Internet giants like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are making headlines with their rival plans to create online libraries of books. Long before those companies even existed, though, there was Project Gutenberg: an ambitious, offbeat effort to digitize classic books by typing them out by hand. The approach made a lot of sense back in 1971, when Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart was a student at the University of Illinois. He enlisted an army of volunteers to help in the effort, by pulling their own dusty volumes from attic shelves and transcribing them, word for word. The electronic versions were sent to Mr. Hart, who stored them on clunky university computers. Nearly 35 years later, Project Gutenberg has put more than 17,000 so-called e-books on its Web site. It continues to add more titles each week -- though most texts are now scanned rather than typed. Mr. Hart, an eccentric technologist and bibliophile, still shepherds the effort on a shoestring budget from his computer-filled home in Urbana, Ill....It's not that we don't want to work with [Google]. Google didn't want to have anything to do with us. They want to do their own project. All of these places can legally use all of our books. If Google put up all of our books, that would be fine. I would have gladly worked with Google. [How is Project Gutenberg different from Google Book Search?] Google is working from the top down. It's very centralized. Project Gutenberg is the opposite: It's decentralized, it's grassroots. From the consumer's point of view, if you're trying to get a quotation from a book, you could get the book from Project Gutenberg and cut and paste, say, the whole "Hamlet" soliloquy. On Google, you can't. Also, ours is totally non-commercial. You won't find advertising on any of our pages.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/11/2005 08:40:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
