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A public library on the Net
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The world's biggest collection of free electronic books on the Internet can now be saved as a personal CD
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THIS MONTH marks an important milestone for the first, and biggest, free library on the Internet. Project Gutenberg, the mission which began in the University of Illinois 32 years ago, with the aim of sharing the world's great books, as a common resource, has just put its 10,000th e-book on its website (www.gutenberg.net) : it's the Magna Carta. Every one of these books can be freely accessed. Each is available in a Vanilla text version that means it can be downloaded easily and occupies the minimum of disk space. And all are free of any copyright restrictions.
The project is the brainchild of Michael Hart (in 1971), an operator at the mainframe computer of Illinois University's Material Research Laboratory. He earned an operator's account worth $100 million and was wondering what to do with all that free computer time. With a few fellow operators, he decided to set up a free e-library, and typed in the first work: the US Declaration of Independence. Project Gutenberg was thus born, named after the father of the modern printing press.
It took another two decades — and the birth of the Internet — for the project to reach a truly global audience. In the years since then, it has put on its website, thousands of books available in the public domain — from Arabian Nights to Anna Karanina; from Little Women to Les Miserables; from War and Peace to Works of Rudyard Kipling; from Time Machine to Treasure Island... .
In San Francisco last week, Prof. Hart outlined plans for the future: "We want to expand the collection to a million free e-books... We want to reach a billion people and distribute a quadrillion copies by 2015." As a first step, they have created a CD with just under 700 Best Books from the Gutenberg collection and gave it away for free during the celebration event. You can also access the CD content, at http://www.gutenberg.net/cdproject/download.html and download it to create your own CD.
Gutenberg is not alone. In recent weeks, it has been provided valuable web space by the University of North Carolina's site www.ibiblio.org which mirrors all the Gutenberg resources in addition to offering many of its own. Another resource worth looking at is Michigan University's Internet public library (www.ipl.org) .
All these sites are run by university academics, people who are imbibed with the core spirit of the Internet — making knowledge and information freely available. No room for "e-biz" or "e-commerce" here. It's all about harnessing technology for sharing, not making money.
Salaam to that!
A. VISHNU
vishnua@hotmail.com
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