Project Gutenberg and the E-Book

The Man Who Typed the Declaration

Michael S. Hart was a student with a night’s worth of free time on a Xerox Sigma V at the University of Illinois’s Materials Research Lab. The account was worth a fortune in 1971 computing time, and Hart decided the only way to justify it was to create something with lasting value rather than run a calculation. Walking home from a grocery store that had handed out printed copies of the Declaration of Independence for the coming bicentennial, he took the pamphlet, typed its text into the machine, and stored it as a file others could retrieve. He had reasoned that the real value of computers would not be computation but storage and retrieval of what he called Replicator Technology: once a text existed as a file, it could be copied without limit at essentially no cost.

Hart set himself the goal of putting the 10,000 most-consulted books into the public’s hands, in plain text, by the end of the century. For nearly two decades he keyed the books in by hand, one at a time: the Bible, Shakespeare, Alice in Wonderland. Optical character recognition became good enough to help around 1989, and in 2000 Charles Franks founded Distributed Proofreaders, which split the tedious work of correcting scanned pages across thousands of internet volunteers and turned Gutenberg from one man’s typing into a production line. Hart died on 6 September 2011. By then the archive he started held tens of thousands of titles, all free, in a form deliberately chosen to outlast the technology it ran on.

Plain Text as a Bet on the Future

Hart insisted on plain ASCII text, and he argued about it for forty years. Fancier formats came and went, each promising better typography, and each tied to software that would eventually stop being maintained. A plain-text file, he reasoned, was the format most likely to still be readable in a century, because it depended on nothing but the alphabet. The choice looked primitive next to a printed page, but it was a preservation strategy: no proprietary reader, no license, no company whose failure could lock up the text.

That bet is the quiet argument at the center of the whole e-book story. A book you can open with any program on any machine is a book you keep. Project Gutenberg’s files have no owner to revoke them and no format that a vendor can abandon. The commercial e-book industry that grew up later made the opposite choice on every count, and the difference did not stay theoretical.

Electronic Paper

Reading long text on a glowing screen was unpleasant, and the fix came from a display that reflected light like paper instead of emitting it. The idea started at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, where Nick Sheridon built Gyricon, a plastic sheet full of tiny two-colored beads that rotated to show a black or white face when charged. Gyricon worked but never found a price it could sell at; Xerox shut the subsidiary down in 2005.

The version that reached the market came from Joseph Jacobson, a physicist who joined the MIT Media Lab in 1995 wanting an electronic book whose pages could change. With two undergraduates, Barrett Comiskey and JD Albert, he arrived at a different mechanism: microcapsules holding white particles in a dark dye, which rose or sank under a charge to make each spot light or dark. Because the particles stay put once moved, the display holds its image with no power at all, drawing current only when the page turns. They founded E Ink Corporation in 1997. The result reads like paper, runs for weeks on a charge, and does nothing else, which for a book is the point (see The History of Displays).

Dead End: The Librie Came First

The first device to put E Ink in readers’ hands was not the Kindle. Sony released the Librie in Japan in April 2004, three and a half years ahead of Amazon, with a real electronic-paper screen and a keyboard. It should have owned the category. It was killed by the terms attached to its books.

Sony wrapped the Librie’s titles in DRM so restrictive that purchased books expired after 60 days, and the device was awkward to load with anything else. Customers were being asked to pay for books that would delete themselves, on a device sold only in one country. The Librie failed, and Sony’s later English-market Reader, the PRS-500 of 2006, arrived first but never escaped Amazon’s shadow; Sony left the e-reader business in 2014. The hardware was ahead of its time and the licensing was the problem, a preview of the fight the whole industry was about to have. First mover meant nothing when the product treated a purchase as a short-term rental.

Kindle

Amazon had the same display and a better grasp of the terms. Jeff Bezos had told his team in 2004 to build the best electronic reader before competitors could, and the first Kindle went on sale on 19 November 2007 at $399. It sold out within hours. Its advantage over the Librie was not the E Ink screen, which was much the same, but Whispernet: a free cellular connection built into the device, so a buyer could think of a book and be reading it a minute later without a computer in between. Amazon paired the frictionless store with a deep catalog and priced new releases low. By December 2009 it had sold more than three million Kindles and defined the market.

The catch was in the format. Kindle books came locked to Amazon’s account system, readable only on Amazon’s devices and apps, and licensed rather than sold. The fine print said the customer bought a license to read, not a copy to keep, and in July 2009 Amazon demonstrated exactly what that meant.

Two Kinds of Book

The e-book turned out to be two different things wearing the same name. One is a Project Gutenberg text file: free, unowned, in a format with no expiration, copyable forever, exactly as Hart imagined when he decided a computer’s value was replication. The other is a licensed Kindle edition: convenient, current, tied to an account, and revocable, as the owners of 1984 found out. Both are real, and most readers use both. The reason to remember which is which is that Hart made the argument for the difference in 1971 and spent his life on it, and the 1984 deletion proved his point better than any manifesto could. The book nobody owns is the only one nobody can take back.

📚 Sources

• Project Gutenberg (Wikipedia) — Michael Hart, 1971 Xerox Sigma V, Declaration of Independence, Replicator concept, plain-text philosophy, 10,000-book goal, Distributed Proofreaders, Hart’s death 6 Sep 2011
• Michael S. Hart (Wikipedia) — biography, founding of Project Gutenberg, plain-ASCII advocacy
• E Ink (Wikipedia) — Xerox PARC origins, Joseph Jacobson at MIT Media Lab, Comiskey and Albert, microencapsulated electrophoretic display, E Ink Corporation 1997
• Gyricon (Wikipedia) — Xerox PARC bichromal-bead electronic paper, Gyricon LLC closed 2005
• Sony Reader (Wikipedia) — Librie EBR-1000EP April 2004 as first commercial E Ink reader, DRM, PRS-500 2006, Sony’s 2014 exit
• Amazon Kindle (Wikipedia) — first Kindle 19 Nov 2007 at $399, sold out, Whispernet, three million sold by Dec 2009, the 2009 remote deletion of Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm and the $150,000 settlement