In honoured memory of Michael Stern Hart

Michael Stern Hart (1947 - 2011)

We who love books and literature, and who value the ease with which books are so readily accessible nowadays in e-format, must take a moment to appreciate the life and work of Michael S. Hart. This gentleman is revered as the founder of ebooks, and made it one of the goals of his life to make books available for all who wanted them, free of charge. He founded Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org , and fought for public domain rights of literature.

His story reminds me a bit of the old shepherd who reforested an entire region of Provence during the 1920's, singlehanded, by planting nuts and seeds as he pastured his sheep. Within twenty years, the region, once barren and uninhabited, had sprung back to life, and become a fertile, blossoming community.

Every now and then some insignificant, ordinary human steps out and changes his or her part of the world. Michael Hart named his project after Gutenberg of the printing press fame. Up until the 1450's, books were a rare, expensive commodity; illiteracy was rampant, and nobody cared. Gutenberg's invention of the printing press revolutionized literature in the Middle Ages; Michael Hart's invention of the ebook has revolutionized the literature of our day. Knowledge and novels once confined to bookshops and libraries, in cumbersome reams of static dead-tree editions, now flit quickly and easily across the screen, occupying little more than a few bytes of cyberspace.

Thanks, guys!