[Please see Michael Hart (musician) for the article about that recording artist.]

Michael Hart

Michael Stern Hart (b. 1947) is an American eccentric best known as the founder of Project Gutenberg, which makes electronic books available via the internet. At least one version of each book is a plain text file that can be displayed on virtually any computer. The e-texts can be downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg mirrors worldwide. Most of the early postings he typed in personally. Today the e-texts are produced (usually scanned) by Project Gutenberg's many volunteers. The collection includes public domain works, as well as copyrighted works if the owner permits.

A gifted but non-standard student, Hart received a bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1973), in an independent-study program, but dropped out of graduate school. In 1971 he combined the interests of his parents (mom a mathematics education professor and dad a Shakespeare professor). At that time the U. of I. computer center gave him free access to its computer, and he foresaw that the future of computers would be information retrieval, not number-crunching. So he started out by posting text copies of such classics as the United States Declaration of Independence, the Bible, and the works of Homer, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain, and that was the beginning of Project Gutenberg.

See also History of the Internet.

External links

• Hart's personal page

Selected interviews

• netpanel September 6, 1997
• The News Gazette March 19, 2000