Michael Hart, Inventor of the E-book, Dead At 64 70
FeatherBoa writes "Michael Hart, the founder and long time driving force behind Project Gutenberg and 1971 inventor of the electronic book has died at his home in Urbana Ill, on Sept. 6th 2011. Project Gutenberg is recognized as one of the earliest and longest-lasting online literary projects, has spawned sister projects in Australia, Canada, Germany and other locations to transcribe public domain literature and make it available via the Internet."
here you go (Score:2)
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Yeah, nothing more fitting to commemorate the death of the founder of Project Gutenberg than to kill their server under a proper slashdotting...
To do it right? (Score:5, Insightful)
To do it right they should slashdot it forever and put a link on the slashdot footer to Project Gutenberg.
The guy did more for the preservation of knowledge than you or I could ever hope to do. Even Richard Stallman owes him a debt that can't be repaid - for the idea that we own the knowledge that we share, and its value increases with its commonality. His ideas are the inspiration for the free software movement, Google Books, and many other things.
The first time I downloaded an eBook from Michael Hart, his site was on The List - and The List was under a meg. I read it a dozen times, and have gotten hundreds since. My Android tablet is now configured to search for books "Project Gutenberg first." Over the years I've given back what I could, when I could, but to be honest I got more than I gave. The man had Vision, with a capital V. I'll never forget the premise: that with digital technology replication is costless so if an ebook is worth $1 and distributed to all the people of the world, that work creates billions of dollars worth of knowledge.
Now's a good time to remember and give again what I can.
The passing of a dear friend is seldom more painful than when you owe them something you cannot repay. Farewell, Michael Hart. If the best I can do now is to do what I can to help push your vision forward, I owe you that.
Holy hell but it's dusty in here all of a sudden.
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but to be honest I got more than I gave
Well, that's the idea, isn't it? The sum is more than the total of its parts. The sum value is far greater than the total effort that was put in, and because of this created value many, many people are able to benefit.
Thank you, Michael Hart, and many people like you, people with big contributions and people with small contributions. Thanks to the multiplying effects of your efforts, I have been greatly benefitting for many years, and thanks to your inspiration, I have contributed where I felt myself cap
A Great Inspiration to us All (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me just say that I admire the man for all that he has done. For his vision, and efforts to push us all to bigger and better things.
Project Gutenberg will be a lasting legacy.
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Seconded! I've used Gutenberg since I first heard about it as an FTP site (mid-80's?). I owe this man many thanks for the hours spent reading Dumas, Homer, Grant, Lincoln, and Augustine as well as others. Latin, German, and French teachers used his site so their kids could get access to literature for their studies. Hart made that possible. Hart was a brilliant man that made his ideas come to reality.
Thanks for everything.
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No, but he was one who envisioned a future of knowledge delivery for all people with electronic files on the Internet, and alas, the one who *actually did it*.
RIP Mr. Hart.
Re:E-book? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, let me be the first among us to say "Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on too."
AC's are what they are, and slashdot is engineered to accept them so that no voice is silenced. I'm OK with that. But to come in here, on this day, and piss on the memory of a man who never did harm and blessed us all with the wealth of ages because you couldn't figure out one of the simplest websites on earth? Fuck you. I mean that sincerely. Die in a fire, please.
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Such is the life of leeches on society, who take and take without a thought of trying to give back. If this AC was genuine with his desire to spread this content, he would have purchased a server and hosted this content on his own dime rather than sucking bandwidth off of somebody else.
I agree, the GP must die in fire, or spend an eternity in some for that attitude alone.
I wrote a short obituary (Score:4, Interesting)
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Just for the record, what did he die of?
Regards,
Peter
a bit early? (Score:2)
I only met him once, and he could be a little difficult at times - it took years to convince him to release titles in anything other than ASCII - and certainly he could be single-minded and met frequent disappointments - the latter being the curse of every person who is ahead of their time.
It seems a little early to make such a speculation, however.
