by Mark Ollig

Created on: December 02, 2009   Last Updated: December 04, 2009

Discovering digitized e-Books via Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a site on the Internet available for anyone to view and download electronic books (e-Books) for free.

These books can be read on your personal computer or most portable devices, such as an iPhone or Kindle.

The project's goal is to provide and make available to the general public, books and other literary works belonging to the public domain, freely accessible via electronic text format which can be easily read using the current technology of the day.

Project Gutenberg was founded July 4, 1971 by Michael Hart, and today it remains the first and largest collection of free electronic books available on the Internet.

Michael Stern Hart was born in 1947 in Tacoma, WA.

According to Project Gutenberg's web site, in 1971, while Hart was a student at the University of Illinois, he was given a very large dollar equivalent worth of operator's account computer time on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer located at the University of Illinois.

The computer time was given with the hope of helping improve one's job performance.

Hart realized there was little he could do in the way of normal computing that would pay back the enormous value of the computer time he had been given, so he decided on a different methodology.

Hart stated the greatest value created by computers would not be in computing alone, but in the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was collected inside our libraries.

With that thought in mind, the first words of electronic text Hart began to type onto the teletype machine connected to the mainframe computer was the Declaration of Independence, taken from the paper copy he had been given at a grocery store after he attended the 1971 4th of July fireworks display.

He then sent this electronic text or e-Text copy to everyone on the same computer network.

Hart realized this first electronic document would become a centerpiece in the computer libraries of the future.

And so, Project Gutenberg was born.

The basis on which Hart established Project Gutenberg was this: anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely.

An interesting term Hart used was Replicator Technology.

Hart describes this term in 1971 to imply how unlimited copies of books' content can be stored inside a computer and be made available to anyone on this world or even outside this world using satellite transmission.

In 1973, Hart typed in the full text of The United States Constitution.

In August

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