

        Copyright 1993-97 Wired Magazine Group, Inc.
        Compilation copyright &copy; 1994-97 HotWired, Inc.
        All rights reserved.

Ann K. Parsons
Professional Tutor

email:  akpgsh@rit.edu     akp@vivanet.com

http://www.vivanet.com/~akp/index.html

"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost."
J.R.R. Tolkien


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