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I think his reasoning behind ASCII-only content was not only sound, but prescient. I have seen dozens (hundreds?) of data file formats come and go, where the only thing from previous eras is a data code which pre-dates not just the internet but electronic computers in general. Even now, HTML is not nearly as standard, where it seems like everybody (especially the major browser developers) want to keep tweaking the standard with all kinds of bells and whistles.
In this sense, in spite of people otherwise co
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Copyright law is a tricky thing, and Michael Hart had to navigate through that maze all while trying to preserve books which were in theory part of the public domain in spite of the best efforts of many people to assert copyright on these older works and somehow getting away with it. In as litigious of a society that the United States of America has become, legal disclaimers are not just useful but necessary.
If you read the fine print, you could take Gutenberg texts and send them into "every possible nook
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I prefer to see a cause of death in obituaries, especially when the age of death is relatively young.
The more I learn about different ways to die, the more I hope to avoid them.
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TFA doesn't say. Although this may be informative:
Frugal to a fault, Michael glided through life with many possessions and friends, but very few expenses. He used home remedies rather than seeing doctors.
I suspect we may never know how he died, but I'm guessing the lack of seeing qualified medical professionals may have contributed to him dying at 64.
Don't get me wrong; Project Gutenberg is an inspired idea. I can also understand wanting to restrict the amount of manufactured chemicals (drugs) one takes in. But not EVER seeing a doctor? That's ridiculous. Not even "Eccentricity" is an excuse for that.
My apologies
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Keep going crazy over other peoples' (former) problems and we'll see if you can manage 54.
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Being upset over losing one of literature's leading lights because of a preventable issue != "going crazy over other people's problems."
Have some perspective.
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The chess player Bobby Fischer also died at 64 and it could be said, he committed suicide. All the news media said, he died of kidney failure, but he refused dialysis, it would be a weird coincidence if Hart also died of kidney failure.
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My apologies to those that were friends of his, but really, didn't you care enough about him to make him go see a doctor once in awhile? The man died at SIXTY FOUR for crying out loud! How much more good work could he have done if some of his friends had just convinced him to see a doctor now and again? Geez!
While I'd hardly qualify as a friend, I did live in the same town as he did for a while, met him only once in person, but communicated a few times over email. I had always planned to take him out to lunch, but alas, that'll never be.
You can either be a friend and respect him and his wishes, or you can just walk all over him and force him to do what your world view thinks is right. You can't be a friend if you do that.
That's not to say an occasional suggestion can't hurt.
I always find it sad that people don'
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Just discovered via Wikipedia, he died of a heart attack.
Urbana Ill (Score:1)
My webbrowser (Chrome, Win7) makes it looks like Urbana III. I was wondering if he had lived on a planet ...
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More like your OS. I'm running Chrome in Mint, and the I is thicker and slightly wider spaced than the lls.
IIIIIIIIIIIIII
lllllllllllllllllll
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Your brain must be thick as shit if you can't figure out that I was referring to it being an OS default font issue rather than a problem with Chrome.
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Your brain must be thick as shit if you can't figure out that I was referring to it being an OS default font issue rather than a problem with Chrome.
Yes, let's be disrespectful on a post about the death of someone very much deserving of our respect.
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I respect what he's done, and I somehow don't think he's going to be offended by my post. I can't believe you're getting offended by a thread on Slashdot. Aren't there some goatse trolls you can go and reply to?
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I've never seen "font" misspelled as "browser" and "OS" before...</pedant>
Rest in Peace (Score:5, Informative)
I volunteered with Project Gutenberg for about 5 years in the1990s. Michael was something of an iconoclast, and had his hand in all sorts of things. I had the pleasure of meeting Michael at his home once, and last was in contact with him two years ago.
