Rupert Neethling
The publication in March of Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet marked the first time that writing by someone of King’s commercial stature was released exclusively on the Internet. Riding the Bullet sold half-a-million copies in 48 hours. The advantage of this commercial model is that recently published works are made available on the Web even though the publishers still hold copyright. But works that are in the public domain, which broadly encompass any literature published before the early 1920s, have quietly come online since before the Internet as we know it was born.
Known as “Etexts”, these works today include Shakespeare’s plays, Roget’s Thesaurus, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Milton’s Paradise Lost, the poetry of Blake and Coleridge, the novels of Jane Austen, the Bhagavad-Gita and over 5 000 other titles. Etexts are usually published in ASCII format and then compressed into Zip files, which means you can download the entire King James Bible in three minutes flat. The downside is that Etexts are devoid of italicised, bold, indented or underlined text. The upside is that Etexts are free.
The person who spearheaded this digital revolution was Michael Hart. In 1971 Hart was given an operator’s account with $100E000E000 of computer time on a mainframe computer at the University of Illinois. The gift was something of a joke, as in 1971 there was more computer time available than people knew what to do with, but Hart was something of a visionary. He announced, in words that his colleagues now quote with pride, that “the greatest value created by computers will not be computing, but the storage, retrieval, and searching of what [is] stored in our libraries”.
Hart promptly put his funny money where his mouth was, typed up the American Declaration of Independence, and made it available electronically. This was the first Etext and also the first publication by a non-profit organisation called Project Gutenberg. Named after the 15th-century inventor of the movable-type printing press, the project strives to provide Etexts of public-domain literature to the widest possible audience of readers with access to computers. Hart & Co consequently stick to “Plain Vanilla” ASCII, the most universal computer text format available. Project Gutenberg also prioritises works that “extremely large portions of the audience will want and use frequently”.
The Project Gutenberg philosophy is “to make information, books and other materials available to the general public in forms a vast majority of the computers, programs and people can easily read, use, quote and search”. Hart hopes to make a difference in the realms of education and literacy, and Project Gutenberg volunteers regularly call attention to out-of-print works that might be lost if they were not preserved as Etexts. Project supporters also point out that schools and universities without the resources to buy expensive books are in need of texts that can be freely reproduced. In addition, the text-searching function built into most word processors makes Etexts convenient as reference works.
Project Gutenberg now averages 40 new Etexts every month. And not only in English: the languages covered by the project now also include French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese and Latin. While this has necessitated a partial departure from the policy of Plain Vanilla ASCII text, Hart in typical visionary form continues to emphasise the need to publish Etexts in widely accessible formats that will remain viable 10 or more years from now, when the word-processing formats common today may all but have disappeared.
Being entirely donation-driven and run by volunteers, the project is an incredible success – especially when one considers that the volunteers who painstakingly type in, scan, proofread and edit each Etext are not paid. Volunteers include retired librarians, disabled people who have no incentive to charge for their work as this would be deducted from their disability insurance, and benevolent programmers.
Some Etexts end up on other sites, such as the Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org), the Litrix Reading Room (www.litrix.com/), the Naked Word (www.crosswinds.net/~freebooks/ nakedword/), Concordances of Great Books (www.concordance.com/) and many more.
Project Gutenberg (www.promo. net/pg/) receives around 750E000 visitors every month. But the surfers who enthusiastically download the classics would do well to consider that Hart ploughs so much of his personal income into the project that he reportedly lives below the poverty line.