Michael Hart (1947 - 2011): Prophet of Abundance

I've never written an obituary before in these pages. Happily, that's because the people who are driving the new wave of openness are relatively young, and still very much alive. Sadly, one of the earliest pioneers, Michael Hart, was somewhat older, and died on Tuesday at the age of just 64.

What makes his death particularly tragic is that his name is probably only vaguely known, even to people familiar with the areas he devoted his life to: free etexts and the public domain. In part, that was because he modest, content with only the barest recognition of his huge achievements. It was also because he was so far ahead of his times that there was an unfortunate disconnect between him and the later generation that built on his trailblazing early work.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Project Gutenberg Made Easy

In my view, Project Gutenberg doesn't get the respect it deserves. After all, this effort to make the world's literature freely available in a digital form pre-dates free software by a decade. Partly, I suspect, this is because people don't know much about the process. Here's a great hands-on intro:

Contributing my time, energy, and two books to PG was not my first excursion in UGC, but it is the first time I have allied myself with a high-profile international project. Adding content to PG requires patience, good social skills (for interacting with your proofreader), and the ability to intuit what needs to be done to get your contribution online. Here’s a journal of my recent experience. (See the sidebar Project Gutenberg’s Verions of the Steps on the right for the concise step-by-step directions for getting material into Project Gutenberg.)

Come to the World eBook Fair

Every year, some of the top ebook companies and organisations come together to offer extremely large numbers of ebooks, absolutely free (mostly as in beer, but often as in freedom) as part of the World eBook Fair. Here are the facts and figures:

Third Annual World eBook Fair: July 4th to August 4th

Just two years ago The First World eBook Fair came on the scene with about 1/3 million books, doubled to 2/3 million in 2008, and now over one million.

Created by contributions from 100+ eLibraries from around the world, here are the largest collections.

As of midnight Central Daylight Time July 4, 2008 these are the approximate numbers:

100,000+ from Project Gutenberg
500,000+ from The World Public Library
450,000+ from The Internet Archive
160,000+ from eBooks About Everything

..17,000+ from IMSLP

1,227,000+ Grand Total

Pretty impressive.

And while we're on the subject of free, here is a good list of "100+ Sources for Free-As-In-Beer Books & Texts Online", which includes a lot of fairly obscure but highly worthy sites. Recommended.

Long Live LibriVox

To my shame, I only discovered the wonderful LibriVox recently. Now it's passed a milestone in its short history:

Well, we did it. We just cataloged our 1,000th book, and for that a huge thank you must go out to everyone who has ever said or written the word LibriVox. Thank you first to the readers for lending their voices to something wonderful; to the Book Coordinators who pull things together; to the Meta Coordinators who get all this audio up on the net; to the Moderators who keep things running smoothly on our forum. And of course the other people: the proof listeners, the catalog development team, the web site designers and fixers, and all the forum volunteers of every stripe.

And more: to our listeners, and supporters, to Dan for keeping the servers running; to the Internet Archive for providing hosting for all our media, which makes it all possible; to Project Gutenberg (and other public domain projects) for liberating all this wonderful text onto the web.

And of course a big thank you to all our families and friends who live with our varying levels of LibriVox addiction.

Interesting to note that LibriVox feeds (in the nicest possible way) off Project Gutenberg, another great digital commons. Interesting, too, to see that they call LibriVox an "addiction"; that's what makes these projects so great: sheer, unadulterated dependancy.... (Via Michael Geist.)

Gawd Bless Project Gutenberg

I wrote recently about the tragedy of losing the IMSLM music score commons. Well, it looks like Mr Digital Commons himself, Michael Hart (he was the first, remember - Project Gutenberg began over a decade before GNU) has stepped in with a great offer to take it under his wing:

Project Gutenberg has volunteered to keep as much of the IMSLM Project online as is legally possible, including a few of the items that were demanded to be withdrawn, as well as, when legal, to provide a backup of the entire site, for when the legalities have finally been worked out.

This is a doubly good outcome: all that hard work is not lost, and it gets better infrastructure (and probably more access to legal advice.) (Via Slashdot.)

Tragedy of the (Music Score) Commons

Here's Wikipedia's info about the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP):

a project for the creation of a virtual library of public domain music scores, based on the wiki principle. Since its launch on February 16, 2006, more than 15000 scores, for 9000 works, by over 1000 composers (as of October 2007) were uploaded, making it one of the largest public domain music score collections on the web. The project used the popular MediaWiki software.

A kind of Project Gutenberg for music - a digital commons, in other words, lovingly put together by hundreds, maybe thousands of volunteers, for the greater good.

And here's what has happened:

On Saturday October 13, 2007, I received a second Cease and Desist letter from Universal Edition. At first I thought this letter would be similar in content to the first Cease and Desist letter I received in August. However, after lengthy discussions with very knowledgeable lawyers and supporters, I became painfully aware of the fact that I, a normal college student, has neither the energy nor the money necessary to deal with this issue in any other way than to agree with the cease and desist, and take down the entire site. I cannot apologize enough to all IMSLP contributors, who have done so much for IMSLP in the last two years.

This tragic situation arises because of the discrepancy in copyright terms: what is in the public domain in Canada (where IMSLP is hosted) may still be in copyright in Europe (where Universal Edition is based). But trying to impose European terms on Canadian content is clearly wrong, as Michael Geist rightly points out:

As for a European infringement, if UE is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest single copyright term applying on a global basis. That can't possibly be right. Canada has chosen a copyright term that complies with its international obligations and attempts to import longer terms - as is the case here - should not only be rejected but treated as copyright misuse.

Remind me never to buy a score from Universal Edition again.

Google Books: A Cautionary Tale

Google Books is important:

the Google Project has, however unintentionally, made not only conventional libraries themselves, but other projects digitizing cultural artifacts appear inept or inadequate. Project Gutenberg and its 17,000 books in ascii appear insignificant and superfluous beside the millions of books that Google is contemplating. So do most scanning projects by conventional libraries. As a consequence of the assumed superiority of Google’s approach, therefore, it is highly unlikely that either the funds or the energies for an alternative project of similar magnitude will become available, nor are the libraries who are lending their books (at significant costs to their funds, their books, and their users) likely to undertake such an effort a second time. With each scanned page, Google Books’ Library Project, by its quantity if not necessarily by its quality, makes the possibility of a better alternative unlikely. The Project may then become the library of the future, whatever its quality, by default. So it does seems important to probe what kind of quality Google Book Project might present to an ordinary user that Google envisages wanting to find a book.

But also unsatisfactory:

The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable.

Rather worrying. (Via O'Reilly Radar.)

The Open Library Opens Its Doors

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet's cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply "free to the people," as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it's more important than ever to be open.

Fine words, but turning them into reality is a monstrous undertaking. Not because any of the required technologies are that difficult to develop or implement, but simply because the current hypertrophied copyright system makes it impossible.

At best, the Open Library will provide us with a bunch of public domain texts like Project Gutenberg, but prettified, plus what looks like a wikified catalogue with tantalising info about all the other books we can't read online.

That's all great to have, and kudos is due to all those behind the project, but is but a pale imitation of what we could - should - have if copyright did its job of encouraging new creation, and got out of the way of such laudable projects.

Set My Libri Free

Everybody knows about Project Gutenberg, which aims to provide texts of as many public domain books as possible. One freedom that is available for such texts is to create spoken versions of them. Librivox is aiming to do just that:

LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (through a podcast, catalog, and bit torrents). We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project, and we operate almost exclusively through Internet communications.

...

We get most of our texts from Project Gutenberg, and the Internet Archive and ibiblio.org host our audio files.

Not only that, but it offers its files in both the well-known - but proprietary - MP3 format, as well as the less well-known but free and deliciously-named ogg format. Another unexpected plus of the project, is that it can offer several versions of the same text, allowing all kinds of interesting comparisons to be made - to say nothing of cool reworkings.

There is also a small but select group of texts in languages other than English. (Via Creative Commons.)

Open Source Planes

First cars, then trains, now planes. New Scientist is reporting that it is now possible to create almost an entire plane by "printing" the components:

In rapid prototyping, a three-dimensional design for a part - a wing strut, say - is fed from a computer-aided design (CAD) system to a microwave-oven-sized chamber dubbed a 3D printer. Inside the chamber, a computer steers two finely focussed, powerful laser beams at a polymer or metal powder, sintering it and fusing it layer by layer to form complex, solid 3D shapes.

Two things are interesting here. First, this is precisely what Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, has been predicting for years. Indeed, he sees Project Gutenberg, which essentially lets you print your own books, as just the first, quite small step in the next industrial revolution, where physical objects will be printed routinely.

Secondly, note that the parts are printed under the control of a software program. So if the program and the data are open, this means that effectively the physical object will also be open. As usual, openness brings with it all the usual advantages of speed and lack of redundancy - you can re-use parts or parts of parts in other designs to create quickly entirely new objects.

A Third of a Million eBooks - Free

I have been rather remiss in not pointing out that the World eBook Fair started last Tuesday. In celebration of the 35th anniversary of the founding of Project Gutenberg:

The World eBook Fair welcomes you to absolutely free access to a variety of eBook unparalleled by any other source. 1/3 million eBooks await you for personal use, all free of charge for the month from July 4 - August 4, 2006, and then 1/2 million eBooks in 2007, 3/4 million in 2008, and ONE million in 2009.

