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Michael S. Hart

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Also known as Michael Stern Hart, Michael Hart

American author, founder of Project Gutenberg (1947–2011)

Person · Open Library

Born
1947
Died
2011
Works
1

Top works

  • Brief History of the Internet

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Key facts

Born
Michael Stern Hart , ( 1947-03-08 ) March 8, 1947, Tacoma, Washington , U.S.
Died
September 6, 2011 (2011-09-06) (aged 64), Urbana, Illinois , U.S.
Alma mater
University of Illinois
Occupation
Author
Known for
Project Gutenberg
Website
hart .pglaf .org

via Wikipedia infobox

~5 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Michael Stern Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) was an American author credited with the invention of the e-book, and who founded Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make e-books freely available via the Internet. He published e-books via ARPANET years before the Internet existed, and later on BBS networks and Gopher servers.

Hart devoted his life after founding PG in 1971 to digitizing and distributing literature from works in the public domain with free and expired copyrights. The first e-books were typed in plain text format and published as text files; other formats were made available later. Hart typed most of the early e-books himself; later, volunteers expanded the project.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Michael S. Hart” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.