In a number of conversations with Michael (mostly online) our opinions on methods often clashed, but I have no doubt that he sought to serve humanity to the best of his ability, and especially to bring knowledge and opportunity to everyone in the world - without exception. He strove mightily to break down the barriers to knowledge, and to dethrone the gatekeepers who seek to prevent ordinary people from joining the company of the elite. I used to doubt his assertion that such gatekeepers exist, or that anyone would be so vile as to purposely prevent meritorious students from gaining an education - but I have come to realize that he was mostly correct. When the Digital Millennium Copyright Act came before Congress, Michael was the chief voice speaking out against it - but sadly, few people listened, or even understood why it was important. Michael's work has done a great deal to break down the barriers to knowledge that he despised, and for this we should all be thankful.
Rest in Peace, Michael. You did well.
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I would dare say that without Michael Hart, Eldred v. Ashcroft [wikipedia.org] would not have happened, and his effort to speak out against the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act (also known as CTEA) will still have political consequences into the future. He drew a line in the sand and there are now many others who are picking up his torch to push back. That the line might have been crossed, at least people know now that territory has been lost and needs to be recaptured.
The most amazing thing he did, ultimately, was
403 (Score:1)
LOL, shows my browser as "RockMelt". It's standard firefox...
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Then it is likely you know nothing about the history of e-books. Study up on the topic before you spout off other nonsense like this.
Dr Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg... (Score:2)
http://www.gutenberg.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_S._Hart [gutenberg.org]
If you want to honour Michael, go and proof a page at http://www.pgdp.net/ [pgdp.net] - the literary equivalent of pouring one out for this internet giant.
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For a while I tried to read Proj. Gutenberg books in e-readers (both using the Hanlin v3, and a Kindle DX). The lack of any kind of formatting or typesetting information other than line breaks hurts a lot. Specially with poetry.
The formatting of text in a page influences the reading experience a lot, and in all Gutenberg project books I tried to read, the on-screen result was always a mess. On non-English books things are even worse. I tried using some Perl scripts hacked by some people, and also wrote my o
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Try the Calibre eBook managing / creating software.
I converted some text/pdf texts very nicely for my nook with it.
http://calibre-ebook.com/ [calibre-ebook.com]
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Never had a problem with the EPUB's on the Sony PRS-650 formatting-wise.
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Project Gutenberg has yet to recover from his decision to limit the original texts to just ASCII w/ no mark-up --- providing even the most minimal of text markup was verboten.
At the time he made that decision, there was no other markup language which was available to use on the texts, at least one which was available under a public specification that also wasn't encumbered by proprietary restrictions like a patent, trade secret, or copyright. That there were other problems along the way only emphasizes more that he was a pioneer who sort of stumbled along the way and had to discover all of these things that you obviously know with perfect 20/20 hindsight.
Considering he started
Project Gutenberg needs your donation! (Score:2)
You know what you doing. For great justice.
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If you see a problem... fix it. Either you are a blowhard and just like to criticize, or you have the technological capability to be able to improve all of the things you are complaining about. Michael Hart started the process, and he knew it was going to take more than a lifetime to be able to get it all put together with the vision he had. These texts are in the public domain, so there is absolutely no excuse for you to sit back and complain if you haven't at least made a reasonable effort to improve u
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I like the way he did it better than the way you are not doing it.
Huh.. (Score:1)
That said, anyone who dies and leaves the tools to encourage people to peel themselves away from mindless entertainment and makes reading a bit more accessable, gets my respect.
Wikipedia-Editors be damned!
Library of the 21st century (Score:2)
I knew him (Score:2)
My boss suggested that I attend a weekly "geek lunch" that a group of the older computer savvy fellows held at the U of I's Beckman Institute and met him there. I was aware of Project Gutenberg before that but hadn't used it much. Michael was a good advocate for ebooks before anyone got around to coining that particular terminology. The last few times we met, I remember him being very excited as he had samples of various new ebook readers to try out. He was testing them to see well they integrated the Guten
A good neighbor (Score:1)
I lived next to him while I was attending U of I as an undergrad. He was a great neighbor. The house I was in had five bedrooms, all occupied by male college students. He told us we could have parties and be loud, so long as we warned him, and gave him $20 to get a burger and see a movie.
Distribued Proofreaders (Score:1)