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Interview with Michael Hart
November 5, 2009 | 8:22 pm
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By Paul Biba
Project Gutenberg News has an interview with the Project’s founder, Michael Hart.
Here’s one of the questions asked by interviewer Andrea Kobeskzo:
You’ve achieved a lot toward the cause of digitizing public works. Do you feel that one achievement stands out above the rest?
One thing was just keeping such a vastly different bunch of diverse persons working more or less together for so long… This was pretty much that first example of what is now so popular, international virtual cooperation.
One of my personal favorites was doing our 100th eBook: The Complete Works of Shakespeare… I will probably always remember that all nighter, as we finished up months of very intense work to do it on time.
Another favorite was doing our own translation of Siddhartha, then fighting off Hermann Hesse’s copyright lawyers!!!
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More than twenty-five years before Brewster Kahle coined the guiding principle of his Internet Archive — “Universal access to all knowledge,” — Michael Hart was putting this ideal into practice with his Project Gutenberg. Hart has worked diligently to promote ebooks and epublishing since 1971 — almost 40 years dedicated to sharing the wealth of the world’s best books.
In September 2009, I worked with Michael, on the latest edition of my book about ebooks. Hart’s expertise, generosity, and sense of humor made this collaboration a pure pleasure.
Hart has been called “the inventor of ebooks”, and “the grandfather of electronic publishing.” The ebook landscape today is vastly more complex than the one four decades ago. Yet in many ways, Hart laid the groundwork for the success of epublishing today.
Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks