The world's oldest digital library began with one student typing the Declaration
On July 4, 1971, a University of Illinois student named Michael Hart typed the US Declaration of Independence into a mainframe linked to the early ARPANET and sent it to other users. That file became the first e-text of Project Gutenberg, which now offers close to 78,000 free books.
Hart had been handed an account on a Xerox Sigma V computer with almost unlimited time, a gift whose value has been guessed at anywhere from $100,000 to $100,000,000. He wanted to repay it with something of lasting worth, and he set himself a target of putting the 10,000 most consulted books online, cheaply or free, before the century ended. He named the venture after Johannes Gutenberg, the fifteenth century printer whose movable type made books abundant. Until 1989 he keyed in every text by hand; only then did scanners and character recognition software make digitising practical.
Volunteers gradually took over. Pietro Di Miceli, an Italian, built and ran the first website from 1994 to 2004, and Carnegie Mellon University agreed to look after the finances. A Mississippi non-profit foundation was chartered in 2000 to handle legal matters, with Gregory Newby as its first chief executive. The collection is deliberately unplanned: there is no selection policy, so contributors digitise whatever interests them, and the whole archive is mirrored on servers in many places so no single accident can destroy it. Hart died in Urbana in September 2011, aged 64.
Hart insisted on plain Latin-character text because he thought it the format most likely to stay readable far into the future, though Chinese and Japanese works now use UTF-8. HTML and EPUB versions exist too, while rigid formats such as PDF are generally seen as off-mission. Critics have called the bare text files bland on screen, and the Text Encoding Initiative complained in 1994 that editions were poorly documented.
Copyright law has tripped the project up. Every book is cleared under US law, but a German court case over works by Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann and Alfred Döblin kept the site unreachable in Germany from 2018 to 2021, and Italy has blocked it since May 2020. Meanwhile the Gutenberg name is a trademark, so resellers who strip it from free texts, as happened with a 1906 book on fox trapping, can legally sell them.
Source: Project Gutenberg
