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MICHAEL HART: CHANGING THE WORLD THROUGH EBOOKS
[English version published by Project Gutenberg, 21 June 2004. Original version published in French by Edition-Actu, 15 February 2004.]
When Michael Hart was a student at the University of Illinois (USA), in July 1971, he set up Project Gutenberg with the goal of making available for free, and electronically, the largest possible number of books whose copyright had expired.
This ground-breaking project became both the first Internet information site and the world's first digitized library. Michael himself typed in the first hundred books. When the Internet became widely-used, in the mid-1990s, the project got a boost and an international dimension. Michael still typed and scanned in books, but now coordinated the work of dozens and then hundreds of volunteers in many countries.
The number of electronic books rose from 1,000 (in August 1997) to 2,000 (in May 1999), 3,000 (in December 2000) and 4,000 (in October 2001). Project Gutenberg had 5,000 books online in April 2002 and topped 10,000 in October 2003, when it had a team of 1,000 volunteers around the world making 350 new books available every month. These 10,000 books are also available on DVD for US$1 each. Michael hopes to have a million available by 2015.
The books are digitized in "text" format, with caps for terms in italic, bold or underlined, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or software. Digitization is done by scanning. The book is then proofread twice by two different people, who make any corrections necessary. When the original is in poor condition, as with very old books, it is typed in manually, word by word.
Digitization in text format means a book can be copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. It also makes a smaller and more easily sendable computer file, unlike with scanning each page, which produces a bulky "photo" file.