Hart describes himself as a workaholic who is devoting his entire life to the project, which he sees as the start of a new Industrial Revolution. He considers himself as a pragmatic and farsighted altruist. For years he was regarded as a nut but now he is respected. He wants to change the world through freely-available e-books that can be used and copied endlessly. Reading and culture for everyone at minimal cost, on a computer or a secondhand PDA costing just a few dollars, or even on a solar-powered PDA, which are starting to appear.
In early 2004, after a stay on the US west coast, in San Francisco and Berkeley, Hart went off to Europe, first Brussels and then Paris. He gave his first lecture in France on 12 February at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, organised with APRIL (Association pour la promotion et la recherche en informatique libre / Association for Promotion and Research in Free Computing) and AFUL (Association francophone des utilisateurs de Linux et des logiciels libres / French-speaking Linux and Free Software Users' Association). He chaired a discussion at the French National Assembly on 13 February at the invitation of the discussion group "Produire et gérer les savoirs" (Producing and Managing Knowledge), a branch of the "Les temps nouveaux" (New Times) group.
What about books in French? The first digitized books were mostly in English but now there are works in 25 different languages. Of the 11,340 e-books available as of 13 February 2004, 181 were in French. The launch of Project Gutenberg Europe in the next few weeks should see the number grow considerably, and so much the better.
There is much work to be done putting all the classics of French culture online freely available to all in a easy and practical format. A total of 1,117 books are currently accessible in text format on Gallica (Bibliothèque nationale de France / French National Library), 288 on ABU (Association des bibliophiles universels / The Universal Association of Booklovers), 195 in html and/or rtf format on Athena, and several dozen more on other websites. Some digital libraries specialize in shorter material. These include the Bibliothèque électronique de Lisieux (Lisieux Electronic Library), which digitizes mostly news and articles, or Miscellanées, which calls itself a "miscellaneous" library.