You can either just bung in a search term on the home page given above, or - probably better - go to the full listing of the constituent collections.

I have to say these are pretty impressive. As well as practically every Western classic you could think (already well-covered by Project Gutenberg) there's some interestingly specialist stuff here: for example, Asian classics (don't miss "Response to a Question on the Five Degenerations of the Eon of Strife" - in Tibetan, of course), seriously deep ancient middle eastern texts (Egyptian, Sumerian etc.), tens of thousands of multilingual editions, 8,000 English poems and sheet music.

It's true that these are not all completely open content: many exist in new "editions" which are copyrighted. They also tend to be PDF files, and some scans from books are not very accurate. But it would be churlish to dwell on these deficiencies (none of which applies to the original Project Gutenberg, which is completely open, in the public domain and highly accurate): get downloading and enjoy.

Open Nanotech

Normally I wouldn't pay much attention to this story about producing mechanical components with industrial printers:

the company builds components by piling thin, patterned layers of ceramics, metals and other materials on top of each other and curing the individual layers as the structure takes shape.

These printed components, which consist of hundreds of layers, can also contain fully integrated moving parts, hinges or sealed air chambers.

What leant this otherwise routine piece of nanotech fluff some interest was a comment made last night by Alan Cox, for a long time de facto number 2 of the Linux kernel, and still very much a big cheese in the open source world (and a nice bloke too).

He was speaking at a question and answer session arranged by the British Computer Society's Open Source Specialist Group. Also present was Mark Taylor, founder and President of the Open Source Consortium, very plugged-in and switched-on, and a coder-turned-lawyer called Andrew Katz, whom I'd not met before.

Alan mentioned the idea of printing arbitrary objects one day, in exactly the manner described by the C|net piece above. I asked him whether he'd been talking with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, who espouses similar ideas rather more fervently - indeed, he says that Project Gutenberg's open content is only the start of the the next industrial revolution, when everything - as in every kind of analogue object - will be downloadable and printable.

When two such different individuals have a blue-sky vision so similar, it makes you stop and think.

It's worth noting that open nanotech will have a huge advantage over proprietary versions, since the whole benefit from the technology will be putting together microscopic elements to build something useful. If each sub-part is proprietary and/or patented, it will be a legal minefield. If the elements are open and patent-free, the only limit is your imagination.

Gutenberg on Your Mobile

Here are 5000 free Gutenberg texts converted into a format suitable for reading on your a mobile. (Via The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter.)

It's Blogging - But Not As We Know It

A few weeks ago I interviewed Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg. As I wrote in the article that resulted, there are close similarities between him and Richard Stallman. Both have conducted a single-minded - not to say lonely - campaign for their respective projects, both have achieved miracles, and both are, er, colourful characters.

In the course of my discussions with him, I recommended that he start blogging. He has been a prolific and fascinating wordsmith for decades, but I thought that the medium of the blog would allow him to reach out to new audiences.

So I was intrigued to receive an email from him recently in which he spoke about a new introduction to his blog. As you will see, this is an interesting interpretation of the blog format - a kind of retro 70s ASCII blog.

But don't let that put you off. What Hart has to say is interesting and important. Indeed, I think he will go down in history as a highly significant figure. Even if he has unconventional ideas on blogging - and on much else.

Another Day, Another Open

Open content is an area that I follow quite closely. I've just finished the second of a series of articles for LWN.net that traces the growth of open content and its connections with open source. The first of these is on open access, while the most recent looks at Project Gutenberg and the birth of open content. The next will look at open content in education, including the various open courseware projects.

Here's a report from UNESCO on the area, which it has dubbed open educational resources, defined as

the creation of open source software and development tools, the creation and provision of open course content, and the development of standards and licensing tools.

I'm not quite sure we really needed a new umbrella term for this, but it's good to see the matter being discussed at high levels within the global education community.

Digital Libraries - the Ebook

It seems appropriate that a book about digital libraries has migrated to an online version that is freely available. Digital Libraries - for such is the nicely literalist title - is a little long in the tooth in places as far as the technical information is concerned, but very clearly written (via Open Access News).

It also presents things from a librarian's viewpoint, which is quite different from that of a your usual info-hacker. I found Chapter 6, on Economic and legal issues, particularly interesting, since it touches most directly on areas like open access.

Nonetheless, I was surprised not to see more (anything? - there's no index at the moment) about Project Gutenberg. Now, it may be that I'm unduly influenced by an extremely thought-provoking email conversation I'm currently engaged in with the irrepressible Michael Hart, the founder and leader of the project.

But irrespective of this possible bias, it seems to me that Project Gutenberg - a library of some 17,000 ebooks, with more being added each day - is really the first and ultimate digital library (or at least it will be, once it's digitised the other million or so books that are on its list), and deserves to be recognised as such.